If you go along Rue de Grenelle, enter the Ministry of Public Instruction, and go up to the minister's office. Arriving in the antechamber, in the middle of a thick cloud of dust, plaster, rubble, where an unfortunate bailiff is suffocating, you will see the floorboards rotten or already missing, the walls bare, black, crumbling, striped with huge cracks.

The Ministry of Public Instruction is collapsing, you will be told.

Indeed, all the staff of this poor ministry have been living for some time in daily terror. They find themselves faced with the prospect of either falling to the ground floor with the floor, or seeing the ceiling collapse on their shoulders.

Everything is rotten

The building, which is the current ministry, was first the Hôtel de Courteilles, built in 1778 by Cherpitel. In 1787 it became the Hôtel de Rochechouart. In 1804 Marshal Augereau took possession of it and his remarried widow gave it the name of her husband, the Count of Sainte-Aldegonde, in 1807. Since 1829, this hotel has been the Ministry of Public Instruction.

Now, for almost a century and a half that it has housed marshals and ministers, the framework is getting tired and the light walls are cracking. Here and there, small repairs were done, but absolutely necessary.
In the thirty-two years that I have been here, an office boy tells us, I have always seen work. But we were far from foreseeing the cataclysm that was brewing.

One fine morning, when arriving at their offices, the officials who occupied the left wing of the building saw with terror the ceiling gracefully bending above their heads. It was a general sauve-qui-peut. The rooms were evacuated and the work began, which was long and painful. It was necessary, in fact, to change the entire framework; to replace the wooden beams with iron beams; to completely rebuild, so to speak, the rooms that were collapsing.

The sagging is gaining ground

When everything was finished, it was noticed that the floor of the neighboring rooms was slowly bending in turn and it had to be noted that the sagging was gaining ground relentlessly.

Having started in the left wing, it is now reaching the center of the building and now the office of the minister himself is threatened. The repair work on his antechamber has begun. But how will the minister be able to get into his office? Will it be necessary to throw a flying bridge over the black abyss that is being prepared? The large dining room below is already a construction site, and among the beams, the parquet flooring, between the scaffolding that supports its ceiling, covered in dust and plaster, the extendable table, sad and solitary, is the only witness to this spectacle of desolation.

The difficulty of repairs

However, the work is very difficult to carry out, because it is much more a reconstruction that must be done than repairs. Century-old beams support 600-kilogram chandeliers. A slightly violent shock would be enough to make these frames fall into dust and hurl these chandeliers onto the heads of imprudent visitors.

It seems, moreover, that the original construction was never very solid. When you see the walls of the minister's antechamber, made of blackish mud, you think more of a Zulu's hut in the depths of Africa than of the magnificent palace of the Grand Master of the University and the Superintendent of the Fine Arts, whose architecture is not the least worthy of esteem. The cracks that streak the partitions give you the impression that with a well-aimed punch you could easily make a hole through which your arm could pass.

Are there any Remedies?

The old Courteilles hotel is dying. It must be replaced. It is being taken care of, but the task is difficult, for lack of money, because there is not enough credit...
And, a philosopher, Mr. François Albert continues his work in his office with its unstable balance. Let's hope that one day he won't end up on the ground floor the promotion of academic palms that he started on the first floor.

J. H