Our Première Dame

There aren’t many photographs of Madame Henriette Poincaré. She was the wife of the president of France, Raymond Poincaré, during the first world war. I was interested to see that she has Italian blood like our present First Lady. She always accompanied her husband whenever it was possible and worked hard during the war to send out parcels, not only to the soldiers, but to the families and children they had left behind as well as offer them support.

She and her husband loved to spend time in the gardens at the Elysée palace. In 1917 an Orang-utan escaped from a nearby circus, found its way into the gardens and tried to drag her up a tree. Of course this news was censored at the time. She must have been absolutely terrified.

Here you see her arriving in Limoges in 1913 accompanied by the Minister of Agriculture (her husband had already arrived).

Sapeurs Pompiers de Paris

These are examples of the different uniforms Parisian fire-fighters would have worn around 1900. In France the fire service deal with all emergencies. Though I’m still wondering about the one with the gun…

As always click on the image to get a better view.

Continuing the story of Odette :

Odette was born in 1899. I’ve discovered that her father was in the army. He sent her a postcard of the officers mess with a cross marking the window of his room, she was eight years old at the time. Her grandmother’s Chateau is not for sale, as I thought, there are two chateaux with the same name. Her Grandmother who signed her cards 'Granny' was a Countess!

In 1906 Odette went to stay with friends and afterwards they sent her these two lovely postcards. I presume that her friends were called Denise and Marguerite

Jeannic

"A travelling photographer is passing through the area. Jeannic is five years old, we must have a photograph of her… but she is terrified by the man and his machine! So daddy has to be at her side. Come on Jeannic watch the birdie…"

This is where I live

It hasn’t changed that much since 1900 when this card was sent. Unfortunately the boats have changed. There are more people who sail for leisure and fewer fishing boats.

Fritz

In June 1902 Barnham’s circus was passing through the town of Tours in France. One of the performers was an was an enormous 80 year old elephant weighting 7 tonnes called Fritz. Not surprisingly, one day he decided he’d had enough of being a circus elephant. One story goes that he refused to move, the other that he went beserk. The outcome was that he was killed. He was taken to be stuffed and came back to Tours nearly a year later and has been there ever since, here are some 5 and 6 year olds at a workshop at the museum in Tours.

Another auction, another family

I’m sorry that I haven’t found time to post for a while. We attended an Auction last week. It’s the furthest we’ve travelled to an auction so far so we took the opportunity to stay in a romantic hotel and mix business with pleasure. We also bought some beautiful cards. One of the lots came from chateau so I’ve been piecing together bits of information about the family. They owned two chateaux in the middle of France , one of which is up for sale at the moment (that’s why the cards were being auctioned I suppose). Around 1900 a lot of the cards were written to a little girl called Odette. She seems to have passed from chateau to chateau to stay with her grandmother, perhaps while her parents were away. Judging by the wording on the cards she was much loved by everyone. Above is one of the cards she received in 1904.

Note: I was having problems uploading this image, in case it happens to you, you just need to click on the terms of service box.