I believe this is the house that my late friend Charles-Henry, his brother, and their mother stayed in when they were evacuated from Paris to Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe during World War II. The owner, if I'm remembering correctly, was a neighbor and friend of Charles-Henry's family in Paris. Mr Edoux was the inventor of the hydraulic elevator in the 19th century, and he coined the term ascenseur as its name. That's the standard French word for elevator today. All this happened many decades before Charles-Henry and his brother Pierre were born in the 1920s.
Again (si ma mémoire est exacte), Charles-Henry told me that they called the Edoux house in Saint-Savin le château. The old-looking tower was built as a water tower to supply the occupants with running water. An Edoux ascenseur was installed in the house itself, which had been built on foundations dating back to the Middle Ages. Edoux was a native of Saint-Savin and died in 1910 at age 83. Gustave Eiffel had ordered one of his elevators and had it installed at the Eiffel Tower to take people and freight up from the second level of the tower to the third (the top). That elevator stayed in service until 1983. I must have ridden in it in the 1970s.
I must have ridden on that old eiffel elevator also- glad I didn't know about it at the time. You went to many interesting places with CHM. It is fun going back to our childhood when we are old.
ReplyDeleteWow, what a place, and what a story!
ReplyDeleteIt does look like a water tower, much like the decorative Victorian ones around the English countryside:
ReplyDelete