CHM at Crosville-sur-Douves

Today would have been my late friend Charles-Henry Michel's 100th birthday. He passed away last February, a couple of months after his 99th. I hope he is resting in peace. He and I were colleagues in Washington DC at the U.S. Information Agency (U.S. cultural services) from Jan. 1983 until I left for California in Oct. 1986. We gradually became good friends over the years because Charles-Henry had a partner and other friends in California, and we always saw each other on his annual visits to the West Coast. In 1992, Walt and I met up with him in Paris. That's when he learned that Walt and I were domestic partners and had been since 1983. Washington DC was not an easy place to live and work in for same-sex couples back then.

The first time Charles-Henry stayed at our house in San Francisco was at Christmastime in 1995. Around that time, Walt and I started driving down to the desert in Southern California to tour around with CHM and his partner Frank, who lived down there (in Salton City) permanently, partially because of health issues. Frank, was exactly one year older than Charles-Henry; he was born on Dec. 13, 1923 and passed away in 2006. We four became close friends and shared many good times together. We stayed at Frank's house many times, though it was a nine-hour drive from San Francisco to Salton City.

Walt and I left California and moved lock, stock, and barrel to France in June of 2003. By then, Charles-Henry had retired from his job in Washington and had taken back possession of his apartment in Paris, where he grew up. Old friends of his family had been living there, I think, for about a decade. C-H started spending a month or two in Paris every year at about the same time Walt and I moved to France, so we saw him often. He stayed with us in Saint-Aignan numerous times, and we stayed with him in his Paris apartment. Our times together in France ended just before the Covid pandemic started in 2019. I stopped traveling to the states at that point. In 2018, C-H suffered a broken hip joint and he never was never able to travel, or even walk, again.

These are some photos that Charles-Henry took at the Château de Crosville-sur-Douve in the Cotentin region of France in 2004. He used to give me copies of the photos he took in France when he was traveling back and forth to Washington and to California. I was his backup, in case his bags were lost or damaged in transit. He and I had been to Crosville-sur-Douve once before, in 1998, when the two of us spent a few days in the Cotentin, as well as in Rouen and Paris. We drove all around the Loire Valley for several years, and we drove up to the Somme/Picardy region north of Paris several times too. That was where his family had come from. C-H's father was born in 1860, if memory serves, and his grandfather, Charles-Henri Michel, a well known artiste-peintre, was born in about 1817. Their roots were deep. It was an honor and a privilege to know Charles-Henry. I often find myself wishing I could pick up the phone and talk to him these days.

Crosville-sur-Douve is described in the Michelin Green guidebook I have as one of the most imposing châteaux in the Cotentin region of Normandy. It's about 15 miles east of Barneville-Carteret.