VERJUS-JOLY Paul and Renée (EN)

Marseilles: the Electricity Fairy

Paul-Abel Verjus was born in Besançon on 9 September 1883 (AMB, 1^E819). In 1907, he enrolled at the École Supérieure d’Électricité in Paris—now called the CentraleSupélec—, from which he graduated in 1908 (CSE, Archives of the former pupils, no ref.). He then moved to Marseilles, where he was hired as an engineer working on the Tramways de Marseille, a subsidiary of the Compagnie Générale Française des Tramways (CGFT), which, since the beginning of the century, had been electrifying its network, which was once entirely horse-drawn (Besançon, MBAA, 2MBAAB_VERJUS_JOLY_A, letter from Renée Verjus to Denis Coutagne, 19 February 1979). Hence, the young engineer began his career at a fundamental turning point in the expansion and improvement of the networks of tramway lines, which now served the suburbs of the large urban centres, including Marseilles, which was undergoing considerable expansion at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tramway, a rapid and cheap form of transport, was now an integral part of urban development.

A pioneering city in terms of industrial progress, Marseilles hosted in 1908 the Exposition Internationale des Applications de l’Électricité, which was organised by various important figures, including the director of the Tramways de Marseille, and promoted by the development of an electricity network supplied by an ensemble of hydro-electric and steam factories. The exhibition handbook explained that holding such an event in Marseilles would, in particular, facilitate the export of electricity to the colonies, as it was a leading city in French colonial policy, in particular thanks to the colonial exhibitions held there in 1906 and 1922.

1927–1937, ten years spent in Tonkin

It was in this context of industrial development and colonial expansion that Paul Verjus was sent by his company to Tonkin, a province in northern Vietnam that was a French protectorate between 1884 and 1945 (Besançon, MBAA, 2MBAAB_VERJUS_JOLY_A, letter from Renée Verjus to Denis Coutagne, 19 February 1979). Making the most of the tramway’s popularity, when the CGFT was created, it established subsidiaries in several French cities, as well as abroad. In 1901, the Société Foncière de l’Indochine was established—it was renamed the Compagnie des Tramways du Tonkin in 1929—and Paul Verjus became its director in 1927, with the intention of setting up a network of tramways and creating new lines (Besançon, MBAA, 2MBAAB_VERJUS_JOLY_A, letter from Renée Verjus to Denis Coutagne, 19 February 1979; Massiac, M. de, 1937, p. 2). On 6 May 1927, he boarded the Porthos bound for Hanoi along with Renée Hernance Félicie Verjus (1888–1986) (Besançon, MBAA, Verjus-Joly file), whom he had married a month earlier (AD 25, 6EP1559).

During the ten years spent in Tonkin, the young couple established a network of friends and acquaintances. Paul Verjus seemed to be popular both with the French community and his work colleagues. In 1935, he was appointed an honorary French member of the provincial council of Ha Dong (Achard, C.-L., 1935, p. 6; L’Avenir du Tonkin, no. 11.845, 18 October 1935, p. 9).

The return to France

In 1937, the young couple returned to Marseilles, where they moved into the apartment the young engineer had occupied before his departure. Although they lived in Marseilles until their deaths, in 1972 and 1986 respectively, they occasionally stayed in the residence they owned in Billy, in the Allier département, the Château de la Croix-de-l’Orme. Renée Verjus lived there for two years during the Second World War, while the residence was occupied by the Germans (Besançon, MBAA, 2MBAAB_VERJUS_JOLY_A, letter from Renée Verjus, 12 March 1979).

Aside from these snippets of information—gleaned from Renée Verjus’s correspondence with the Musée de Besançon—, scant information exists about the lives of the Verjus-Jolys in France. We know little about Madame Verjus, except for the fact she played musical instruments—the violon and probably the piano—, because she mentioned a Pleyel grand piano that was kept in the Château de la Croix-de-l’Orme, amongst several other private details contained in her correspondence with the museum. Born in Besançon in the Grette district (AM Besançon, 1 E 835), she kept the family house until the end of her life, as indicated in her letters. After the death of her husband, she seemed to divide her time between Toulon—where she owned a ‘small shack for two’—and Marseilles (AM Marseille, 2 F 402, 1 K 858 and 1 K 840; Besançon, MBAA, 2MBAAB_VERJUS_JOLY_A, letter from Renée Verjus to Denis Coutagne, Marseilles, 9 April 1980).

Childless and attached to her native town, Renée Verjus, sensing that her health was deteriorating, made contact with the museum in 1979 to offer her native town the collection that she and her husband had assembled, as they had agreed. In fact, in one of the letters she sent to Denis Coutagne, the museum’s curator, she set out their intentions: ‘During our stay we assembled a fine collection of Chinese objects, which will be given to the Musée de Besançon upon our death, as we have no children’ (Besançon, MBAA, 2MBAAB_VERJUS_JOLY_A, letter from Renée Verjus to Denis Coutagne, 19 February 1979). She passed away in Marseilles on 6 January 1986.

The compilation of the collection in Hanoi: the diversity and frequency of the acquisitions

As soon as they arrived in Hanoi, Paul and Renée Verjus began to acquire Asian objects. They assembled their collection throughout their stay in Tonkin, over a ten-year period. The Musée’s archives have an ensemble of twenty-nine invoices in their name. The first of these dates from August 1927 (Besançon, MBAA, 2MBAAB_VERJUS_JOLY_B2). With the exception of the year 1934, for which we have no receipts, they acquired 341 objects, for a total of 16,775 piastres. According to these documents, the Verjus-Jolys primarily bought items of furniture (103, including nine screens, eight armchairs, three wardrobes, ten tabourets and six seats, four showcases, eight carpets, three wall hangings and twenty-six kakemono, twelve decorative panels in various materials (lacquer, cloth, wood, etc.), twenty lanterns, etc.), vases (forty-one, including ten made from porcelain, one from quartz, and another from agate, twelve from metal, seven lacquered, etc.), and items of dishware (comprising porcelains, various ceramics, and silver objects). But the invoices also included eleven incense burners (in bronze, cloisonné metal, red quartz, jade, and blue agate), twenty-one statuettes (in ivory, jade, porcelain, marble, and bronze), four weapons, and six items of jade and amber jewellery. Of all these objects, Renée Verjus seemed to be particularly attached to an eight-leaf screen, which she considered the pride of the collection’ (Besançon, MBAA, 2MBAAB_VERJUS_JOLY_A, letter from Renée Verjus to Denis Coutagne, 28 March 1979; MBAAB, inv. I4).

The shops of Hanoi

The twenty-nine invoices came from five Parisian dealers in Hanoi (Nguyen-Dinh-Lien, called Phuong-Hien, Lē Van Dien Boderie, the company Cat-Thinii Nguyen-The-Long, La Perle M. Passignat, and the company Phuc-Thaï, Do-Van-Tu). The contemporary Hanoi press mentioned that La Perle was one of the most important antique centres in the city for Europeans who wished to return home with Asian objects. Marcel-Alexis Passignat (1881–c.1939) worked there with his sons and owned a branch in Saigon (Cucherousset, H. ed., 1923, 1931, and 1932; L’Avenir du Tonkin, 1934; Achard, C.-L. (ed.), 1939). His business card indicated that he specialised in Chinese and Annamite antiquities and provided several examples of objects sold in the shop: mah-jongg (game of Chinese origin), panels, embroideries, furniture, and Chinese screens, coromandel lacquer objects, incense burners, bronzes, paintings on silk, lacquers, jades, ivory objects, kakemono, porcelains, and other curios made up the French dealer’s stock; and he also sold European prints. According to the newspaper Chantecler (16 February 1939, p. 4), Marcel-Alexis Passignat went to China regularly to acquire objects and find intermediaries. In the 1930s, his shop suffered from financial difficulties—due to customs duties—, which obliged him to organise several liquidations before permanently closing his shop in Hanoi in 1936.

Objects acquired on the expert advice of the curator of Hanoi Museum

A study of Madame Verjus’s letters reveals that the couple acquired objects ‘with the approval of Monsieur Crévost, Grand-Croix of the Légion d’Honneur who had participated in the China-Tonkin campaign and was curator of the Musée Agricole et Commercial d’Indochine in Hanoi. Renée Verjus added: ‘We had been on very friendly terms with him since 1927–37 and when we met at the Exposition Coloniale in Marseilles’ (Besançon, MBAA, 2MBAAB_VERJUS_JOLY_A, letter from Renée Verjus to Denis Coutagne, 30 April 1979).

After a brief career in the Navy that took him to Tonkin in 1884, Charles Victor Crévost (1858–1938) settled in Hanoi in 1900. He became the curator of the city’s museum in 1904. Director of the Institution as of 1919, he was also a delegate at the Exposition Coloniale in Marseilles in 1906 (Léonore database: 19800035/215/28264). When he passed away in 1938, Le Bulletin économique (1938, section 1, pp. 7–10)—with which he had worked on a number of occasions—referred to him as a person acknowledged for his expertise about Indo-Chinese craftsmanship.

The material history of the collection after its return to France: the collection during the Second World War

During the Second World War, when Marseilles was occupied by the Germans, the couple decided to protect the collections (‘We foolishly took everything to the chateau when the Germans came to Marseilles’, Besançon, MBAA, 2MBAAB_VERJUS_JOLY_A, letter from Renée Verjus to Denis Coutagne, 26 July 1979). Paul was obliged to become a civilian worker during the conflict. As for Renée, she spent her day at the Château de la Croix-de-l’Orme in the company of an SS battalion that was stationed there. In one of her letters, she wrote that she ‘spent two years with them, but refused to collaborate to save our collection. Unfortunately, all my efforts were in vain’ (Besançon, MBAA, 2MBAAB_VERJUS_JOLY_A, letter from Renée Verjus to Denis Coutagne, 12 March 1979). Despite everything, she was forced to leave the chateau just before the summer of 1944, forced by the Germans, who set fire to the residence on 25 August after executing several Resistance fighters. The French furniture and some of the Far-Eastern objects were destroyed in the fire, as the donator confirmed in the same letter: ‘Most of our unique collection went up in flames in the Château de la Croix de l’Orme, an estate we owned in Billy (Allier). (…) nothing survived, including our furniture’. Only the outbuildings escaped destruction and with them, several objects in the collection, such as a Pleyel piano. ‘The remainder, which I was going to give to the Musée de Besançon, which survived two requisitions, was deposited in our friends’ place and at the dead farmer’s place’.

The donation to the museum

It was on 19 February 1979 that Renée Verjus first contacted the museum. For more than two years, she regularly wrote to Denis Coutagne and Georges Barbier, the museum’s curator and librarian respectively. In these letters, she expressed on several occasions her desire to conserve the entire collection, which she described as ‘unique’. When the donation was accepted by the City, she was reassured that the collection would not ‘have to undergo the “indignity” of being auctioned after my death’ (Besançon, MBAA, 2MBAAB_VERJUS_JOLY_A, letter from Renée Verjus to Denis Coutagne, 28 March 1979). Lastly, in a letter dated 27 March 1981, Renée Verjus mentioned that she was attached to the name ‘Verjus-Joly’, which combined her husband’s surname with her maiden name, ‘both from Besançon’ (Besançon, MBAA, letter from Renée Verjus to Georges Barbier, 27 March 1981).

Although Renée Verjus did not contact the museum until the end of the 1970s, the couple’s intentions seemed to predate this. In her correspondence, the donator mentions the ‘mobilier de France’ (‘French furniture’) intended for the museum that had been destroyed when the château was set on fire during the Second World War. As her health was deteriorating, she requested that the procedure should be speeded up. She confirmed this in 1980 when she requested the prompt transfer of the objects, as she was worried about the safety of the works, because she had just been the victim of several burglaries (Besançon, MBAA, letter from Renée Verjus to Denis Coutagne, 19 April 1980).

On 22 March 1979, the municipal council accepted Verjus-Joly’s donation (AM Besançon, 222 W 730, session of 30 March 1979). A draft letter of acknowledgement (Besançon, MBAA, 2MBAAB_VERJUS_JOLY_A, draft of the letter of 18 April 1979) addressed to Madame Verjus indicates that the City wanted to create a museum that would retrace the stories of expatriate Francs-Comtois in the colonies. The Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie carried out three successive transfers of the collection in April 1979, the spring of 1980, and, lastly, at the beginning of May 1980. This donation was complemented by an ensemble of French watches given to the Musée du Temps in 1979 (AM Besançon, 222W8, session of 3 April 1981) and a violon given to the Conservatoire.

The Verjus-Joly collection has never been studied or published. The objects have been inventoried according to their material or category: tripods, vases, ewers, plateaux, and other objects in metal (A), bases, statuettes, boxes, and wooden objects (B), ceramic and porcelain wares (C), objects made from stone, jades, quartz, and so on (D), ivory objects (E), painted fabrics (F), jewellery (G), watches, and other clocks belonging to the donation to the Musée du Temps (H), items of furniture, armchairs, screen, tables, and showcases (I).

The documentation carried out during the first decennial campaign listed 244 items (objects and bases) in the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie and eleven objects in the Musée du Temps, for the most part added to the Joconde database (Open Heritage Platform) in 2013. Amongst the many items given by the couple of collectors, it is worth mentioning the eight-leaf wooden screen with its hardstone inlays (Besançon, MBAA, inventory no. I4), the ensemble of incense burners made from various materials and rolls of paintings on silk that include one or two signed works. Lastly, far from being restricted to Far-Eastern objects, the Verjus-Joly collection also includes French silver and goldsmithery, attesting to the couple’s attachment to national craftsmanship and a certain art de vivre.