Madame C/Mevrouw C
From Mondothèque
Madame C.01
EN When I arrived in Brussels that autumn, I was still very young. I thought that as an au-pair I would be helping out in the house, but instead I ended up working with the professor on finishing his book. At the time I arrived, the writing was done but his handwriting was so hard to decipher that the printer had a difficult time working with the manuscript. It became my job to correct the typeset proofs but often there were words that neither the printer nor I could decipher, so we had to ask. But the professor often had no time for us. So I did my best to make the text as comprehensible as possible.
On the title page of the final proofs from the printer, the professor wrote to me:
After five months of work behind the same table, here it is. Now it is your turn to love the book, the pre-book and the spoken word, and to develop a good sense of documentation, of institution, and of Mundaneum.[1]
NL xxxxxxx
Madame C.02
EN She serves us coffee from a ceramic coffee pot and also a cake bought at the bakery next door. It's all written in the files she reminds us repeatedly, and tells us about one day in the sixties, when her husband returned home, telling her excitedly that he discovered the Mundaneum at Chaussée de Louvain in Brussels. Ever since, he would return to the same building, making friends with the friends of the Palais Mondial, those dedicated caretakers of the immense paper heritage.
I haven't been there so often myself, she says. But I do remember there were cats, to keep the mice away from the paper. And my husband loved cats. So in the eighties, when he was finally in a position to save the archives, the cats had to be taken care of too. And the cats were written into the inventory.
We finish our coffee and she takes us behind a curtain that separates the salon from a small office. She shows us four green binders that contain the meticulously filed papers of her late husband pertaining to the Mundaneum. In the third is the Donation act, dated April 4 1985, that describes the transfer of the archives from the Friends of the Palais Mondial to the Center for public reading of the French community.
In the document, the cats are nowhere to be found.[2]
NL xxxxxxx
Madame C.O3
EN In a margarine box, between thousands of notes, tickets, postcards, letters, all folded to the size of an index card, we find this:
Paul, leave me the key to mythe house, I forgot mine. Put it on your desk, in the small index card box.[3]
NL xxxxxxx
- ↑ Wilhelmina Coops came from The Netherlands to Brussels in 1932 to learn French. She was instrumental in transforming Le Traité de Documentation into a printed book.
- ↑ Madame Canonne is a librarian, widow of André Canonne († 1990). She is custodian of the documents relating to the wanderings of The Mundaneum from the 1960s until its transfer to Mons in 1993.
- ↑ Cato van Nederhasselt, second wife of Paul Otlet, collaborated with her husband on many projects. Her family fortune kept the Mundaneum running after other sources had dried up.