I'm loving my shadow journeys, I have to admit.

Of course, they're not a patch on real journeys... That goes without saying.

But I've really enjoyed following up a variety of leads, with the goal of extending last year's travel experience into this year.

In spirit, I have been very much back in northern France over these last few days...

I wrote up my research on my grandfather in France (in hospital in Trouville, and writing home from Rouen), and so it seemed a good time to add some recollections about our own brief experience of the area around Rouen, and our first acquaintance with the "Terre-Neuvas", the fishermen who, as far back as the 16th century, went off each year for months at a time to fish the Grand Banks off Newfoundland.

In Pietr-le-Letton, Maigret follows his quarry to Fecamp, where the storms are sweeping in, and he can smell the cod and herring, and hear the sea tumbling the pebbles along the dike. The marine economy is changing, making space for the illicit activity that Pietr is tied up with. (Maigret is told that the Newfoundland fishery business is being reorganized, after five years' abandonment. And since the war there has been a crisis in the merchant navy, so sailors who were formerly captains on long-haul routes have had to take on jobs as second or third officers -- or opt for fishing off Newfoundland and in the North Sea.)

Edith Piaf, meanwhile, was connected with the Normandy towns of Falaise and Bernay.

And Monique, the heroine of La Garconne (the 1922 novel by Victor Margueritte, which was judged so scandalous that it cost its author his Legion d'Honneur decoration), has been a voluntary nurse at "auxiliary hospital No. 37" in Trouville... Fancy... (Knowing what I now know, I suspect this number should be "73", not "37".)

Anyway, that's all been interesting. But closer to home, there are French connections too.

Seaside resorts like Cromer started to attract health-seeking visitors in the late 18th century. But for a long while, accommodation was in short supply. Into this breach sprang Pierre le Francoise, whose family had come to Britain to escape the French Revolution.

He acquired a building that was quite splendidly sited on the cliff facing the sea. There was a hotel here earlier, it is thought, but it was demolished in 1820, to make room for a summer retreat for Lord Suffield. Ten years later, this is what Pierre le Francoise took on. In 1836, the establishment is listed as a "boarding house", but by 1845 it had become the Hotel de Paris, and had obviously gone up in the world.

Le Francois died in 1841. (He is buried, or so I read, in Cromer churchyard.)


His widow ran the hotel until 1845, when she sold it to Henry Jarvis, who extended the building to create additional accommodation. The arrival of the railway (to a station at the top of the hill in 1877, and to Cromer proper in 1887) was the impetus for a wave of hotel-building, and in 1891, Jarvis's son, Alex, decided that the Hotel de Paris was due for a major facelift.

The architect chosen for this task was Norwich-based George Skipper: "Its frontage, which borrows features from the late medieval palace at Chambord, disguised the previous Regency buildings." And indeed, the Hotel de Paris is a marvel of turrets, bay windows, cupolas, and decorative gables.




I need to digress in two directions at this point:

Firstly, the Hotel de Paris has a number of claims to fame. It's probably of interest only to me that our old friend Lady Battersea stayed here with her mother for a fortnight in 1877 (pre-facelift, therefore). But Oscar Wilde is said to have worked on his play A Woman of No Importance while staying at the hotel in 1892. You can see here some pages from the hotel's "Register of Aliens", dating back to 1919 and 1920: "As well as the usual Guest Register, all hotels, inns and lodging houses had to keep a Register for Aliens who were staying there. Belgian, Italian, Norwegian, Americans, Mesopotamian (Iraq), Swedish and Dutch guests staying at the hotel signed this register even though many of them lived permanently in Britain." And Stephen Fry worked as a waiter there, later complaining that he "must have walked two hundred miles between kitchen and restaurant, silver-serving from breakfast to late, late dinner"...

Secondly, George Skipper's handiwork is visible in a number of other places around Cromer.

There's the rather jolly Town Hall (1890):


Then there's the really lovely St Bennet’s at 37 Vicarage Road, built in 1893:







And Skipper was the brain behind the redesign of The Cliftonville, another Victorian cliff-top hotel, which "was transformed into an example of the Arts and Crafts style showing the influence of the French Renaissance as well as the 19th-century Queen Anne Revival".








Which kind of brings us full-circle back to France... Skipper's designs, I'm told, betray a number of influences: "The French Renaissance style of his early years (enriched by Flemish influences from his visit to Belgium as a student) were to give way to the more weighty Neo-Classical Palladian buildings... But around the turn of the century he still found time for more playful ventures, embarking on ‘the mildest flirtation with British Art Nouveau'". (John Betjeman even went so far as to remark that Skipper "is to Norwich rather what Gaudi was to Barcelona", but I can make no comment as to the applicability of the comparison.)

Art Nouveau is a pan-European rather than specifically French movement, but I guess you could argue that some of its most iconic examples (Toulouse-Lautrec's posters, for example, or those unforgettable "bouches de metro") hail from France.

So, as always, there are connections beneath the surface, and there's a great satisfaction to locating points where my shadow journey converges with my real one.