The Postcard

There was a stamp shop in the arcades of the Palais Royal, the owner of which, an old grey-haired man with a fur vest that had turned yellow from pipe smoke, placed a box of old postcards in front of his shop every morning. The cards were sorted by motif and place, and the few people who stopped in front of the boxes rummaged through them to find rare stamps.

One of these cards had been sent from Granville, a seaside resort in northern France. Its front shows a rock and the Plat Gousset on rising water; on the back, a woman notes in brief words "Ne pas m'attendre jeudi. Baiser Jeanne." It's a message like they would send by SMS today: "Don't wait for me on Thursday. Kiss, Jeanne."

But why not?

The message was addressed to a Madame Cousin in Rue Escudier number 32 in Boulogne, in the west of Paris. The card was sent on 26 May 1939, a few days after the steel pact between Germany and Italy had been signed, and a few weeks before the murderer Eugen Weidmann was publicly guillotined in Versailles. That dramatic event, in turn, took place a few months before the beginning of the war. But this historical knowledge betrays nothing about why Madame Cousin should not have waited for Jeanne.

House number 32 in Rue Escudier stands silently in the narrow street with its wrought-iron balconies, while a man on a scooter rattles past with a motionless expression. In the bar Le Panier, not one of the old ones knows anything about Madame Cousin. But then an older, fine gentleman with a grey sweater and a grey moustache steps in front of the house. Did he knew a Madame Cousin who lived in this house? He gives a look of astonishment: “Yes, but it was at least half a century ago.” Bringing out the postcard itself leads to even more astonished looks, “Aha! 1939!” He would have to ask his wife.

There is a pale blue staircase in which the pungent smell of detergent blends with the musty elegance of the smell of old wood. The apartment is on the first floor, two hooks in the hallway, and on one of them hangs the beige flat cap that the master of the house wears when he goes out. His wife smiles, “Madame Cousin” she says, “lived upstairs in one of the apartments at the time, an older lady. She lived there for a while with another, younger friend, but the two had not been particularly talkative”.

At the Boulogne residents' registration office, it is found out that one Jeanne Marie Goreguès had lived in the Rue Escudier at that time, but the files are kept in the mayor's office of the 18th arrondissement. Once you have entered a hallway, you want to know where it leads, even if it is not clear what you are looking for at the end.

In the Place Jules Joffrin lies the Mairie du XVIII Arrondissement, a mayor's office whose architecture is more magnificent than the seat of government of numerous small nations. The archive is housed on the second floor; the archivist, with a casual gesture, lifts a heavy folio from the ladder, which almost slips away from him as he opens it, volume G, like Goreguès, voilà. The document reports that Jeanne Goreguès, the 46 years old employee of the French State Railways, was born on 2 December 1880 in Boqueho, Côtes du Nord, and was now widowed having formerly been married to Léonard Achille Trolet, who died on 12 June 1917. Further, the document states that this Jeanne married on 31 July 1926 at 10.44 a.m. the railwayman Edouard Alexandre Leon Merlier, born in 1891 and widowed since 1924. Another document, file number 10596, shows that a Jeanne Goreguès, now deceased, was living in the 14th arrondissement in the same year 1926. She was born in 1907, 27 years after Jeanne from Boulogne. We now know some things: that Jeanne perhaps had a daughter of the same name; that her first husband probably died in the First World War.

We know that Jeanne and her eleven-year younger colleague were both widowed, that they married each other on July 31, 1926, and that Jeanne later lived with the older Madame Cousin rather than with him, who sent her a postcard from Granville in May 1939, 59 years old. More learning is not to be had; for example, what Jeanne did in Granville disappears in the fog of history, just like the postcard itself as a medium of communication.

Text: Niklas Maak