Monthly Archives: August 2021

Hôtel du Sentier

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I’ve posted before about the various Egypt-related street names and monuments scattered across Paris. If you get a kick out of discovering these sorts of things – and I do – then I have a hotel recommendation. The Hôtel du Sentier opened just this summer at the splendid address of 2 place du Caire. It’s housed in the block that also contains one of the entrances to the very fine Passage du Caire, which was built in 1798 to celebrate (a little prematurely) Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. (Neighbouring streets are called rue du Caire, rue d’Aboukir, rue du Nil and rue d’Alexandrie.) The façade is decorated with ancient Egypt references, notably some heads of Hathor, to which street artists have recently added touches of their own – see photo below.

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Previously the area was shabby and rundown – the passage, which is the longest in Paris is still filled with a motley assortment of discount clothing stores, dry cleaners and wholesale mannequin outlets and is in bad repair – but the neighbourhood is definitely on the up. Sentier has become a hotspot for tech start-ups and is now hip. Just a couple of years ago the place du Caire was a forgotten space, now it’s buzzing, the pavement split between seating for a new Californian-inspired café and Le Champollion, the in-house café of the hotel.

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As for the hotel, I haven’t actually been inside but I read that it has 30 rooms spread out over six floors. They overlook the glass roofs of the passage or place du Caire. From the photos it looks extremely chic. I didn’t dare click on the prices.

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The angels of Suez

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At the Musée des 30 années (Museum of the 1930s) on the outskirts of Paris I came across the above maquettes. The two sculptures are each about the size of a suitcase. I stopped to look at them because they’re beautifully streamlined examples of Art Deco styling. Then I glanced at the information on the plaque and was surprised to read they were working models for a proposed monument to the defence of the Suez Canal. What monument? What defence? So, of course, I went straight to Google and it transpires the monument was actually built, and there it stands, forty metres high, the height of a tower block, beside the Suez Canal near Ismailia. To my embarrassment, the author of guidebooks to Egypt for Lonely Planet and National Geographic, I’ve never seen it. Never even knew of its existence.

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It’s the work of Raymond Delamarre (1890–1986), a French sculptor, known particularly for his war memorials, and the French architect Michel Roux-Spitz. Together they won a competition organised in 1925 by the Suez Canal Company to produce a monument celebrating the force of British, Egyptian, French and Italian troops who in 1915 repulsed an attack on the Canal by the Ottoman Turkish army. The monument takes the form of two huge winged angels in rose granite placed at the base of two pylons. The angels carry flaming torches and stand, in Delamarre’s words as ‘guardians of the country’s destiny’. The monument is designed be seen by ships passing through the Canal. Its inauguration took place on 3 February 1930. A special medal was struck to celebrate the event, designed by Delamarre himself.

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That makes a second reason to head back out to Ismailia next time I’m in Egypt (the first being George’s restaurant, of course).

You can find out much more about the project here (in French but with some great images). Click here for a post on that other piece of impressive French sculpture originally also intended for the Suez Canal.

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If you knew Suzy

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Still on the theme of divas. I was at the recently reopened Musée Carnavalet in the Marais district of Paris, a beguiling labyrinth of grand old spaces devoted to the history of the city. In a room documenting Parisian city life of the mid 20th century I found the above painting of Suzy Solidor. She was most definitely a diva and there is an Egypt connection.

She was born Suzanne Louise Marie Marion, later changing her name to Suzy Solidor when she became a cabaret star and eventual owner of a number of infamous Parisian nightclubs. No surprise really that the Carnavalet should have a portrait of her because there were many of them made, mostly at the request of Madam Solidor herself. She was an obsessive collector of her own image, a Kim Kardashian of the 1930s, documenting herself in painted portraits rather than selfies. She commissioned portraits from artists as diverse as Francis Picabia, Jean Cocteau, Kees van Dongen, Tamara de Lempicka (below) and Francis Bacon. They hung in her clubs, where she and her guest artists would perform in front of them. After the Second World War, she was convicted as a collaborator because she’d kept her nightclubs open during German occupation and willingly, it was said, served German officers. She had to leave France and travelled to the US, taking her favourite portraits with her. By the time she died in 1983, she was completely forgotten.

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I first came across her name when she was mentioned in connection with the burning down of Shepheard’s hotel, in January 1952. Some of the newspaper accounts of the event record that one of the fleeing guests was Suzy Solidor. Some mention that she lost her jewellery in the fire; some reported later that some of her gems were recovered. Since then I’ve always been intrigued to know what she was doing in Cairo. Was she looking to add a selfie painted by Mahmoud Said to her collection? It’s unlikely we’ll ever know. Still, Solidor’s presence at Shepheard’s suggests that the hotel retained an air of glamour until the end.

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Midnight in Cairo

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By chance or design, I don’t know, the Divas show (see previous post) coincides with the recent publication of Midnight in Cairo: The Female Stars of Egypt’s Roaring ’20s, a book by Raphael Cormack, an academic specialising in Egyptian theatre. It was released in the US in March this year (cover above), and in the UK and Egypt (cover below) a month or two later. I have to immediately own up to not having read the book. I bought it but my wife got to it first and she’s slowly making her way through it. Slowly, because every paragraph sends her to YouTube to stream some vintage Egyptian film or archive interview.

Cormack, currently a visiting researcher at Columbia University, was in Cairo in 2010, doing research for his doctorate degree on Egyptian theatre and found hundreds of sources in entertainment magazines from the early 20th century that revealed a time when ‘incredible stuff was going on in downtown theatres and cabarets and then cinema’. The book is structured around the lives of seven of the most prominent women in Egypt’s entertainment industry.

‘The stories of women’s lives in particular leapt off the page. Historians are often told that women’s perspectives are hard to find, but here they could not be ignored,’ he told jadaliyya.com. ‘I have tried to use their words and experiences to build a picture of Cairo’s nightlife and entertainment industry from the perspective of these fascinating women.’

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The jadaliyya interview also includes an extract from the book’s introduction, which – I hope the publishers don’t mind – I abridge further here because it is a wonderfully evocative piece of writing and bound to appeal to anybody who appreciates the content on this blog and in my own books.

Introduction
In the late 1980s, the Egyptian writer Louis Awad looked back on his student days in Cairo between the wars. In particular, he remembered the nights he spent in the cafés of Cairo’s nightlife district, Ezbekiyya.

All you had to do was sit in one of the bars or cafés that looked out onto Alfi Bey Street, like the Parisiana or the Taverna, and tens of different salesmen would come up to you, one selling lottery tickets, another selling newspapers, another selling eggs and simit bread, another selling combs and shaving cream, the next shining shoes, and the next offering pistachios. There were also people who would play a game ‘Odds or Evens’, performing monkeys, clowns, men with pianolas who performed with their wives, fire eaters, and people impersonating Charlie Chaplin’s walk. Among all these, there was always someone trying to convince you that he would bring you to the most beautiful girl in the world, who was only a few steps away.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the centre of nightlife in Ezbekiyya was Emad al-Din Street – long and wide, with a tram line down the middle running north to the suburbs of Shubra and Abbasiyya. The intersection with Alfi Bey Street, where Louis Awad used to sit in the bars and cafés, was at the southern end of the action. In its heyday, Cairo’s nightlife could rival that in Paris, London or Berlin. Any resident of Egypt’s capital city in the early twentieth century could have claimed, with justification, to be living in one of the great cities of the world, at the centre of many different cultures.

Excerpted from Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt’s Roaring ‘20s. Copyright (c) 2021 by Raphael Cormack, published by Saqi Books in the UK, W. W. Norton & Company in the US and AUC Press in Egypt.

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