Pauline à Paris

For a long time now, Josephine, who is a hundred years old, has been telling her grandson, the author, about the story of Pauline, which is worthy of a novel by Victor Hugo. The heroine, a Parisian maid in the 1900s , has an adventure with a handsome, moustachioed young man who disappears after getting her pregnant. Forced to abandon her daughter, she meets a man thirty years older than her who, touched by her story, decides to help her retrieve the child…

Using recordings of conversations with his grandmother, and taking notes of the variations in her story, Benoit Vidal investigates in the hope of filling in the blanks and uncovering the facts. This fotonovella opens up his family album and, through the use of period paintings and news- paper imagery, helps a lost world come to light: By telling Pauline’s story, Josephine is offering us a rare insight into the history of France from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century.