The fate of these three Varoese grandmothers
Three new portraits of women from Provence. « They are only two in this photo of the Méridional of October 1960 but I will tell you about three ladies of Provence of the time.
They did not shine in any field except in my child's eyes, at least for two of them because there is one I didn't know, my paternal grandmother, the poor girl died very young in 1934; Unfortunately I have no picture of her. »
Head for the Var with Claude Boyer.
My paternal grandmother was called Ernestine Chauvier, born in Luke in 1901, daughter of Louis de Roquebrune on Argens and Marie Leidet de Draguignan.
Used at Fréjus slaughterhouses, with too many days spent paddling in ice water she catches what is then called « chest flow », an evil that takes away on a cold January day. She is only 33 years old and leaves two orphans, my uncle Henri and my father Raymond.
Perhaps Mr Fleming's penicillin could have been of great help to him, but unfortunately, in the early 1930s she was only in her infancy.
About ten years passed and one day in 1941 my grandfather Stanislas remarries with the one who will be my lover, Valentine Fouques, with the white hair in the picture.
Although her name is Angelus, she has always been for us. « Miss Valentine » Following the blush of the chestnut with whom she was placed by her majority on leaving the sisters' house, Madame did not like Angèle and decided that it would be Valentine and it remained her.
She didn't have children but was for my sister, my brother and I the best grandmother. Generous, caring, a grandmother as we wish to all the children of the world giving her son-in-law and then to their children the love that she did not receive during this childhood that Victor Hugo would not have disavowed.
Her father was from Fox-Amphoux, her mother from Cotignac, but she was born in Puget on Argens in 1912. It was at the age of five that she lost her father Philomain, who died in 1917, with his lungs ravaged for breathing a yellowish cloud that had come to cover the trench in which he was standing up in northern France.
Anna Martin her mother does not recover from the loss of her husband and soon joins him, leaving little Valentine orphan, and that's how she was « placed with the sisters ». She comes out only by her majority with a towel for everything viatic, which she embroidered herself at her initials.
She had a war godmother in the person of Violette Bouyer-Karr, the little girl of novelist Alphonse Karr based in St Raphaël.
My other mother in the photo is meme Renée, my mother's mother, born in 1908 in Gonfaron, although the family cradle on the maternal side is Toulouse.
Méme Renée is, according to the terminology of the time, a « natural girl », a condition of which she has suffered all her life. She always refused to talk about this father who was to be easy because, although he did not recognize this fatherhood, he probably had not abandoned him because she was still dressed in beautiful clothes and, for the time, was spoiled by toys that certainly could not have been offered to her by her mother with a salary of corkscrew.
Still it is that to my great damn I never knew who was this great grandfather and my family tree found it amputated from a branch.
Mémé Valentine left us in 1992 and Méme Renée in 2003.
Claude Boyer
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