Charles Cros
Poet, scientist and inventor, passionate about literature and science, the astonishing Charles Cros was born in Fabrezan on October 1st 1842. Passionate about music, letters and numbers, he passed his baccalaureate at the age of 14 and studied Sanskrit and Hebrew at the age of 15. A high-level scientist, he was passionate about progress and worked on the design of an automatic telegraph, which he presented at the Universal Exhibition of 1867, as well as on a project for the reproduction of colours, shapes and movements. This visionary foresaw the cinema, the spoken newspaper, and imagined the phonograph before Thomas Edison. In 1869, he published The General Solution of the Problem of Colour Photography and, in 1876, he produced the first colour photographic prints. Charles Cros was also a well-known poet: he wrote, among others, L'Artiste, Le Fleuve and Le Coffret de Santal. He became friends with Verlaine, Rimbaud, Jean Richepin and Germain Nouveau. But his bohemian life and absinthe abuse made his health precarious, and he died on August 9, 1889. Today, we remember him above all for the famous recitation Le Hareng Saur, studied at school: "It was a big white wall - naked, naked, naked. Against the wall a ladder - high, high, high. And on the floor a herring - dry, dry, dry..."
Pierre and Maria Sire
Pierre and Maria Sire were inseparable from the moment they were married on August 2, 1919 in Coursan, and lived for a long time in the city of Carcassonne, first near the Grand Puits and then opposite the château comtal. Both teachers, they had a parallel career as four-handed writers and wrote three novels -L'Homme et la poupée, Le Clamadou and Marthe et le village-, thus making a strong impression on the literary and intellectual milieu of Carcassonne from the early 1930s. After the death of her husband in 1945, Maria never wrote another line.
Maria Sire's family includes two other authors who were born in the Aude and who left their mark on their time: her grandfather, Charles-Louis Eugène Stublein, a meteorologist, who devoted many articles to the vagaries of the weather; and one of Maria's nephews, Henri Tort-Nouguès, a professor of philosophy and literature, Grand Master of the Grande Loge de France and author of numerous works on Freemasonry.
Henri Gougaud
Born in 1936 in Carcassonne, Henri Gougaud defines himself as "the heir of the Occitan troubadours". He has a special place in the hearts of the people of Audois and has written songs for Reggiani, Ferrat and Greco. In 1969, he created the Bélibaste publishing house, a tribute to the last perfect Cathar, Guilhem Bélibaste, burnt in 1321 at Villerouge-Terménès. A large part of his work as an author is dedicated to his native land, to the troubadours and to the history of the Cathars. "Tales have nourished me all my life, they made me what I am. How did they do that? I don't know, that's their secret. " - Henri Gougaud.
