How I went to the flea market and found endless love

One of the pleasures of Paris is the flea markets. Some of the markets (like Clignancourt) are so exhaustively picked over by professional antique dealers that it is almost impossible to find anything interesting at a reasonable price, but the market at Vanves, on the southern edge of the city near the Porte d’Orleans, still holds out the thrill of the chase. I go to Vanves frequently and regularly find bargains; sometimes I hit the jackpot and find something truly wonderful.

The conventional wisdom is that the best time to hit the flea markets is early morning, around 6:00 on Saturday. That’s when the dealers arrive to unload their trucks: that’s the time, according to the experts, when you can find the unnoticed Picasso, the banged-up Louis XVI commode, the long lost, unrestored Caravaggio.

I have no doubt that the early birds do, in fact, find juicy worms. But I seem to turn into a night owl when I’m in Paris, and the idea of getting up at 5:00 a.m. leaves me utterly undone. I usually get to Vanves around 10:00; I am able to enjoy two good hours of ambling (which in any case is about all I can take); just as I am reaching my saturation point, the vendors are beginning to shut down their stands.

Fortunately the end of the day sometimes offers bargains as exciting as those purportedly found at the crack of dawn. A few months ago, for example, just as I was about to head back to the Metro, I spotted a huge painting (about 6’ wide x 5’ high) propped up against a truck. The brocanteur (a seller of used goods that don’t quite qualify as real antiques) told me he had bought out the furnishings of a café near Boulogne, on the outskirts of Paris; the name of the café was Le Relais, and the painting had occupied a prize place on the back wall.

The painting was a landscape, in more or less the center of which was an inn with a sign that said “Le Relais” (the relay). A carriage was bringing a group of people to the inn via a road on the right; a river ran beside the inn, from near the top of the painting to the bottom; and a huge fountain filled a part of the foreground on the left. A scattering of hens and chickens were fluttering around in front of the on-coming carriage, and on the lower right, under a bridge, a little school of fish was frolicking in the river.

Of course no description can fully convey the feeling of a painting; but this was a large, extremely charming, quite well-painted landscape by a professional painter of the folk art or “naïve art” school. The colors are mostly greens (many fields), and the painting is full of visual events: a stretch of sky at the top with a few birds; a river with fish; many mini-forests, a couple of tiny villages and lively, prancing horses in front of the carriage. The overall effect is fresh, light-hearted, and merry; the painting is a little like a visual fairy-tale.

The price was 200€, about $250. I took about 30 seconds to make up my mind, and Le Relais is now at the restorers, being prepared to occupy a prime block of wall space in my living room.

A trip to Vanves in early July gave me the opportunity to acquire an entirely different kind of art object. Unlike Le Relais, this object is neither large nor colorful, nor is it friendly and charming. It is not, as they say in art history courses, easily accessible.

My new object is a black and white photograph, in a blond wooden frame, of a French bride and groom, circa 1955.

The young bride –a brunette with an impeccable hairdo that looks rather like a helmet, is looking up at her tall, blond husband with an expression of manic excitement. Her partly open, smiling lips reveal a glint of pure white teeth; in her hand, pointed carefully at the camera so as to be fully visible, is a small, tightly wrapped bouquet of pale flowers surrounded by a doily. (Every detail of this photograph, down to the flounces on the bride’s skirt, was arranged with maniacal care.) The bride is wearing a little pillbox hat and a calf-length silk dress with a full skirt; her left foot is pointed gracefully toward the viewer and her right foot is carefully pointed in the direction of her husband. “Pointed” is the right word, because the shoes –obviously the last word in the fashion of the day—have stiletto heels and sharp, aggressive toes. The woman wearing these shoes is telling the world that she is no pussycat.

The couple is standing in a room that contains a window on the left and a door on the right. The wall behind them is covered with an elaborate patterned wallpaper (perhaps some sort of Toile de Jouy?); on the floor either side are two baskets of flowers, one with hydrangeas and one with carnations and lilies. There are at least three more flower arrangements on the furniture, and the oversize blossoms thrusting and gushing from these bouquets press against the people, surrounding them, supporting them and hemming them in.

By some trick of the photographer (perhaps by inadvertence?) the bride is in perfect focus; indeed her head, which is in profile, is so perfectly sculpted that it almost looks as if it were made of plastic. The sense of unreality conveyed by her sculpted profile is compounded by her protuberant eyes, which look, in the photo, like the eyes of a doll, open wide to the world, blank, brilliant and unblinking.

The groom is not illuminated by any similar aura. Standing stolidly beside the bride in a dark suit with a pale silk tie, his hands hanging dully at his sides, the groom has been photographed slightly out-of-focus; only his spiffily shined new shoes are sharply defined. And in contrast to the fervid luminosity of the bride, the eyes of the groom are—undramatically but unequivocally—firmly closed to the realities of his situation.

What is one to make of this extraordinary photograph? At first glance, it is a conventional wedding picture, a bride and groom surrounded by lots of flowers with spooky lighting supplied by a photographer who got a little carried away with the dramatic effects. French people to whom I have shown the photograph tend to shrug their shoulders and say something like, yeah, we have pictures like that at home, of the wedding of my parents (or grandparents), what’s the big deal?

My own reaction is different. To me the photograph is a vivid social document, a distillation of the 1950s view of marriage, of the differences between men and women, of the meaning of love a long, long time ago. And because we now know what became of the expectations of people like these, the photograph seems to be infused with an overwhelming sense of irony: a sort of Diane Arbus-like image of people whose perception of their lives is wholly, insanely at odds with the realities of their situation.
 
To me, this bride looks like an extra-terrestrial, staring breathlessly up at Mr. Right, her eyes illuminated with the certainty that Marriage Equals Happiness.

And how about the groom? With his unfocussed half-profile, his waxed and glinting new shoes, his buttoned-up suit and his closed eyes, the groom seems to exist only as a vague prop in the dream of the bride: a tall, blond, well-dressed, stolid Husband; The Perfect Mate as imagined by a young woman from the provinces, circa 1955.

The rest of the photograph also seems like an emanation of the bride’s imagination. The nimbus of light surrounding her; the radiant, adoring eyes, the masses of engulfing flowers: everything has been elaborately staged to provide this bride with a picture out of her dreams, the perfect wedding in the perfect dress to the perfect man in the perfect setting, and they all lived happily ever after. This is the modern, up-to-date version of the portrait Emma Bovary would have commissioned to celebrate her marriage to Charles, the ideal bourgeois husband.

But we all know what happened to Emma Bovary. And we also know that the idea of marriage as the beginning of a life lived in a nimbus of endless rapture—the idea so brilliantly articulated in this photograph—is (how to say this politely?) a load of horse manure.

In France as in America, approximately half of all new marriages will end in divorce. In France as in America, married people will fight, have affairs, live together unhappily til death do them part, have children on drugs, discover that their partner is gay, drink themselves to death, beat their partners to death, die early of AIDS, gamble away the family fortune, file for bankruptcy, move to Texas, live cold and sexless lives, end up as street people, give up on life, go home to live with Mother.

Emma will find a lover and he will desert her; Charles will end up bankrupt and alone.

This is the 21st century, and we know all this. Indeed we wonder what happened to this very couple, this young man and woman whose extraordinary wedding photograph is for sale in the flea market –“For the frame, monsieur,” as the brocanteur said to me, “you can throw away the picture.” Why is this treasured photograph, in its handsome wooden frame with a genuine imitation leather back, not gracing the mantle of the couple’s children or grandchildren in some bourgeois redoubt in Clermont-Ferrand or Bordeaux? Why has this photograph, once so lovingly and extravagantly posed, printed and framed, ended up on the sidewalk in Vanves, an object of commerce and ridicule? What actually happened to this couple?

In 2004, we know that life is not all Toile de Jouy and radiant light. But in 1955, people did not know these things. In 1955, people believed—or at least women believed—or at least many women believed—that if you married in a nimbus of light, surrounded by masses of flowers; that jf you gazed up lovingly at your silent, stolid partner; that if you were a good girl and followed the rules and made sure your husbands’ shoes were always shined and his tie perfectly selected and knotted—if you did all of this, your husband would love you forever, you would have 2.5 perfect children and you and your family would live happily ever after.

In 1955, a wedding photograph in a wooden frame with genuine imitation leather backing meant that Love was Eternal. This photograph, purchased for 5€ at a flea market, is the physical incarnation of that ancient ideology. It is a work of art, and it is one of the most compelling purchases I have ever made.

Michael Padnos, who in an earlier life practiced law in Massachusetts, Washington DC and Atlanta, GA, grows olives in Provence and writes on France for various publications.  He is working on a book entitled Sunshine and Fresh Garlic: A Tour of the Markets and Food Festivals of Provence.  He lives near Aix-en-Provence and eats extremely well.