Amiens – Front View of the Cathedral

It’s interesting to note that the caption of the postcard is bilingual, something quite unusual for the time. I assume that it was published during the war or right after and there were still quite a few Anglophone troops in the area, writing home.

Amiens, July 31, 1919

My dear Adrien,
I received your postcard, which gave me great pleasure to read. As you say, here I am, “I’ve become a farmer”. What do you want, anything to drag my from the barracks. Still, I got a 35-day reprieve. I see that the harvest has been very bad on your side. For us, it’s very good. Well, it’s better that way, we’re not short of bread.
You asked me to spend a few days at your place for a good hunting trip. If I can go, my dear Adrien, I’ll do everything I can to please you.
Thank you very much.

Hello to your dear parents and Camille

Gaston

Translation note: “What do you want, anything to drag my from the barracks.” is a very strange sentence. It’s strange in the original text too. Partly because his style is not that great, partly because he’s very probably using slang or an expression from that time and that is not very clear nowadays.

Well, not much to say about the card itself. I keep forgetting who Gaston is. A cousin, I think, or a good friend. I think it’s him (which would mean I might have met him in my youth) but he’d only be 13 when he wrote the letter, too young to be in the military.

A great recurring mystery in these cards is Camille‘s identity. She is mentioned in a number of cards, and I’ve never been able to determine who she was. Often, you’d think she was Adrien’s little sister, but my father always told me that Adrien was an only child (if you’re discovering these cards now, read this to understand their origin and context: in a nutshell, Adrien is my grandfather, whom I never met because he died in the 1950s, and these postcards are his correspondance with family and friends).

Another hypothesis that recently occurred to me is that she could be one of my grandfather’s daughters, born of a first marriage? Indeed, he married my grandmother quite late (at around 45 years old) and was clearly single (or could he have been widowed?) at the time of the postcards (1910-1925 approx.). What’s more, I don’t know anything about his youth before the time of the cards.
But this hypothesis opens the door to more unanswered questions. Above all: why wouldn’t my father know about this half-sister? What happened to her? Did she die, too, before Adrien married my grandmother?

It’s also worth noting that some time ago, my cousin did some brief genealogical research (by consulting the town hall registers of my grandfather’s village, where she also lives) and although the tree was incomplete, there was no mention of any Camille.
But if Camille is neither Adrien’s sister nor daughter, who is she? She clearly seems to be part of the family, living with Adrien and his parents.

I’m afraid I’ll never know. The people who might have known the answer are all dead now (and I didn’t think or dare to ask them at the time for fear of upsetting a family secret that would cause trouble or whatever). My father doesn’t know who she is. Maybe I should ask him again? I haven’t spoken to him about these cards in probably ten years, and they say that with age, certain forgotten old memories sometimes come back ????

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