Well, I am almost SPEECHLESS with ecstacy. Turgot's 1...

Well, I am almost SPEECHLESS with ecstacy. Turgot's 1739 Plan of Paris arrived today (the 1965 reprint of the 1900 reprint, and it's a good thing, otherwise I wouldn't have dared lay a finger on it); EVERYTHING I was looking for and more. It's not just a map of Paris (like the 1754 map I've been using so far); it is, essentially, a drawing of the entire city, district by district, house by house. Meaning, I can see not only what the gardens of the wealthy town houses looked like, and which of the city's bridges had houses on them as London Bridge did, but I can see which portions of the banks of the Seine were embanked at that time (I drove myself crazy writing Ran Away, trying to find out if the Seine was embanked in 1827, and ended up writing around that detail), and where open ground at the edges of the built-up areas of town had been graded, or not. This map is jaw-dropping. It came in 20 sections, each section about 18 x 24 inches, all tenderly enclosed in a portfolio. (It took Mr. Turgot five years to put the thing together). AND it was accompanied by a sort of gazeteer listing every street and cul-de-sac in Paris, every parish church (with descriptions of when they were built!), every neighborhood (Paris was organized by neighborhoods before Napoleon split the city up into arrondissements).

As a research tool, this is staggering. Especially used in tandem with the book I have which dissects modern Paris, showing - street-by-street - any architectural treasures, thus permitting me to identify which neighborhoods were favored by the rich.

I have a set of CDs with similarly detailed historical maps of London, but it was only recently that I learned of the existence of Turgot's Plan.

Such are the arcane joys of being a researcher.