L'Abbaye de Créteil, Val-de-Marne (94)

In autumn 1906 a literary and artistic group moved into 37–39 rue du Moulin in Créteil, Val de Marne and christened it 'l'Abbaye de Créteil' after being inspired by the utopian Abbaye de Thélème in Rabelais's Gargantua. The experiment was the brainchild of the poet Charles Vildrac* and Georges Duhamel, although it only lasted until January 1908.

The housing area Mont-Mesly a little to the south-east of the village – built some decades after the end of the experiment – remembers l'Abbaye de Créteil's brief inhabitants in a number of names of streets and buildings.

 

A plaque on the wall of number 37 reads:

'René ARCOS, Georges DUHAMEL,

Albert GLEIZES, Lucien LINARD, Henri MARTIN,

Alexandre MERCEREAU, Charles VILDRAC,

RÉALISANT LE RÊVE CHANTÉ

DANS SES POÈMES PAR L'UN D'EUX

FONDÈRENT DANS CETTE MAISON

EN 1906

L'ABBAYE DE CRÉTEIL

DE GRANDES ET BELLES ŒUVRES PRIRENT LEUR ENVOL ICI

ET FIRENT PAR LE MONDE MIEUX AIMER NOS LETTRES

ET NOS ARTS.'

 

 

Just a few yards from l'abbaye de Créteil is the River Marne opposite L'île de la Gruyère, which the village cattle used as a watering place.

 

At the side of the watering place is a footbridge to the island, the delightfully named Allée des Coucous being one of the streets there, and which a comedian has tried to change to 'Couscous'.

 

Back on the mainland, rue de la prairie is lined on the waterfront side with allotments: here, a pumpkin is growing.

 

*Vildrac was born Charles Messager, but used the pseudonym as a homage to Walter Scott's character Wildrake in Woodstock, or The Cavalier: A Tale of the Year Sixteen Hundred and Fifty-one (1826).