Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe

The town of Saint-Savin is just north of Antigny, which I posted about yesterday and the day before. The two communes share a border. My friend CHM and I first went to Saint-Savin together in 2006. We had already known each other for more than 20 years at that point, and we went to Saint-Savin for a specific reason. It was because CHM had spent time there during World War II, with his mother. I was sure he would enjoy seeing the place again, and he was too.

Walt and I had first seen Saint-Savin in 1989, when we spent a week driving from Grenoble to Bordeaux and then up to Chartres before going to spend a couple of days in Paris. That was the first time we ever saw Saint-Aignan, too, but that's another story. Anyway, we were going to fly out of Paris back to San Francisco a few days later. Why did we want to go to Saint-Savin?

It was because I had had this poster since my days in Champaign, Illinois, back in the 1970s, when I was a grad student and teaching assistant in the University of Illinois French department. I got the poster from the offices of the American Association of Teachers of French, where I was a part-time staffer, supplementing my paltry TA's salary. At some point, Walt had had this and a couple of other AATF posters mounted on boards and we put them up on the walls of various apartments we lived in when we moved to San Francisco in 1986. We were fleeing Washington DC for a couple of reasons — one being that Washington and the Republicans in power back then (Reagan Republicans) were less than friendly to people like us. I had a government security clearance at the time, and I was soon going to come up for my five-year review. I didn't look forward to being interrogated about my life. Besides, Walt had an opportunity to move to California to continue his education. So off we went.

The first time CHM came to visit us at our house in California was in, I think, 1992. That too is a story for another day. CHM had never been to our apartment or house before. He had only learned that Walt and I were domestic partners a few months earlier. He and his partner Frank were in the Bay Area because Frank's daughter lived there, not much more that two or three miles from us, in Silicon Valley. That was a funny coincidence. He and Frank were to visit us many times in the 1990s, and we visited and stayed with them many times in southern California where they were living, south of Palm Springs.

When CHM looked around in our house in Sunnyvale (the heart of Silicon Valley) in 1992, he quickly spotted the poster of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe on a wall and wondered how we had come to have it. I told him about getting it from the AATF in Champaign in the 1970s, and how we had driven through there in 1989. He knew my history as a grad student and teacher in Illinois, because he and I had worked together in Washington DC between 1983 and 1986. He had even met Walt but didn't know we lived together. He also told me about his time spent in Saint-Savin in the 1940s. That's why we both wanted to see Saint-Savin again in 2006. It's only 100 kilometers south of Saint-Aignan. Here are some pictures from then. More will follow.

I remember our stop in front of this hotel/restaurant in Saint-Savin, when I took this picture. We decided to have lunch there. When we walked in, CHM told the young man who greeted us (he might have been the owner or manager) that he had good memories of meals with his mother at the Hôtel de France more than 60 years earlier. The man smiled and said he had only been there for a year!