François Rabelais in Seuilly (37), Indre-et-Loire (37)

François Rabelais (c. 1483–1553) was born in La Devinière, Seuilly, now the only museum dedicated to him. Antoine Rabelais was his lawyer father who had inherited several properties in Seuilly from his mother. This smallholding, or farm, dates from the fifteenth century and Rabelais was the third child. This, the Château de Grandgousier, the seat of giants, is is where Gargantua was born: the centre of the 'guerre picrocholine'. This is Rabelais country. L'Indre-et-Loire turned the property into a museum in 1951.

The property from a general viewpoint.

La Maison du Métayer, or tenant farmer, now showing the biography of Rabelais.

An anonymous oil painting on wood called Rabelais au verre de vin.

The pigeonnier-grange, or dovecote-cum-barn, dates from the 17th century, now holding an exhibition dedicated to Rabelais and Nostradamus.

The room contains a number of old editions of Rabelais's, this one including an illustration by Lucien Bouche from a 1930 Hazan edition.

At the back of the pigeonnier, Le Logis Rabelais, 15th century and of white calcareous stone.

La Grande Salle  in the logis.

Bust of Rabelais holding his pen, by Louis-Valentin Robert, who executed the Rabelais statue in the Turgot wing of the Louvre.

The charcoal sketch of Rabelais by Matisse presented to the musée in 1951.

The bedroom on the upper level.

The door to the petite chambre.

François Villon, Georges Brassens and Rabelais by Louis Mitelberg (1992).

The cellars were hewn out of the rock used to construct houses in La Devinière, and became an underground farm, also including an oven, chimney, and wine press.

And the wine press.

Finally, La Maison du Vigneron.

With its bread oven. And all of this for six euros (five if you've visited another museum in the département): it makes the National Trust look like a total rip-off.

My François Rabelais posts:
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François Rabelais in Seuilly
Rabelais in Meudon-sur-Seine
Rabelais at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés

Georges Duhamel: Le Désert de Bièvres (1937)

In December 1906 l'Abbaye de Créteil was formed and lasted until January 1908. Inspired by Rabelais's Abbaye de Thélème, it was intended as a kind of non-religious artistic commune, an escape from the commercialisation of the mind, from the slavery to which artistic people were subjected, printing its own works and leading a 'natural' life.

It wouldn't have been possible without the writer Charles Vildrac, who was strongly supported by his friend the poet Georges Duhamel. They found a rundown mansion – belonging to the automobile manufacturer Barriquand – for rent in Créteil and the poets René Arcos and (slightly later) Alexandre Mercereau, the painters Albert Gleizes and Henri Doucet, the printer Lucien Linard, and others, took part in the (very short-lived) experiment. The poet Henri-Martin Barzun was the patron. Thirty years after the event, Georges Duhamel gave a fictional representation of l'Abbaye Créteil in his novel Le Désert de Bièvres.

Le Désert de Bièvres is fifth in Duhamel's Chronique des Pasquiers series of novels, and it's easy to tell that there are a number of things about the protagonist Justin Weill that relate to Vildrac, just as there are a number of things that link the narrator Laurent Pasquier – who has put off his medical studies for the project – to Duhamel himself. There's a printer called Jules Piquenart who may well represent Lucien Linard, although little is heard of the patron the Marquis Farfreyde, and Duhamel seems to have jumbled the other characters about, perhaps to protect the guilty, perhaps just to fictionalize the issue more.

Almost from the start the poet Jean-Paul Sénac is trouble, perhaps indicated by the fact that he likes a drink (or two). But that is a relatively small thing, as there are a number of other bad habits he has: he stays in bed late, he's lazy and pisses out of his bedroom window rather that go to the toilet, and we discover towards the end that when he picked his nose he left the findings on his chair. He's a professional complainer, but most of all he can't live without mocking people, inventing all kinds of insulting names for them.

If this makes the book sound humorous, it certainly is in many parts – Sénac knows, for instance, from the creaking of the bed above and the sighing coming from it that the painter Raoul Brénugat is having fun with his wife again, and he must be in very good shape as he's at it not just every night but often in the morning, and at times after lunch. For a while though, Sénac will have to ease his frustration by bullying the stray dog who's made himself at home in the Abbaye and is rather taken to this poet-monster.

There's also Armand Larseneur the musician, the ardent vegetarian and philosopher Bernard Jusserand and his wife who turns out not to be his wife, and Testevel the editor, all more or less surviving through a number of months until internal conflicts and money problems mean that – slowly but surely – the utopia-turned-dystopia loses its inhabitants and only the original Justin and Laurent remain to concede defeat and make imminent plans for going back into the outside world.

Perhaps surprisingly, the real press managed (painstakingly, with a pedal machine) to produce about twenty books. This one is highly readable.

Links to my previous blog post of l'Abbaye de Créteil – plus a forty-minute video (including an aged Vildrac) relating the history of the Abbaye – are below.

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L'Abbaye de Créteil, Val-de-Marne
L'Abbaye (1906–1908) [Video]

Rabelais in Meudon-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France

This sculpture is in front of the town hall and is the work of George Saupique and erected in 1946. François Rabelais was the parish priest of Meudon from 1551 to 1553, slightly conflicting with the dates below.

'FRANÇOIS RABELAIS
Curé de Meudon de 1550 à 1552
Oeuvre d'ANDRÉ FRANÇOIS TRUMPHÈME
1820 - 1888
offerte aux Meudonnais par les
CIGALIERS DE PROVENCE
en 1886 lors des premières fêtes Rabelais.
Le buste a été détruit en 1942.
En 1996 la Ville de Meudon a commandé une
nouvelle fonte d'après le plâtre original,
inauguré le 5 Octobre
par Henry Wolf, Maire de Meudon.'

So the original bust, presented to the people of Meudon by Frédéric Mistral's 'Cigaliers de Provence' in 1886, was destroyed in 1946 and reconstructed from the original plaster model in 1996 here in Place Rabelais.

Rabelais is of course associated with the Pierre levée dolmen in Poitiers, although his relationship to this dolmen, at the northern entrance to the Parc de l'Observatoire in Meudon, is far more tenuous.

I couldn't resist including these two views of Paris from the park: here you can see the Eiffel Tower to the left, and the Sacré Cœur in the middle background. The large building in the middle is Bouygues Telecom tour Sequana at Issy-les-Moulineaux.

A blanched La Défense seen through the trees.

My François Rabelais posts:
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François Rabelais in Seuilly
Rabelais in Meudon-sur-Seine
Rabelais at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés

Rabelais at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Val-de-Marne (94), France: Literary Île-de-France #34

The so-called 'Tour Rabelais' ('Rabelais's Tower') in Parc de l'Abbaye in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés was built between 1358 and 1360 as an important fortification point of the abbey during the Hundred Years' War (`1337—1453).

Rabelais (1483(?)—1553) was the private secretary of Cardinal Jean du Bellay, the first dean of the secularized St-Maur-des-Fossés abbey in 1533. He was one of the canons and stayed here in 1536, 1537, and 1550, finishing writing his Quart Livre (Fourth Book here. He would have stayed in one of the abbey lodges and the castle built pour the cardinal by Philibert Delorme, but not in this tower.

My François Rabelais posts:
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François Rabelais in Seuilly
Rabelais in Meudon-sur-Seine
Rabelais at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés