Home : History : Eugénie,
Aline and Jeanne THOUVENIN
Aline related that once, Eugénie and herself were supposed to stay in the garden.
Their Mom had locked up the door. Eugénie who wanted
to play house, entered the kitchen between the bars in order to get some
matches. Another time, Aline received the spanking instead of Eugénie
who was older and had ran faster. Aline
talked a lot about her youth with her sisters. It sounds like they had a lot of
good times with their cousin Emile Robert and with uncle
Jean Marcel Thouvenin. There were also cousin Henry
and aunt Marie with whom they had some good times.
When Aline turned 13 years of age,
she was sent to boarding school (1903-1904) at the nuns of the Christian doctrin in Pont à Mousson [Footnote 29]. Probably that year Eugénie had gone to the same boarding school. But when
Jeanne was about of âge to go to boarding school, she
went to Virton [Footnote 30] [Footnote 30a] in
In company of the good nuns, vanity was not permitted. Aline related that there were no mirrors for girls to look
at themselves. One day that she was in the laundry room, she saw a mirror. She
decided to look at herself to see if she was pretty or not. She was
disappointed by her image.
The three sisters learned to sew, to embroider, to crochet and
knit. Thus they made their own dresses. They must have been of the same size
because when they had made only one dress, they went to the photographer to
have their photo taken one at the time because they passed the one dress from
one to the other [Footnote 31]. Later on when they had
completed the three dresses and made some hats, they went again to the
photographer to be photographed together [Footnote 32].
The three of them had a lot of talents since they even made
their hats. Aline related that with her sisters, they
had hurried to finish the hats for a particular day when a dancing hall was
coming to Autreville. They had planned everything for
that Sunday. They hurried to finish the farm work early. Being free from work
they asked permission to go and show their hats to aunt
Marie in Autreville. Permission was granted.
Therefore they went to Autreville each of them
dressed in her pretty dress and hat. The intention of course was to go dancing,
which they did with aunt Marie’s permission. Aunt
Marie was not as strict as her sister Henriette. They
danced until dinner. They were seated at the table when a knock came at the
door: it was their mom who knew very well that there was a dancing hall in Autreville on that day and she was coming to pick up her
daughters. Aunt Marie pleaded their cause so well that they were permitted to
return to the dance until 11 pm at which time they all walked up to Bezaumont during the night.
At that time life was very strict for the young ladies,
especially the daughters of Maria. When the parish feast was approaching in Bezaumont, the three sisters would agree with their friends
to go to Easter communion only after the festival because going to confession
before, the priest would have made them promise not to go dancing the day of
the festival. That dance was about the only way that they could get to know
young men from the neighboring villages. Therefore they would agree to go to
confession after the festival and confess that they had gone dancing. I suppose that during the first world war there was not celebration of the patron
feast. The only young men that the three sisters could possibly meet were
soldiers who came back from the battle field and camped in grandmother’s barn.
The fountain was across from grandmother’s house near the Poinsignon
door [Footnote 33]. Aline
related that in winter the soldier had to chop off the ice near the fountain
and they had to wash stripped down to the waist in the cold water from the
fountain...
Sometimes soldiers spend the evening in company of the
family. They told the girls that girls
are always looking for the stripes on the sleeves of the soldier. There was a
tall Martiniquais who flattered himself from being
from the French Martinique. It was
apparent that he would have like to court one of the three sisters. It is
probably after the war that the patron’s feast started again.
The three sisters did a lot of walking and walked probably
quite fast. During the war, they went to visit cousin
Emile Robert at the forts of Toul. They left Bezaumont at 10 am and returned at 10 pm. Aline also remembered having gone to visit the aunt of Domevre. (Anne Léonie
Mangeot, born 28 June 1835 in Autreville
and married in 1852 with Nicolas Edouard Louis.)
Aline remembered that she ate some sauerkraut with
sausages.
When they were young ladies, someone in the family (perhaps
uncle Aimé Renard?)
promised to buy two bicycles
for the three sisters, that way there would always be two of them
together. The pant skirts were bought. But at the time there were gossips about
a young lady on bicycle in the neighborhood, therefore the bicycles were never
bought for the Thouvenin sisters so that there would
not be any gossips about them. The family motto was: “IN OUR FAMILY, WE RESPECT
OURSELVES.” The name Thouvenin was respected in Bezaumont and the family needed to live up to their name.
The long winter evening were spend by
the fireplace doing needlework. I was told that it was the custom to place a
glass of water in front of the light to diffuse more light on the work.
The three sisters were close to each other. They never forgot
to wish a happy anniversary to each other such as is witnesses by the cards
found which were sent to Aline [Footnote 34] [Footnote 34a] [Footnote 34b]. Likewise they did not forget aunt Marie, neither their grandma from Autreville
and who lived until 1917. (See endnote
or photo no.30).
In march 1922, Claude Thouvenin died only 72 years old. After that various events took place and Bezaumont was not the same.
Jeanne the youngest was married first in 1923 [Footnote 35]. She was 28 years old and Georges Lorrain
of Vittonville was two years older. The second great
grandmother of Jeanne was Margueritte Lorrain born in Sainte Geneviève,
descendant of the Lorrains from Vigny,
Moselle. Georges Lorrain
was descendant of the Lorrains from Lixières (a commune at present attached to Belleau). A
relationship between these two families is not impossible, but to this day has
not been established.
Georges Lorrain was the youngest son
of a family of three boys who survived childhood (René of Bouxières,
Emile of Vandières and Georges of Vittonville.) The three brothers served during the war
1914-1918. René was gassed, Emile lost
an eye with a piece of shrapnel and Georges was buried almost completely alive.
He was in a trench when the men in the trench heard a shell (bomb?) coming. The
men all laid down as they should except Georges who
fell on his knees. He remained buried up to the neck for a number of hours but
was the only one in the trench that survived to tell the story. All his life he
suffered from varicose veins and Aline always said
that it was the consequences of this accident.
Georges Lorrain was the last one to
get married and he took over the farm of Vittonville.
Of course Jeanne left Bezaumont after her marriage to
establish her home in Vittonville. She probably did
not feel too lost because the farm house of Vittonville
was even larger than the one of Bezaumont, In 1926, they had their first little girl, Suzanne who died
in 1927 [Footnote 35a] of a childhood disease. In December 1926 Aline
got married to Mathias Becker [Footnote 35b] and went to live in
Jeanne was very busy at the farm and did not come back to Bezaumont very often. But Aline
who lived in Nancy came back a little more frequently to Bezaumont.
Mathias died suddenly in 1937 at only 60 years of age. It was
very difficult for Aline to be a widow with two young children in the city and without a job nor
any training. Three years later the second world war
started. When Aline went to Bezaumont,
she always returned with bags filled with food. When Jeanne came to Nancy, she
also brought food which was rationed. Aline and her
children went often to Bezaumont or to Vittonville. The gathering of the three cousins (Geneviê, Simone and Yvette) brings back happy memories of
happy times together.
During the war, Aline placed her
children at aunt Marie in Autreville
for a year, by fear that Nancy would be bombed. Henry Joly
was there also as well as Camille his wife and her mother Mrs
Boussard. There was also Mrs
Humblot, a distant cousin, godmother of Claude my
brother. Thus Claude and Yvette got better acquainted with “aunt
Marie”, youngest sister of Henriette, and with Henri Joly (nephew and step son of aunt Marie), as wellas with uncle Mangeot
(brother aunt Marie) who was quite elderly. Aunt Marie took breakfast over to
him every morning and soup at noon. Sometimes uncle Mangeot
came to eat at aunt Marie’s. He had a long beard and
Yvette remember that when he ate his soup, it would drip in his beard. Yvette did not like to kiss him because of
his beard. Sometimes Henri and Camille
took Claude and Yvette for some long walks on the hills of Autreville
to pick some blackberries and make some jam. Never did Yvette eat such good
jam. Aunt Marie was an aunt who spoiled children. She laughed with them, kidded
them and knew how to please them but it must have been a very difficult
year for her to cook for this big family in addition to being diabetic. Uncle Mangeot died
April 6, 1940. Yvette was already at school that morning when one of the Macon
boys arrived saying that Mr Mangeot
was dead.
A year passed without any bombing of Nancy. The war continued.
After the German occupation, everyone returned home.
Yvette and Claude continued to spend their vacations in Bezaumont. When planes with bombs were flying over,
grandmother Henriette looked at those strange objects
in the sky without making any comment. Then the fateful summer of 1944
arrived. The Germans evacuated the
village of Bezaumont. Henriette
who was then 84 years old and Eugénie 56 did not want
to leave their home. The Germans who occupied the village did not know how to
milk the cows and they wanted some milk. Therefore Eugénie
milked the cows for them. But these soldiers were replaced by others. One
morning at about 4 am when it was still dark, Henriette
and Eugénie were woken up by great big knocks at the
door. They got up quickly to open (they slept in their clothes.). It was an
S.S. soldier who demanded that they leave the house. He saw the safe. He asked
for the key. Henriette told him that it was lost. He
wanted them out. They wanted some shoes. He gave them some shoes. When they
showed that it was shoes for the same foot, he became inpatient and put his gun
under Henriette’s throat. They were happy to leave alive and went to
the castle of Ville-au-Val in the shelter with other inhabitants who were also
refugees there. They stayed there as
long as the battle lasted for the Americans to cross the Moselle
and occupy the hill pushing the enemy back towards Germany. The battle was
tough. The Germans opposed much resistance of the last hill before Germany.
Half of the village of Bezaumont got burned down.
Then the calm returned. Time came for Henriette and Eugénie to leave the shelter and walk up to Bezaumont. They arrived from Ville-au-Val by the back alley
and the garden gate and saw their house burned, only
black walls remaining standing.... Of two generations of work, there remained
nothing except blackened walls and ashes. Henriette
wiped a tear from the corner of her eye and pronounced words
which symbolizes the strength of character of these people from
Lorraine: “never mind, we’ll work again.” And they worked again. They went to live in the old house of uncle Thouvenin, the house at the upper part of the village. It
was the house in which Claude Thouvenin was born.
There were no floor left. The soldiers had used the
floor during the first world war to make some fire. A
bomb had dropped on the roof but the main roof beam remained undamaged. They
moved the old stove from the burned house. They found army cots and blankets
left by the army, etc. A large
ammunition box became a table, smaller ammunition boxes became chairs. It is in
this house and in these conditions that they spend the winter 1944-1945. Sometimes Eugénie
wrote that she needed to let the ink melt on the side of the stove before being
able to write.
Yvette remembers having visited aunt
Marie probably in 1945. Aunt Marie was not the same person. She seemed tired.
She probably did not feel well. She had lost her joy of living and her happy
mood. The joyful spirit which had animated the house of Autreville
had disappeared. Aunt Marie died December 5, 1945. Every family in the village
was represented at her funeral, which shows that she was loved and appreciated
by all.
Henriette and Eugénie
continued their life in Bezaumont [Footnote 36]. A new floor was placed in the attic and the roof was repaired.
Henriette and Eugénie
continued to harvest hay, potatoes, fruits and grapes. Henriette
continue to make a garden and when the year was dry she carried a bucket of
water from the well all the way to the garden to water the young plants. When
she was 90 years old, she did not want help from her 17 years old granddaughter
to carry to carry her bucket because “it is too heavy for you, you are too
young.” To accept the offer of a young person would have meant for Henriette that she had become “too old.” On February 14,
1954 (age 93½) that she returned to her beloved husband who had waited for her
32 years.
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© 2004, 2005 Jean-Marc Samson and Yvette Longstaff