Great names marked by their time in Gard
In the 17th century, Jean Racine spent a year and a half in Uzès to win the favor of his uncle, the bishop's vicar general. The town welcomed him with curiosity, and he enjoyed the resort life. He wrote "Nous avons des nuits plus belles que vos jours" ("We have nights more beautiful than your days") in his later correspondence, Lettres d'Uzès. Alphonse Daudet was born in Nîmes and spent his youth in the département. Concoules was his reference for La Chèvre de monsieur Seguin. Alès, on the other hand, left him with painful memories of his work as a tutor at the Collège Impérial, where he was regularly insulted and humiliated: this was the inspiration for his novel Le Petit Chose. For his part, Robert-Louis Stevenson set off on his journey to the Cévennes in 1878, to forget a thwarted love affair. After 220 km and twelve days' walking, he reached Saint-Jean-du-Gard. The pages of his Voyage avec un âne dans les Cévennes, published a year later, are both funny and touching, reflecting his inexperience and the fact that he's out of place in this rugged yet exotic landscape. André Gide was born to a father from Uzès, and will always be attached to his childhood visits to the South of France. Throughout his work, the garrigue and his affection for the region are reflected in poetic, anecdotal and sensory allusions. In 1914-1915, the poet Apollinaire was garrisoned in Nîmes, where he was joined by Lou, the Countess Louise de Coligny-Châtillon, his muse and lover. From Nîmes, he wrote her fiery missives and a total of seventy-six sensitive and passionate poems.
Those who say the country
Jean-Pierre Chabrol, born in 1925 in Chamborigaud in the Cévennes, became a member of the Resistance, then a prolific writer and journalist after the war. He has written some forty novels, most of them historical or autobiographical, such as Un homme de trop (One Man Too Many), about the maquis, from which Costa-Gravas made a film of the same name. His major work, Les Fous de Dieu, retraces the epic of the Camisards and the peasant revolts, and through his short stories and other writings, he never ceases to immerse us in his Cévennes roots. Jean Carrière is a writer from Nîmes who spent his entire life in the Gard region. After his first novel, Retour à Uzès, which won a prize at the Académie française, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1972 for L'Épervier de Maheux, which recounts the abandonment of the Cévennes and the rural decline of the 1950s, as well as the obstinacy of a man determined to defy fate. Playwright Gilbert Léautier, founder of the Théâtre du Béguin in Lyon, moved to Aujac in 1980. In Pour planter des arbres au jardin des autres (To plant trees in other people's gardens), created for Radio Suisse Normande, he portrays typical Cévennes figures, both realistic and anonymous, with truth and tenderness. Alain Renaux's Le Savoir en herbe - Autrefois, la plante et l'enfant is a remarkable work on the region, in a more didactic vein, but with a telling voice.
