After months of complaining to Vic, I finally found a junk store in Boston with a box of lost photos. This makes me unreasonably happy. This one of a Peugeot bicycle dealer in France is related to several others that I did not buy, mainly architectural photos. They all have the same typewriting on the back in an odd blue ink. The one says: “La Châtre, a house of the fifteenth century.” This is a translation from an earlier French handwritten note. The typewriter must have been a European model due to the unusual diacritic.
It seems to me, based on some other photos in the box, that many of these photos belonged to a photographer who was stationed with the American military in Wiesbaden, West Germany during the 1950s. Obviously, this photo is older. Was the previous owner once a soldier and then a professor of architecture at one of the local universities? Or is this set of photos completely unrelated? Perhaps belonging to what may be a set of photos from an earlier photography shop that starts with an R? Either way, how did it end up in a box of paper scraps in Boston, being sold for a buck?
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3 Comments
Hi there
that’s a great picture.
FYI – La Chatre is a town in the middle of France, near the cathedral city of Bourges, and still has quite a few buildings like the one in your photograph – as you can see here:
http://www.la-chatre.com/ville.html
That building in the page above, does look very similar to this building.
Taking a look at this site, I can see that the town is very close to the Loire Valley, famous for its wonderful biking (and French boyfriends). If you were into George Sand, you could go look at her house and go to a festival in her honor.
Thanks for the link. I liked looking at it and imagining I could read French. I wonder if they are within the wine region and what the local cheese and food is like.
Great blog! There’s also this from Wikipedia:
“Marcel Dussault (born May 14, 1926 in La Châtre, France) is a former French professional road bicycle racer. He was professional from 1948 to 1959 where he won 21 races. He won a stage in the 1949 Tour de France and wore the maillot jaune on the following day. He would win another two stages in the Tour de France. Other results include Paris-Bourges in 1948 and 1949.”