The Passadoc Gazette - No 73

The Quiz! This week: eight quizzes!
We talk a little... a lot... passionately!
1973, last cart towed by a mule... Sainte-Croix-du-Verdon, abandoned village... Raymond Maufrais or Les Aventures d'un Varois en Amazonie... 1909, the earth trembles in Provence... The story of the Kermes and the Garance... The petanque! Cicadas! June 12, 1944... The sinister and terrifying Brandbourg company...
Vagabondages...
Photos from yesterday
We sing on Passadoc too!
Passadoc library.

André and François Abbe

1973. Last cart towed by a mule in Roquebrune.

A century earlier, an ancestor crossed the Esterel to sell his wine to... Cannes! The journey lasted 12 hours, with 400 meters of elevation to cross the Esterel from the Var. His cart certainly looked like Mr Fabre's. He was the last to use in the village of Roquebrune-sur-Argens (Var).

Photo André Abbe

– It was Mr Fabre... Or Francis Lambert? wonder Sébastien Perrin and Giselle Penat-Lorde.

Click! Next to this page

Claude Boyer

I knew that in the '60s. My mom and mom were doing the harvests at Yvonne and Charles Giraud, maybe there were readers at Passadoc who knew them? They lived on Rue Saint-Jean in Puget.
We were leaving in the blue tomb drawn by Butterfly (all the horses called Butterfly!) But he was my boyfriend; When my mom cooked artichokes, I wanted to keep the hay for Butterfly. Charles held Papillon by the bridle and we went at the pace of this crew to Canevère... Rex the dog (all the dogs called Rex!) trotted behind and it hurts me.
The horse and Charles, it was normal for them to walk but the dog... I thought it was unfair.

I don't remember anymore, but the trip lasted a while. Upon arrival, the pickers began to work; Charles, the canesteu on the shoulder, carried the grapes until the tomb and I picked up the grass that I gave to Papillon, who was waiting placidly towed in the middle of the vineyards.

Charles Giraud had his horse tied to Lucien Regis in Puget-sur-Argens.
(I do not guarantee that the horse is Butterfly)

Giselle Penat-Lorde

I've known these « Vehicles » and/or « means of locomotion » In the 1950s and early 1960s, the joy of Thursdays and school holidays. A thousand memories. All work in seasonal fields, including harvests.

Several paths for the Vergers/Roquebrune, and I loved that we would return by « top », as I said – I had to be wise and the horse not too tired – because it climbed and there were rocks which gave with the vegetation of the garrigue a small air of far west ! In my childish imagination, I certainly had to wait to fall nose to nose with some Sioux or other lost Indians!

evoking « this way up », it was yes a draille in fact, a square, square, square, or cairade = these paths of passage of animal circulation, sometimes cashed, whose in theory the right of passage is immutable. Right who was and who is how much flouted, ignored, happily trampled.

Robert Chauvier

On Thursday, my grandfather Chauvier tied up his horse, and my brother and I went in the cart, heading for the cabanon of L-Iscle.
We went through Les Prés Chevaux, where he now has Cabasse college, the land of the Martin des Jaume and the neighbour Victor Chauvier who sometimes came to eat with us.
My grandfather and Victor spoke in Provencal. We didn't understand, but we were still listening.
After dinner, my grandfather came out with a communist newspaper called « The Earth » And made us make a dictation on an article, I don't count the mistakes we made!
Then we could play along the Bual or the Argens.

Other memories...

Painting of Louis-Edouard Garrido (1893-1982)

Patricia Jouve

Return of fields in the 1960s in Provencal Baronies ... We were 2 or 3 children at the top of the hayload of the neighbouring peasant, proud as Artaban, the kings of the world!

Giselle Penat-Lorde

The time of harvests and fenaison, a happiness to be juised at the top and have a breathtaking view, to dominate the world on its small throne of hay or straw balls ... « And you don't chuckle, don't fall » ... I still hear the voice of my grandfather speaking most often in patois of course ... Happy children we were, to curl in the hay but not in the sofa in front of the TV and/or tablet and co!

Jean Paul Dubroca

Sainte-Croix-du-Verdon, abandoned village

1957... The small Provençal village was emptied of its inhabitants. The artisans closed shop one after the other, the faithful were rarer in the little parish and the few children were now gathered in one class. Exodus rural, the disappearance of handicrafts, this charming village seems to be dormant.

Click! The INA video on this page

Claude Boyer

Raymond Maufrais or The adventures of a Varois in Amazonia

Raymond Maufrais was born in Toulon, the 1st^and October 1926. He is the only son, and pampered by his parents. He is such a turbulent and fighting child that his parents send him to boarding school when he is not nine years old. Far from being calmed he makes the wall with two comrades and all three disappear in the wooded hills of the High Var.
The three runaways find refuge in a cave where the gendarmes guided by their dogs find them only after four days of search. They are in good health, the budding adventurer had planned supplies; he tells the gendarmes that he counted « join a colony in the mountains« .

In order to give him the illusion of the adventurer life he dreams of, his parents enroll him in Scouting, he will become totem « Temerary sea lion » The other scouts are impressed by his swimmer and diver skills, thanks to which he will obtain his certificate as a school swimmer/saver.
However, he is not strictly speaking a brilliant student except in literature. His teacher of French who detects in him gifts of writer will baptize him « the future journalist » And he does not hide his ambitions to become a great reporter.

Click! The continuation of the article to this pagee

1909... Earth trembles in Provence

The most violent earthquake in France in the 20th century^e century.
On 11 June 1909 at 9 p.m., the earth began to tremble about 50 kilometres north of Marseille ravaging Lambesc, epicenter of the earthquake, followed by a second tremor about 20 minutes later.
A magnitude estimated at 6, the earthquake causes 46 deaths, 250 serious injuries, a large number of homeless people and ravages several surrounding villages.

Click! The rest of the storyt…

Giselle Penat-Lorde

The story of the kermes and the garance

The eggs of a small parasitic insect, the kermes, and the crushed roots of a marshy plant, the garance, were the substances that for centuries allowed to dye the fabrics in red, i.e.: vermilion, scarlet, scarlet or Turkish red.
The vermilion and scarlet were obtained by picking on an oak the tiny eggs of an insect, the kermes. Female kermes hung on the oak branches, covered at the time of laying a kind of shell to protect their eggs filled with red colour. Gathering the kermes was like gleaning, a right of the poor consecrated by use. It was done around May, by women and children, who had allowed themselves to grow their nails to better detach the small capsules of bark. We were extending these « seeds » on large canvases that were watered with vinegar to kill animals. We let the sun dry, then we sieve.

Text Passion Provence.

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The petanque!

Alain Cathala and Giselle Penat-Lorde

Cicadas!

Click! Let's hear them!

The legend of cicadas

History takes place at the blessed time, very, very, very long ago, when angels came to spend their holidays on Earth, sent by God to come and rest in a full year...

One fine day, two angels arrived on a sunny afternoon as are the afternoons of our home (45° in the shadow!), on the 15 o'clock blow, in the middle of our beautiful Provence. They expected to find successful orchards and vegetable gardens, well-maintained fields, roads and ditches. So they were greatly surprised not to meet anyone between the calanques and the restanques, to see many fields in wasteland, to see dilapidated fences and paths invaded by the briers.

Then they said,
– But where did we land? What is this country where nobody works? Let's go to the village to find out…
When they arrived at the village, they were a little thirsty, but they found only doors and shutters closed: no one in the streets! Not soul that lives, nothing, desert! In the final solution, they headed towards the presbytery in the hope of meeting the priest and having the explanation of this great mystery which was very disturbing to them! They knock at the door, and instead of finding the priest busy in his ministry, they found him taking a nap.
– Father, what is going on here? Nobody's working? Where did the inhabitants go? They said. The priest replied:
– We can see you've come a long way. God gave us the sun and its warmth. Also, at home in Provence, in summer, we can only work a little in the morning and a little in the evening, when it is not too hot. The rest of the day we take a nap, in the shade and in the cold! That's why you didn't meet anyone! Everybody's asleep!

The angels rushed back to Paradise and told God about their stay in Provence.
– Something must be done to prevent the provencals from sleeping so that they can work their fields! They said in a choir! The angry God, think for a moment by scratching his beard. He then decided to create a new species of insects that would prevent people from sleeping. When the sun is too hot, throughout the summer, these insects would hide in the pines and perform, like a military band, strident and stubborn notes, with the secret purpose of preventing Provençals from sleeping too long.

Thus the cicadas were born, symbolizing Provence but also the art of taking a little nap, for the Provençals, far from being annoyed by the cicadas, used their « melody » to get even faster into a good penequet (sieste)

Text: Made in Humanity

Philippe Natalini

June 12, 1944...

In memory of two resistance fighters who died for France: François Duchâtel and Émille Millet.

Born on 15 October 1916 in Nantes, François Duchâtel was a gendarme at the Aups brigade in the Haut-Var.

In the summer of 1941, he verbalized the mayor of Aiguines, whom Vichy had just fired and who was ostensibly listening to British radio. But it was reported on 3 February 1944 in a report by an officer of Draguignan's Sipo-SD as warning the threatened resistance, notably by his brigade chief. François Duchâtel was then fully in the Resistance. He provided information to the Burin subnet (SR of the MUR) and took the maquis on 7 June 1944 with two other gendarmes, including Constable Bouet. These three gendarmes of the Aups Brigade thus went underground by taking with them typewriters and carabiners. They joined the maquis AS Vallier whom François Duchâtel was already helping as he moved to the Canjuers Plan area north of Aups.

On 12 June 1944, carrying out a refuelling mission, the van in which Duchâtel was with Ernest Millet, Constable Bouet and Roger Donadin, was arrested at a dam established by militiamen from Marseille at one of the entrances to the village of Aups while the militia was investing in that locality.
A weapon is found in the vehicle. Constable Bouet at the rear of the vehicle barely had time to jump to escape control, while Donadini tried to flee but was stopped with a grenade in his hand.
In the truck cabin, Duchâtel and Ernest Millet cannot escape. Ernest is killed with a bullet in the face while François Duchâtel, after having exhausted the ammunition of his revolver, is shot on the spot, at your guard, by the militia.
The militia left his body and that of the driver of the Ernest Millet vehicle "out in the sun all day long with a sign bearing the mention "This is how the traitors of France die.“.

A stele was erected to their memory at the execution sites in front of the « Villa Rose » 14 July 1945 by the municipality and the Resistance. The name Duchâtel was given to a village square. He was also honored at La Valette-du-Var, near Toulon, where he had ties. He was among the other deaths of the local resistance on the plaque affixed to the town hall by the Secours Populaire on 23 August 1945; his name was given to a road of the commune by decision of the municipal council of 12 July 1945.
The new Gendarmerie barracks of the Var Group in La Valette also bears his name.

He received the title of Death for France. A commemorative event in honour of Duchâtel and Millet is held on 12 June each year in Aups, on the site of their martyrs. That is the case again this year.

The sinister and terrifying German company Brandbourg

History, after Jean-Marie Guillon ...

The elements of a German column, also composed of a detachment of the 8^e Brandenburg Company (Schorn Detachment) stopped on 16 June 1944, at about 6:30 a.m., in the vicinity of Germany-en-Provence (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence), a group of young people coming from the Var and seeking to join the guerrilla FTP.

This column was sent to hunt for resistance fighters in the area since June 7. She arrived from Vinon-sur-Verdon (Var) where, on 14 June, she had shot down a resistanceman, the former mayor of the village André Arbaud, and another resident, and then committed various abuses.

The young people arrested attended the execution of nine people in the German square and were then taken to the territory of Saint Martin de Bromes, at the place called the Ravin des Bayles, where they were all massacred at about 11.30 a.m. The priest had managed to release a young logger from the group. The Germans had told them beforehand that they would be sent to work in Germany. But it was not because fifteen bodies were discovered on 19 June.

Fourteen of these young people were identified, all from Brignoles (three) and from surrounding villages (three from Val, three from Montfort, three from Carcès). Two or three former Italian army soldiers, like some of them, were employed in the bauxite mines in the area. They were a group of friends aged 17 to 24, all of whom decided to « Up » To the maquis.

One of them, Gabriel Unia of Carcès, had accompanied his comrade Floréal Fuentes to Montagnac at the FTP, who would be killed on 11 August 1944, not far from there at Sainte-Croix-du-Verdon, and would then come down to drive his other comrades there. The group gathered in Cotignac to take the Riez bus around 10:00 p.m. on the evening of the 15th. Their project was known in their villages. Other friends had to go with them. They were without weapons.

Several versions circulated about this group and the circumstances of his arrest. Unknown in the region of Saint-Martin-de-Bromes, they were considered as loggers on their way to their construction site, whereas in the Var they were mentioned either a betrayal by a former Italian soldier or an infiltration by a member of the Brandenburg detachment then installed in Brignoles.

A stele was erected to their memory on the scene of the drama, in Saint-Martin-de-Bromes with name errors and an unknown. Another stele is in the Montfort cemetery.

List of executions: Bagarre Louis – Bertolucci Orlando – Botto Eugène – Cabasse André – Cantoni Ezio – Fabiono Raphaël – Fagginolo Jean – Heraud Camille – Magakian Jean – Mares Max – Prestia Guiseppe – Sappa Marius – Simondi Gabriel – Unia Gabriel.

Maryse Laugier

Lake Saint-Cassien

June... The emerald lake at its highest level.
He feeds the Siagne who never tarries... I'm sending you a little freshness!

Philippe Levieux

Here are the marmots of the Southern Alps!

Marmots (Marmota) form a genus of rodent-inspired mammals. It is the second largest rodent in France after the beaver. Its elongated body is covered with a beige fur on the belly, grey on the ears and head and brown on the rest of the body. It feeds on roots, leaves and stems of flowers.