La Gazette de Passadoc - N°100

Why Passadoc?

The reign of the slide ended when the digital photo arrived just after the year 2000.

It was by observing that my thousands of slides were beginning to lose their colors that François and I decided to embark on a digitization that is still under way.

We then thought that it was appropriate to encourage slide owners to do the same thing as ourselves, by creating an association: Passadoc.

Behind the choice of this name are the words of « past » and « passage », of « documents » and « Occitanie ».

Saving the slides taken between 1950 and 2000 from scratch means preserving a precious heritage...

By showing our scanned photos, we encourage diaposers in the countries of Oc and elsewhere to go through their drawers to bring out their own.

Over the days, over the months, many slides, anecdotes have been shared. All this enthusiasm for reviving these memories demonstrates the usefulness of Passadoc, which has been declared of general interest.

And then on January 30, 2021, the idea of a small weekly report sprouted; This is how it was born. « The Passadoc Gazette ». Here's the 100^e Number!

Good reading... And long May!

André Abbe

Echoes of the week...
The 40-year-old photo...
The truth about the pistou...
Martin Bidouré...
Mistral or Buffalo? ...
Lucien Sapin...
A few days from Christmas...
The Library of Passadoc ...
Daudet...
The Boutis...
Wild Herb Soup...
Roquebrune in images...

André Abbe

40-year-old photo

I just found that 40-year-old photo..

When I was going to make a photo projection, I had to trim more than 20 kg of material. Today I take a USB flash drive of less than 20 g!

At the time we had to send mail by post, wait for the answer, our drawers contained paper, envelopes, stamps... now a simple click and instantly the recipient receives the email to the other end of the world via an electronic highway. If our correspondent is in front of his computer, the answer comes back to us after five minutes, but even without a computer, he receives directly on his phone.

That's progress! Where will he stop? It is a progress that is expensive in energy and we no longer want pollution, nuclear... How do we do it then, we have to produce this electricity of which we are so greedy consumers?
It's not the news of the moment that will make me wrong.

The truth about the pistou

Where does the term "pistou" come from? A real subject for soup and a very popular sauce in France and Italy.

I don't know where I took this picture anymore, and why it says "Pistou" on the sign. However, it gives me the idea of approaching the end of the year holidays to correct once and for all a mistake too often committed.

Too many gourmets believe that pistou is basil because the pistou soup contains basil and it can be said that a pistou soup without basil is not a real pistou soup...

But in Provencal basil is called "balicot" and the word pistou comes from the verb "pistar" which means to reduce into dough. Indeed in the pistou soup the basil is always "fucked" in a mortar before being associated with the various vegetables
Italians make a "minestrone" that looks like our pistou soup.

I add that the verb "pistar" also means trampling with the feet and that in the past the grapes were "pissed" in the tombs before bringing it to the cooperative to be able to load a little more. This practice is now not recommended because healthy and whole clusters are to be brought to the cellar.

Lo Viton

Looking at the weather maps, it happens to complain about our mountain friends who live above 1000 meters of altitude; -10° are not rare up there right now.

I'm only going to see them at the good season but I think of them all year round.

I regret that people in the lower country gave them unflattering names. In Lower Provence, we called them « gavots » or gavouats ». In Languedoc it was the « gavachs ».
The names would come from the fact that some mountain people wore a taste due to a food deficiency, but I'm not sure.

Most of the Provençals below have ancestors from the mountain, me the first beautiful. By mocking the gavots, we laughed at ourselves. Today, no one laughs at them anymore and that's how it is.

In the Occitan-speaking valleys of Italy, mountain people are called « by the low valleys near the Po plain.

There is a hamlet in the Varaita valley bearing this name « lo Viton », which is populated by fewer and fewer vitons.

Our mountains have emptied of their gavots, gavachs and vitons. Their descendants return in summer.

Claude Boyer

Martin Bidouré

We are in 1851, Napoleon III democratically elected – at least according to the laws in force at the time – governs France for three years.

Since the President's term of office is four years, he will have to face the ballot box again, which does not mean that he will not be too happy; The dissolution of the assembly is already part of its prerogatives.

His calculation is then simple, it dissolves and provokes a coup to stay in power.

Of course its opponents do not hear it with this ear and call for insurrection under the aegis of the « the new mountain » led by Ledru-Rollin who had lost to him in 1848.

Thus began the episode of the insurgents of 1851. The Var where « Red society » is very active is no exception. This is where Jean Ferdinand Martin, a native of Barjols, entered the scene, who experienced the tragic fate of having been shot twice.

If you want to know more:

https://abbe.photo/lincroyable-history-de-martin.../

Mistral or Buffalo?

One evening in October 1891, Frédéric Mistral returned home.
He crosses the road of a little black-haired dog running after him, partying him, then making a real circus number. Mistral hunts him with his stick and then continues on his way.

The next day, Mistral sees the dog who obviously followed him in front of his door and here he is again doing his circus! In short, Mistral ends up adopting him, baptizing him « Pan-Perdu » And a beautiful, beautiful friendship is born between the two! Wherever Mistral goes, the dog follows him! This friendship will last two years, until Pan Perdu goes to the paradise of dogs leaving the poet very unhappy.

A few years before his death, Mistral drew up the plans for his mausoleum tomb! Besides, beautiful faces of Provencals and the felibrean star, the poet demanded that a grave sculptor on the stone of Pan-Perdu!

But listen to the most surprising!
Paul Roumel who tells this story tells that he was in the United States in the city of Buffalo Bill where he visited the museum of the famous hunter where the dog is mentioned, and there he notes that Buffalo Bill and Mistral look alike!

Pierre Roumel, then asks himself questions about this circus dog, Pan Perdu. He researched and learned that Buffalo Bill came to Provence in 1889 with a circus. The Marquis Folco of Baroncelli had invited Buffalo Bill into his manade after his tour and there, Buffalo Bill, told him that he lost his circus dog in Tarascon!

Did Pan Perdu travel miles across the fields, on the roads to tie up with his lost master? The story may be romantic, but it's pretty.

If you are looking for a photo of Buffalo Bill, you will see that the resemblance between the Provençal poet and the American prairie runner is striking!

Lucien Sapin

Born in 1929 in Gennevilliers (Hautes-de-Seine), Lucien Sapin known as "Lulu" is no less a child of the country having its maternal origins in Gonfaron in the department of Var. He was the son of Marguerite Sapin née Fabre who lived in Impasse Rivière in the city where donkeys fly.

(I take all the more pleasure in writing this article that Lulu was my cousin, his mother Marguerite and my great grandmother were sisters.)

A Complete Artist

Painter, sculptor, he met the most prominent actors and singers, he travelled around the world. It would be illusory to pretend to sum up here the enumeration of its sectors of activity, from Cairo to St Petersburg, through the Kremlin and the princely palace of Monaco, he paints, sculpts and participates closely in the restoration of UNESCO's world heritage.

Michèle Morgan, Isabelle Adjani, Emmanuelle Béart, Pierre Bachelet, Ralf Vallone, Pierre Fresnay, Carlo Ponti or Sofia Loren to name but a few are asking for his works and his work.

A non-standard career path

He made his life a work, and his work a passion while remaining of rare simplicity, not forgetting his dear Gonfaronese for whom he painted, grazed the burials or the names of the villas.

Lulu has no more than six months when he arrives in Gonfaron. Very soon the teacher discovers in this applied student the artist of exception. He talks about him to the marbrier of the village and that is how Lulu sees the birth of his vocation, this passion for art that will accompany him throughout his life.

Head of the workshop of French Marbles, attached to the Louvre Museum as Best Worker of France, he restored the Grande Galerie du Louvre, the pavilion of Flore. He was entrusted with the restoration of the "four parts of the World" of Carpeaux, the "Three Graces" of Pradier, "Love" of Canova (offered by Napoleon to Josephine), the wing of "the victory of Samothrace", the pendulum of the old station of the Musée d'Orsay, the golden gilding of the base of the Obelisk.

Madame von Karajan ordered her a full-size piano in white marble at the death of her husband.

He worked with Moore, Calder, Arp and Paul Belmondo and said: "I worked 18 months with him, he was such men as Michel Ange or Rodin who imposed a force”

In charge of the Ministry of Culture, he works in the Hermitage of St. Petersburg, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, St. Sophia in Istanbul, the Acropolis in Athens and also in Jerusalem, Cairo, Parma, Florence, Budapest, Sarajevo, Seville, Brasilia, Belgrade, Petra, Aswan, Israel and the Gulf of Akaba.

Closer to home, in Brignoles, he is the author of the engraved monolith attesting to the 700th anniversary of the death of Saint-Louis: this work can be admired in a small square facing the station; He also signed the shield of the royal convent of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume.

His father was a wood sculptor, as it is true "What a pine does not a cade" (a pine does not give a cade) in occitan.

A simple man

Running the planet all the time, he likes to relax in Gonfaron during his holidays. He is a lonely walker who flees the city and honours, a dreamer who communicates with nature that he paints according to his walks with his easel, canvases and brushes.

When nature explodes, it sets its colors on the canvas.

He will say "When I start a painting I only see spots. The difficulty of painting is to accord these spots to get harmony of the whole”.

Demanding with himself, always dissatisfied with his work, he is constantly in search of perfection and probably reached because he will have the permission of the Louvre Museum to perform such reproductions as "The Glauses" by Millet, "Rememberment of Mortefontaine" and "The Blue Vase" by Corot.

Lulu left us in 2011.

A few days from Christmas...

Why do you need a few days of Christmas?
Because December 21st is the winter solstice, which means that the days will begin to lengthen.

According to IMCCE (Institut de Mécanique Céleste et de Calcul Ephemerides): the solstice will take place at 22 hours 48 minutes and 10 seconds, with the sun at its minimum at that time.

But, you know, you're not gonna have to worry about a lot of apothecary accounts. I'm not going to start a class on equinox precession... It is just that this news brings me joy because we will therefore enter full foot into the winter and personally I love winter days with their blue sky, virgin of any cloud.

I am Provencal and I love light, clarity. If the inhabitants of the northern countries practice light therapy it is good that the human being is made for the sun and our region is known for profusion

Nothing bites more than to see, at the end of January, shy white or pink flowers carefully shook on the branches of a few bold almond trees that only ask to explode in February, driving with them the mimosa that comes out of his sleep...
We are certainly not there yet, but he quickly spends the time between our fingers like a handful of fine sand, we will soon be in the time of the cherries which itself is very short... As the song says.

Claude Boyer

On December 16, 1897, Alphonse Daudet, Nîmes by birth, disappeared. He sang Provence in his varied, complex and often mocking work.
Adolphe Brisson, his friend, director of political and literary Annales, said:
« He had put himself entirely, with his beautiful childhood mood of the Midi, his irony of Parisien, his imagination as a poet who grew things up without distorting them. ».

Who doesn't know Blanquette, Master Cornille or Tarascon Tartarin?
Although it is made famous by the Fontvieille mill in the Bouches-du-Rhône, an emblematic mill of his work, it has never lived there.
It was on the banks of the Seine, in Draveil in the Essonne, that he wrote a large part of his work, taking with him the rural sourness of tambourines and provençal gallobets.
His house is today a museum and the statue [photo Passadoc] is in Alès.

Jeanne Monin

He is the author of eighteen novels, several tales, news, plays, but today he is best known for his « Letters » : The Goat of Mr. Seguin, The Subprefect in the Field, etc., i.e. almost thirty stories; if some are tragic, such as The Sauterelles, many are delicious and smiling. Thus The Old and Mamette's portrait:

A door that opens, a trot of mice in the hallway... It was Mamette. Nothing pretty like this little old lady with her shell cap, her Carmelite dress, and her embroidered handkerchief that she held in her hand to honor me, in the old fashion...
[...] When Mamette came in, he began by making me a great reverence, but in a word the old man cut his reverence in half:
— It's Maurice's friend...
Aussitôt la voilà qui tremble, qui pleure, perd son mouchoir, qui devient rouge, toute rouge, encore plus rouge que lui… Ces vieux ! ça n’a qu’une goutte de sang dans les veines, et à la moindre émotion elle leur saute au visage…

Et ce charmant passage qui décrit l’atmosphère de la pièce avant l’arrivée de l’ami :
Il n’y avait d’éveillé dans toute la chambre qu’une grande bande de lumière qui tombait droite et blanche entre les volets clos, pleine d’étincelles vivantes et de valses microscopiques…

Marie-Odile Beraud

« Boutis de Provence » – Kathryn Berenson – Éd. Flammarion – 1996.

Le Boutis : mot provençal désignant les ouvrages piqués exécutés à la mèche, employé notamment pour les jupons, les couvre-lits et les « petassons ». Le boutis désigne également l’aiguille à pointe ronde avec laquelle on « introduit » les mèches de coton dans la broderie.

On associe souvent la Provence à la lavande, aux oliviers, elle est aussi le pays des boutis.

Chaque pièce est un chef-d’œuvre qui demande des heures de travail.

Le couvre-lit en piqué blanc a longtemps fait partie du trousseau de la mariée. Sans oublier ces magnifiques jupons qui faisaient la fierté de celles qui les portaient : jupon du dimanche ou pour les fêtes, plus travaillé avec des couleurs plus gaies ; jupons plus sombres, souvent dans une « indienne » pour les autres jours.

Si vous avez l’occasion de visiter un musée des costumes et traditions, faites-le ; vous y verrez des chefs-d’œuvre au travers de costumes, de pièces de lingerie, du linge de maison….

Marie-Odile Beraud
Une fois passé Briançon, vous vous engagez dans la vallée de la Clarée, torrent de montagne affluent de la Durance.
Si vous allez jusqu’au fond de cette vallée, vous pouvez accéder à Bardonecchia en Italie, par le col de l’Échelle mais avant vous traverserez le village de Val des Prés.
C’est là qu’est née Émilie Carles à la fin du XIX° siècle, institutrice aux idées libertaires et modernes pour son temps.

Elle connaît une gloire locale en publiant, dans les années 70, un livre autobiographique intitulé Wild Herb Soup. Elle y raconte la rude existence des habitants, sa vie d’institutrice dans les villages les plus reculés, son union avec Jean Carles, anarchiste, libertaire et un peu bohème ; elle raconte aussi la guerre et la perte accidentelle de sa fille.
Malgré toutes ces épreuves, elle n’a jamais perdu la foi en son idéal d’une société plus juste et plus humaine.

Wild Herb Soup, un de ces livres dans lesquels on plonge dès la première page et qu’on ne peut plus lâcher jusqu’au mot fin.