Sarah Bernhardt hops by again

See here

We recently acquired some new vintage postcards from an auction. One of the albums came from a chateau. In fact there were two chateaux, the parents chateau and the chateau of the grandparents. There was a Granny so we must assume she was an English Lady.

Ninette wrote to her uncle that she had two letters in her possession from Sarah Barnhardt. Unfortunately the letters had been written to the Comtesse de Najac who was a close friend of Sarah Bernhardt. As Ninette was staying with friends who knew the Comtesse they were going to take her to see her, so she would be asking for a signed photograph of Sarah.

I’ve also fallen in love with an Elephant…

In search of Raymond Bergevin

Raymond Bergevin was the man who made postcards of La Rochelle and other local places of interest. He seems to have had his peak between the wars. For a few of years I’ve been meaning to check out the address where he operated from, a busy shopping street in town by the market. A couple of weeks ago Rob and I had a few jobs to do in town so we put “look up 66 Rue des Merciers” onto our list. Not an easy task as many of the buildings in the street are not clearly numbered. We started at the wrong end of the road so the excitement mounted as we neared our goal.

Number 66 is a narrow terraced building and today houses a cheap handbag shop (yes, in la Rochelle!). We stood across the road and scrutinised the building looking for clues. We were disappointed at first. Only the wooden beam over the door and window of the shop was of any interest. Looking up above the first floor windows I could just about make out some old faded lettering. So faint that if you didn’t know what it said you couldn’t guess: R Bergevin. It was like finding buried treasure.

If you want to see what we saw, start from the market, it’s a couple of buildings down on your left. Best viewed from across the road