Paul, My Father

My father, Paul, was the third son of my grandparents Léonce and Marguerite. He was born in April 1915 in Paris, which means that he was conceived just before the general mobilization in July-August 1914.
As Léonce was mostly away fighting in the war, Paul did not really started to know his father before the age of three and a half.

During the war, the family resided in an apartment in Avenue de Suffren in Paris. This is a very good neighbourhood.

Avenue de Suffren
(source)

In the 1920s, probably before Paul started school, Léonce bought a house rue Saint Joseph in Le Chesnay, near Versailles. Paul and his brothers went to school in a private catholic establishment: École Saint-Jean-de-Béthune in Versailles. This school has been renamed École Saint-Jean-Hust, after the fusion in the 1990s with a private catholic girl school, École d'Hulst.

École Saint-Jean-de-Béthune
(source)

As Henri's family were also living in Le Chesnay, being from a catholic family, Henri's sons were also student at École Saint-Jean-de-Béthune, and that is how the two families met. Paul was friend with my uncles and through them, he met my mother Marie.

Paul was a bookworm. At some point, he thought he would become a priest, but he soon realized that it was not for him. One of his younger brother, Étienne, became a Jesuit priest, after Worl War II.

In the 1930s, Paul bought a small movie camera. He used it before, during and after World War II and he took short movie of us, his children. Sometimes, on Sunday afternoons, we would gather in his home office to watch these movies.
Today, to take videos of anything is easy, as it can be done with almost any cell phone. But, this was not the case in the 1930s.

At university, Paul studied philosophy and got a Bachelor of Philosophy. He tried twice to get the Agrégation of philosophy to become a secondary education teacher. He failed both times. I think it was better for him, because he would not have been a good teacher.

His father suggested to Paul that he could become a librarian, and that is the career he pursued. But of course, when he was 24 years old, in 1939, World War II started.

Continue to Part 16

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Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4
Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8
Part 9 - Part 10 - Part 11 - Part 12
Part 13 - Part 14
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A Brief History of my Family in France - Part 15 - Paul, My Father

Paul, My Father