The Fountain That Refuses to Be an Exhibit
Inside the courtyard of Musée Carnavalet, a Wallace fountain stands among objects that explain Paris. But there is no glass case around this exhibit. Visitors can fill bottles from it, as they can at the fountains out in small squares and on street corners. The city’s water company maintains and restores them as drinking-water points, not as relics.
The Londoner Who Chose Paris
Richard Wallace was born in London and spent much of his life in Paris, including at Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne. He was a wealthy British heir with a particular affection for the city. After a time when clean water ran short in Paris, he gave fifty drinking fountains for public use and later supported more.
The city chose the sites, chiefly small squares and the crossings of broad streets. The fountains began on boulevard de la Villette. It was a gift with a practical division of labour: Wallace supplied the cast iron, while Paris decided where somebody might actually need a drink. There are now more than a hundred Wallace fountains in the city.
The Faces Under the Green Canopy
Wallace sketched the design, and the sculptor Charles-Auguste Lebourg turned it into cast iron. The caryatids stand beneath a small dome decorated with dolphins. They look closely related, but shift your position and their poses change: a bent knee, a fold of tunic, the angle of an arm. Their figures represent virtues, among them kindness, charity and sobriety. Sobriety is a fairly pointed choice for a drinking fountain within sight of cafés.
The Val d’Osne foundry cast the original forms; its successor, GHM, still uses the original mould for new pieces.
The dark green makes the fountains recede among trees and park railings. Paris kept the shade in harmony with newspaper kiosks and Morris advertising columns, so the elaborate canopy now seems as natural to the pavement as the other metalwork. A few fountains wear brighter colours and stand out deliberately.
The Cup That Left the Chain
The large fountains once carried tin cups on chains. A passer-by could lift a cup, drink and leave it hanging for whoever came along later. The cups were removed for hygiene reasons. They belonged to an arrangement in which the container was part of the fountain, rather than something the drinker brought from home.
Wallace had intended the water to flow continuously. Some fountains still work that way; others have a button. There are smaller models for squares and gardens, as well as versions fixed to a wall.
The Winter Pause and the Fountain in London
In winter the Wallace fountains are turned off because frost could harm the pipes inside. They run again in spring. Other public drinking fountains in Paris remain in service through the cold season, but the familiar canopies have a pause built into their working year. A dry basin in winter tells you something about plumbing, not about the end of the gift.
There is a relative of the Parisian fountain across the Channel. Outside Hertford House, home to the Wallace Collection on London’s Manchester Square, a cast of the same fountain stands in the forecourt. It is a listed structure: in London the fountain is something to look after, in Paris something to drink from.
Come spring, a hand can hold a bottle beneath a green dome in Paris. The person need not have heard of Richard Wallace. Perhaps a public gift is doing its job when nobody has to remember whom to thank.
