THE CASE FOR LUNCH

Notes on an underappreciated meal.

- BY LAUREN COLLINS

In 1962, Roxane Debuisson, a Parisian housewife in her thirties, was walking down the Rue de Birague, in the Marais, when one of a pair of gilded iron balls—a traditional emblem of barbers—detached from its bracket and almost conked her on the head. The salon's proprietor, it turned out, planned to replace them with a neon sign. This was les trente glorieuses, the postwar years in which French society raced toward modernity, leaving the past in the dust of massive state-sponsored construction projects. Debuisson took the remaining orb home, thereby beginning an exceptional collection of Paris ephemera—previously commonplace objects that were disappearing before her eyes.

“The collection began out of my love for Paris and my love of the street,” Debuisson later said. For decades, she conducted a one-woman salvage operation, scooping up rating plates, bench marks, pieces of bridges, tree corsets, street signs, fountains, gallows, Métro seats, mailboxes, and some seventy thousand commercial invoices. A 1970 photograph by her friend Robert Doisneau shows her in a coat and kerchief, crouching on the pavement to examine a dilapidated bust of Molière, rescued from a bakery near the Pont Neuf.