The Case for Lunch

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.