José Bruyr in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Yvelines (78)

José Bruyl (1889–1980) was a Francophone Belgian poet who was one of the founder members of L'Académie Charles-Cros. He was also a member of the Claude Debussy comittee in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He was a music critic and wrote several works on Arthur Honegger, the history of music and several composers such as Schubert, Liszt, Brahms and Ravel. He wrote a large number of articles in French music papers.

Jacques Fesch in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Yvelines (78)

Jacques Fesch (1930–57) was condemned to death for theft while carrying a firearm in 1954, followed by the death of a policeman. Whilst in prison he became a Christain mystic, and is in the current process of beatification. His complete works (close on 600 pages) were published in 2015. The only comment I have to make about this is that I am, and always have been, totally opposed to capital punishment.

Jacques Tati in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Yvelines (78)

Jacques Tati (1907–82) was born Jacques Tatischeff of French-Russian-Dutch-Italian origin. His family grave is in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and the bicycle tyre is most fitting for a film director well remembered for his early Jour de fête (1949), about a postman on his bicycle going about his normal work (with invitations to drink alcohol), and which obviously heavily influenced the blockbuster by Dany Boon, Bienvenue chez les ch'tis (2008), at least in one particular sequence. A great director of almost silent film comedy. The suggestion, some years ago, that his pipe be airbrushed out of stills of his films, was the suggestion of an idiot.

Boîte à lire in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines (78)

This boîte à lire in Maisons-Laffitte, here called a Bibliobox, was made from a former telephone box in Remagen, Maisons-Laffitte's twined town in Germany. The project was carried out by a joint effort between the twinned towns, Les Amis de Remagen and the Lycée des Métiers Jules Verne in Sartrouville, a town across the river from Maisons-Laffitte. Pupils at the lycée conceived the exterior with images from Maisons-Laffitte and Remagen such as a horse and the plan of the park in the former, and the bridge towers and Liebeskraft ('The Srength of Love') sculpture by Lajos Barta in front of the Peace Museum in the latter. The box was opened in March 2017, although a Bücherbox had been in place several months earlier in Remagen.

Boîtes à lire:
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Boîte à Lire, Dicy, Nièvre
Boîte à lire, Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines
Boîte à lire, Sorigny, Indre-et-Loire
Boîte à Lire, Jonzac, Charente-Maritime
Boîte à lire, La Roque-d'Anthéron, Bouches-du-Rhône
Boîte à Lire, Épineuil-le-Fleuriel, Cher
Boîte à lire, Marseille, Bouches-du-Rhône
Boîte à lire, East Markham, UK
Boîte à lire, La Folie Couvrechef, Caen, Calvados
Boîte à lire, Bergues, Nord
Boîte à lire, Le Havre, Seine-Maritime
Boîte à lire, Villerville, Calvados
Boîte à lire, Saint-Servan, Saint-Malo, Ille-et-Vilaine
Boîte à lire in Caen, Calvados
Boîte à Lire, Noyant d'Allier, Allier
Boîte à lire, Dampierre-en-Burly, Loiret
Boîte à lire, Illiers-Combray, Eure-et-Loir
Boîte à lire, Chartres, Eure-et-Loir
Boîte à lire, Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or, Rhône

Cimetière du Mesnil-le-Roi, Yvelines (78) #5: Jeanne and André Bourin

Jeanne Bourin (1922–2003) (née Mondot), was a historical novelist who returned to the Catholic faith at the age of forty. She had a sentimentalised and idealised view of the Middle Ages, and her La Chambre des dames (1979) is her most well-known novel. She married the literary critic and writer André Bourin (1918–2016) in 1940. André contributed to a number of magazines and wrote at least thirteen books.

Cimetière du Mesnil-le-Roi, Yvelines (78) #4: Louis Pauwels

'Quand verrai-je ma fin du monde ?
Que votre Volonté soit faite etnon la mienne.
Mais je vourdrais semer des oiseaux dans ceux que j'aime
Et qu'ils ne souffrent pas quand je m'endormirai.'

Louis Pauwels (1920–1997) was, as the stone above states, a poet, writer and journalist. He was the editor-in-chief of Combat in 1949, directed the monthly Marie-France, and with Jacques Bergier founded the magazine Planète, dedicated to science, philosophy and esotericism. He later founded Figaro Magazine, which he was in charge of for more than twenty years. The novel L'Amour monstre (1954) is one of his principal fictional works.

Cimetière du Mesnil-le-Roi, Yvelines (78) #3: Józef Czapski

Józef Czapski (1896–1993) was one of the officers to survive the Katyń massacre, and was a fourth founder of Kultura: another exile living in Maisons-Laffitte. He was a writer and an artist. His plaque just within the boundary of Maisons-Laffitte stands alongside Jerzy Giedroyc. Keith Botsford's Józef Czapski: A Life in Translation (2009) is an attempt write Czapski's 'autobiography', what Botsford calls 'a biography from within'.

Cimetière du Mesnil-le-Roi, Yvelines (78) #2: Zofia and Zygmunt Hertz

Zofia Hertz (1911–2003) was the first Polish woman to become a lawyer. She met Jerzy Giedroyc in 1933 at the Bureau de la culture, de la presse et de la propagande and she became his secretary. With Jerzy Giedroyc and her husband Zygmunt (1908–79), she also founded the Instytut Literacki (which in two years produced twenty-eight publications) and Kultura in 1946.

Cimetière du Mesnil-le-Roi, Yvelines (78) #1: Jerzy Giedroyc

I showed a photo of a plaque dedicated to Jerzy Giedroyc (1906–2000) a few posts below, and now I discover him in the Cimetière du Mesnil-le-Roi. As I mentioned in the post, he was the founder of the review Kultura, a magazine which concerned Polish culture, particularly emigrant writers and intellectuals. He also founded the literary institute in Maisons-Laffitte. Following his wishes, Kultura ceased publication on his death.

Jerzy Giedroyc in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines (78)

'Jerzy GIEDROYC

1906–2000

Fondateur de « Kultura »

revue politique polonaise –

et de l'Institut Littéraire

a vécu et travaillé

dans cette maison'

Kultura was a Polish and world cultural magazine designed as an instrument against communist totalitarianism. Many important writers of the twentieth century contributed to it, such as Albert Camus, Simone Weil, George Orwell, Witold Gombrowicz, T. S. Eliot, Emil Cioran and Czesław Miłosz.

Paris 2015: Cimetière de Bougival #2: Georges Avenel

Georges Avenel (1828–76) was the brother of the writer Paul Avenel (1823–1902) and spent much of his life researching the French Revolution. Notably, he published Anacharsis Cloots: l'orateur du genre humain and the unfinished Lundis révolutionnaires 1871-1874, nouveaux éclaircissements sur la révolution française à propos des travaux historiques les plus récents et des faits politiques contemporains.

Paris 2015: Cimetière de Bougival #1: Émile Richebourg

'À

ÉMILE RICHEBOURG

HOMME DE LETTRES

1833 – 1898'

Émile Richebourg is now virtually forgotten, although he was once a very popular writer. His novels were serialised in Le Petit Journal and Gambetta's La Petite République and both publications benefited greatly from his contributions. Richebourg – who was born into a modest family – earned a considerable amount of money from his novels, which seem to have been particularly welcomed by women. He told Émile Zola that he was the great literary novelist, whereas Richebourg was the great popular novelist. He lived with his wife in Bougival on the Route de La Celle St Cloud, in a house which he named 'La Charmeuse' after his novel Andréa la charmeuse.

He wrote a great number novels, including Les Amours de village, Les Millions de Monsieur Joramie, La Fille maudite, La Dame en noir, Jean Loup and Coeurs de femmes.

Paris 2015: Victorien Sardou, Cimetière de Marly-le-roi (78)

'SÉPULTURE

VICTORIEN SARDOU'

 

 

'À SON PRÉSIDENT D'HONNEUR
VICTORIEN SARDOU
SOCIÉTÉ DES AUTEURS
ET
COMPOSITEURS
DRAMATIQUES'

 

Aside from André Baillon, the other author of note in Marly-le-roi cemetery is Victorien Sardou (1831–1908). Sardou's most famous play was Madame sans gêne (1893), one of a great number of his works. He was also noted for spiritualism.

Paris 2015: André Baillon, Cimetière de Marly-le-roi (78) #1

'1875 – 1932

 

AU ROMANCIER

ANDRÉ BAILLON

SES AMIS.'

 

 

An impressive tribute to the brilliant Belgian-born novelist André Baillon, who after a number of aborted attempts killed himself in 1932. Adolphe Wansart (1873–1954) also made a bust of Baillon.

My other post on André Baillon, which includes my impressions on his novel Le Perce-oreille du Luxembourg, gives much more information on the man:

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André Baillon: Le Perce-oreille du Luxembourg

Paris 2015: Léon Frapié, Cimetière du Montoir, Houilles (78)

 

'LÉON

FRAPIÉ

1863–1949'

 

For nearly forty years Léon Frapié wrote a number of realist novels, of which La Maternelle (1904) was the second to win the Goncourt, begun the year before. This is narrated by a woman and is said to be a largely biographical story of his first wife, the declassée teacher Léonie Mouillefert whom he married in 1888 and who inspired several of his working-class novels.

 

'MADAME LÉON FRAPIÉ

NÉE ALICE VERLAY

1881 – 1975'

 

Frapié's second wife, who as Alice Verlay-Frapié wrote several children's books.

There is a Square Léon Frapié in the 20th arrondissement.

Lise Lamarre in Versailles, Yvelines (78): Cimetière des Gonards #5

Lise (or Louise) Lamarre was a poet and a journalist.

'LISE LAMARRE

      DONT LA VIE FUT VOUÉE

À L'ART ET À L'AMITIÉ...

                                  15 JUIN 1951'

'Esprit pur, je connais enfin la Vérité.

La Lumière, l'Amour, et ma force sereine

retrouve le but où tend l'humanité

     Lise Lamarre'

Louise Bryant in Versailles, Yvelines (78): Cimetière des Gonards #4

Louise Bryant (1885–1936) was an American writer who espoused socialist and anarchist causes. Her first marriage was to John Reed – who died in 1920 – and she moved to Paris with her second husband, William Bullitt, in 1923. A few years later she was diagnosed with Dercum's disease.  Bulitt divorced her due to her heavy drinking and her lesbian relationship with Gwen Le Gallienne, and Bryant died in in Sèvres of a brain hemorrhage.

The film Reds (1980) is a representation of the Bryant and Reed story.

Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac in Versailles, Yvelines (78): Cimetière des Gonards #3

A superb image of a dandy: the gay poet Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac (1855–1921) was the model for Esseintes in Huysmans's À Rebours (1884) and one of the models for the Baron de Charlus in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.

The statue on this anonymous grave is the angel of silence is from Vitry-sur-Seine château. Montesquiou is buried next to his secretary and lover Gabriel Yturri (1860–1905).

Armand Renaud in Versailles, Yvelines (78): Cimetière des Gonards #2

The Renaud plot in the Cimetière des Gonards includes a rather impressive bust of the poet Armand Renaud (1836–95).

Armand Renaud was born in Versailles and was a civil servant, progressing to inspector of fine arts. He wrote a great deal of poetry, some influenced by Persian and Japanese literature, and some of which was put to music by Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921).

Edith Wharton in Versailles, Yvelines (78): Cimetière des Gonards #1

'EDITH WHARTON

NÉE EDITH NEWBOLD JONES

24 JANVIER 1862 – 11 AOÛT 1937'

Edith Wharton's grave in the Cimetière des Gonards, Versailles. Below is a link to a long earlier post I made on Wharton in the Mount, Lenox, Massachusetts, with many images of her home there:

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Edith Wharton in Lenox, Massachusetts