The memory of the Cévennes writer André Chamson celebrated in a garden on the heights of Millau

At the moment of remembrance on the heights of Millau with Catherine Velle, the granddaughter of the writer André Chamson. Midi Libre – F.M

The mayor of Millau Emmanuelle Gazel and the granddaughter of André Chamson, Catherine Velle, daughter of the author Frédérique Hébrard and the actor Louis Velle, both of whom died in 2023. Midi Libre – F.M

A public garden in the Millavois heights will be named after the great Cévennes writer who died in 1983, father of the author Frédérique Hébrard and father-in-law of the actor Louis Velle.  

The light drizzle did not prevent, this Friday morning, the tribute to the writer André Chamson. Rue Léopold Sédar-Sanghor, on the heights of Millau, with a view of the Larzac and the elegant silhouette of the Viaduct, his granddaughter Catherine Velle was able to express her emotion at the baptism of a public garden in the name of the man of the pen. "It’s a pleasure to be here with you."< /p>

Emmanuelle Gazel, the mayor, under the eyes of one of her predecessors at the town hall of the city of the glove, Jacques Godfrain, reweaved the thread of life in words by André Chamson. "This garden, through its composition, seems to dialogue with the work of André Chamson. Had he not confided: one must be rooted to embrace the whole earth?"

Writer and resistance fighter

And the councilor continues on "the garden, writing of the landscape. Seeing the children's games here, facing the cliffs of Larzac, would the Academician not have thought, I quote: of the exaltation that we had, little mountaineers of the Cévennes, before the great slopes, the protrusions of the rocks, the rolling of the highlands. Writer of the Cevennes reliefs, the Languedoc country and Provence André Chamson also devoted beautiful lines to the Causse du Larzac. One of those places, he writes, where we have the feeling of touching both the beginning and the end of created things."

Emmanuelle Gazel did not forget to recall the resistant past of the great writer who became an academician in 1953. "André Chamson was a Camisard in thought through his historical novels, and guerrilla by deeds. Courageously in the Lot before founding, with André Malraux, the Alsace-Lorraine brigade. He also, with his wife Lucie Mazauric, helped save the masterpieces of the Louvre by accompanying them to the Loc Dieu Abbey, here in Aveyron."