The passing mystery of a famous kiss

Look at this photograph, and let's discuss images in the media, I told French journalism students at one of the occasional lessons I give at a college near the Louvre.

Recaptured by: ginieland.

Of course Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville, also known - see my exchange with Richard of Orléans below - as The Kiss at City Hall or just The Kiss, is to do with art, not news photography.

But it seemed a good, familiar and topical place to start. Topical because my class had all been to the current exhibition of Robert Doisneau photos of Paris, staged appropriately enough in the City Hall.

So have 215,000 other people, I was told by City Hall today. Since entry is free, we can safely assume the total will top 250,000 before the doors close on February 17.

My students knew all about the kiss itself having been posed, though by a real-life courting couple. I suppose that stopped being a secret several years ago.

But what about the passers-by, I asked? Tell me especially what you think of the stern-faced man who walks past the embracing couple with other matters apparently on his mind.

All the students agreed he was French, almost stereotypically so with his beret. One thought his appearance, and the timing of Doisneau's picture (1950), evoked the Resistance.

Ah, I said, having hoped for just such a response, but he was Irish. An auctioneer and devout Roman Catholic named Jack Costello, passing through Paris on his first trip out of Ireland, a motorbike pilgrimage to Rome.

How, my students wanted to know, could I be so sure? I then told them of a Dubliner, Pat Cody, who had phoned out of the blue after an article of mine appeared in The Daily Telegraph about the female half of the kissing couple, Françoise Bornet, auctioning off her original print.

Pat explained that the passer-by was his father-in-law. It seemed convincing enough; I checked on the internet and there it was, not once but several times.

An academic from Lincoln University, an Italian website and so on. All talking about the Irishman's walk-on role. Pat mentioned that the Irish Times had also written it up (I have since seen that article, and heard of other references on radio and TV).

I did nothing much about this at the time, beyond passing it on to London colleagues in case they wanted the Irish correspondent to follow it up (they didn't) and, later, mentioning it in my blog.

That drew a response from a photography buff in America who was intrigued to have more light shed on his knowledge of this classic item of photography.

On leaving the Telegraph - my employment, coincidentally, legally ends today - I decided to resurrect the subject.

The current exhibition in Paris gave me the excuse, though The Kiss is actually displayed very discreetly as if considered one of Doisneau's lesser works.

I drove over to Grasse to meet one of Jack Costello's sons, John, who was visiting the south of France. He put me back in touch with his sister, Colette, Pat Cody's wife, whose number I no longer had. This is her, with proud dad Jack, on her wedding day 15 years after The Kiss.




And then I got the Kiss of Death from City Hall. They gave me numbers for Doisneau's two daughters, between them acting as commissaires for the exhibition. To say they were easy to contact would be an exaggeration, but one of them, Francine Deroudille, did tell me with absolute certainty that there was, after all, no Irish connection.

For Jack Costello, read Gérard Petit, a Montreal lawyer who, according to Francine, who had made contact with her father in 1989. The two men later met. Petit knew, and Doisneau confirmed, that he was that passer-by.

Early checks of newspaper clippings drew a blank. But thanks to Bill Taylor, I discovered that Petit's role was reported by a French-language Quebec newspaper. He had been alerted by a neighbour who was a firm fan of Doisneau's work and, in particular, this photograph.

Again with Bill's help, I was able to communciate by email with Carole Turbide, who now lives in what was Petit's home and who also knew a little of the story. She loved the thought that "perhaps a little of Doisneau's soul lives on in this flat".

Where the story had led was not quite where I had first expected, though my account of it was evidently given a very prominent show in yesterday's Irish editions of the Sunday Times, the first piece I have written for another newspaper - as opposed to websites such as The First Post - since leaving the DT.

I must admit that I rather liked the idea of an untravelled, unsophisticated Irishman caught by chance in such a striking (if contrived) portrayal of human emotion. He would, as Colette told me, had been mortified had he actually noticed them behaving like that in front of him.

So I am happy to report that Colette, and her brother John, prefer to hang on to the family history and insist that the man in the beret and specs was their dad.

Jack Costello himself never knew a thing about it. The Kiss did not become an international success until it was marketed as a poster after his death.

But neither Gérard Petit nor Robert Doisneau is any longer around to contradict his children's fond belief.

Adieu to the rue de Rivoli

Only three weeks to go so we invited the concierge and his wife to our farewell to Paris party. They couldn't make it, though the crown princess who will one day rule as Queen Victoria came instead.

But that's being extravagant with the truth.


The lovely Princess Victoria of Sweden was indeed in our building on the rue de Rivoli, the Daily Telegraph office-cum-apartment that has been our home, shared with a procession of colleagues from London, for two-and-a-half years.

But the nearest she came to attending my shindig was when she bowled over to my wife at the bottom of the lift shaft, assuming her to be part of the Parisian Swedish Circle's welcoming party.

We'd agreed to take it in turns to make sure guests to each function were ushered to the right one.



As it happens, and despite the fact that we were able to secure the presence of not only two ambassadors but the charming and witty Petite Anglaise (leading me to speculate that this must surely outrank one Scandinavian princess), it was not too difficult to make the distinction.

None of those attending our party wore formal evening dress. And, as a mark of the leaner times upon which their hosts had fallen, our guests were mostly carrying bottles or titbits of food, or both.


  
"Il y a un petit problème," the concierge had said when I asked him to join us and our friends and colleagues for Saturday's modest soirée to mark the end of two eras - mine as a Telegraph journalist and the Telegraph's (rather longer) presence in two of Paris's most chic arrondissements, the 1st and the 8th.

The Swedes had their royal reception, the concierge added in worried tones, and the strict security measures included the stipulation No Press.

Luckily, our neighbours saw the funny side of one minor snag: the majority of our people were indeed likely to be press. In the end, the building somehow accommodated all their guests and all of ours. The sifting process at the lift worked a treat.

To the horror of one or two French friends, we'd promised only a "light buffet" and the more sensible guests dined out before arriving. But the light buffet stretched an awful long way and I fear I shall be eating the remains - cheese, crisps and charcuterie - until we leave for the Var immediately after Christmas.

Living at the office has been a far from ideal arrangement.

But when you peer out from the living room, directly opposite the Tuileries, you get as good a view as you'll find in most parts of Paris.

It runs from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower and takes in all the landmarks in between, and we have been fortunate - despite those benign invasions of our privacy from London - to experience it.

Successive Telegraph correspondents, dating from before the Second World War, have had similar luck, being based in a series of imposing offices in the 1st and 8th arrondissements. Soon, for us, it is to be adieu to the rue de Rivoli, au revoir to Paris.

Among regrets, one sticks out. Why didn't I put more pressure on the mayor of the 14th arrondissement to order the demolition of the Tour Montparnasse, the one ghastly blot on the landscape as seen from our room with a view*.

* Captured here, in photos two and three, by one Bill Taylor, who may have a flawed outlook on penal matters but knows a bit about photography. The first is mine and the last, a family snap taken by me on Tour de France finale day, shows how thin you'd need to be to dine on the balcony.