the mystery Gaumont staircase, again

This is a callback to a post from January 2012 (here), where I wondered where a staircase seen in two Durand-directed Gaumont comedies might be, or have been if it was now gone.

On♪sime et le pélican (1913)

Onésime, tu l'épousera quand même (1913)

Although the strong likelihood was that these stairs were somewhere near the Gaumont studios in the 19e arrondissement, I had examined carefully every one of the 148 staircases featured in François L'Henaff's Paris en marches, the Parisian escalographer's bible, without finding a match. L'Henaff himself looked at the images and gave me an analysis of the staircase's construction, but didn't recognise it as an extant staircase in Paris.

Since then the staircase has turned up in three more films by Durand:

Onésime et le gardien du foyer (1913)

Onésime est trop timide (1912)

Calino polygame (1911)

These slightly different framings of the stairs give no more clues to their location, but I did find a clue in seeing more footage from Onésime et le pélican, where the shot of Onésime chasing the pelican down the stairs is preceded  by one of him chasing it in a street with what appears to be the head of a staircase behind them: 

This is the end of the rue des Lilas, 19e:

Google Street View

The staircase beyond leads down to the boulevard Sérurier:

Google Street View

If a shot of the top of a staircase is followed by a shot of the bottom of a staircase it doesn't necessarily mean that these are shots of the same staircase, but the probability is strong. Here, however, the staircase leading down from the rue des Lilas doesn't look enough like the staircase in the Gaumont films. For one thing, it bends to the left after the second landing, whereas the Gaumont staircase appears to carry on straight:

The handrail down the middle could have been added later, the lamp post could have been repositioned, but the first flight of the modern staircase has 25 steps whereas the one in the film has only 20. That seems to be an insurmountable obstacle to the identification of one with the other.

If this is the same place, then the staircase must have been remodelled. If the plan parcellaire of this place, drawn no later than 1896, is to be believed, the staircase linking the rue des Lilas and the boulevard Sérurier was originally straight:

So I'm inclined to think that the staircase was remodelled at some time, but the evidence I need is an image of the rue des Lilas stairs from before then. I haven't found a photograph from the period, but other visual evidence may be useful. At the head of this post I placed a painting by Alphonse Quizet of the top of the rue des Lilas staircase:

This picture (undated when it appeared at auction in 2003) suggests that there was no central handrail when it was painted, but otherwise offers little to allow a match with the staircase in the Gaumont films. Quizet painted other parts of the rue des Lilas:

And painted the boulevard Sérurier:

But didn't show anything of the stairs linking the two.


He does have one painting called a Staircase in Belleville, dating from the late 1920s:

Les Escaliers de Belleville

This is promising. The stairs are the right type, there's no central handrail, and the corner of wall with the street name on it matches the one in his Rue des Lilas painting:

The slight differences may be due to changes over time, or to artistic licence, but the bigger problem is the upper part of the building. This, in the Rue Des Lilas painting, is the Manoir de Beauregard, an eighteenth-century mansion now serving as a guest house (see here). The Rue des Lilas painting accurately shows the chimney stack, the one dormer window in the roof, and other details:

Whereas the details of window and chimney in the Escaliers de Belleville painting are quite different:

Either Quizet was happy to be inaccurate, or the Escaliers de Belleville painting is of a quite different staircase.

If it is a different staircase, I haven't found it yet. 

Another staircase painted by Quizet poses a different problem:

The last two images above are, I think, black-and-white reproductions of colour oil paintings. All three are, I think, of the same place; all three were identified by their various sellers as of staircases in Montmartre, but to my eye all three buildings at the top are variations of the Manoir de Beauregard on the rue des Lilas. I haven't, at least, found a Montmartre staircase with similar architectural surrounds, though I'm still looking.


If I get to be any more definite about either the staircase in the Gaumont film or the staircase(s) painted by Quizet, I shall post again.