Buying a Piece of History

My friend and Rhodes colleague Katheryn Wright and I went to the flea market today at Saint-Ouen, just north of Paris. The Marche aux Puces is legendary as the biggest in town, and it certainly lives up to its reputation. It's row after row of booths, shops, and stands selling everything imaginable, from clothes to antique furniture to junk to CDs and DVDs. It's a shopper's dream.

I bought some old postcards of the 1910 flood, the subject of my current research. When we asked the dealer if he had any, he pulled out 3 stacks of about 75 cards which we had fun sorting through. People collect cards of their flooded neighborhood, he said, or based on themes or scenes that interest them. I bought a few too, including one dramatic scene of a little girl being rescued from a flooded street. It’s definitely going in my book.

Flipping through 100 year old postcards, I could feel the dust come off on my fingers. It’s similar in the archive. When I pulled century old (or older) documents out of the archival storage cartons at the Archive de Paris, they had that distinctive smell of decaying paper. Bits of them crumbled onto the desk where I was working. And when I left, my fingers were stained with age.

I wonder if the people who wrote those documents realized that I, or anyone, would be going through their work nearly 100 years later. Will anyone be examining my things a century from now? And I wonder whether the people in the postcards -- especially that little girl being rescued -- ever thought that I would be buying their picture at the Paris flea market on a crisp fall day.