Les Feux de la Nuit

Les "Feux de la Nuit"

A largely part novel located in Beaujolais, chronicle of life in the small village of Soubran "Chiroubles" during the year 1944. The country lives over the round trips of the maquis of the Ardillats, shaking the ordered world of "La Grande Maison".

With a romantic background, we follow the tribulations of the mayor, Tavernier, the grocer Labat, Albert Laurent the manager of the Vasseur house, Roger Talloires, industrialist in Juvisy and the muse Catherine Demouzon. Although freely inspired by the real, they are not without recalling the figures of Chiroubles of that time.

""The bus entered a village at the top of the coast. He stopped at a crossroads that he blocked him entirely with his mass, between houses without sidewalks. She went down. With the same insolent and shy look at the times, the driver held out the suitcase. then showing a portal about twenty meters:
- The Vasseur house, that's it, Mademoiselle!
She thanked with a sign of the head and headed for the grid. The street was steep slope, coated with cow dung…
The grid opened on a large courtyard surrounded by buildings and planted with large lime trees. The "bourgeois house" had a perron sheltered from a marquise and flanked on one side by a column terrace …"

La Villa Cheysson

"But Jean Vasseur was not a fatalistic winemaker. In the afternoon of this August 6, he took his bicycle and ride towards Beaujeu. The weather was magnificent, the splendid view despite a slight mist of heat veiling the distant. The road by Corniche Mont Avenas, along small woods and dry pastures cluttered with rocks and brush where two or three cows paid by a child paid…"

"The villages stood lower, two kilometers as the crow flies below the cornice road. Those of half-mountain first, Chiroubles, Le Truges, Vermont, Saint-Joseph, Régnié. Then those of the last foothills with their tighter vines: Fleurie, Villié-Morgon, Brouilly. Finally, the plains and meadows of Saône took place, to the dark crests emerging from the mist on the horizon."

Soubran-le-haut : This village was that of "Claude Vasseur « remarkable oenologist, this ancestor had saved the Beaujolais vineyard of phylloxera by persuading the winemakers to adopt the transplant on American plants before their total and final ruin »"

The author : Jean Bommart

12/09/1894 - 25/12/1979

Born in Douai (North) in 1894, Jean Bommart - After a year of medicine study and one of law's study in Lille - he was ahead of the call in September 1914 and was brilliantly fighting in artillery (injured in 1916 at the start of the Battle of Verdun ), then in the armored trains. A graduate of the high commercial studies in 1921, he became press secretary and representative of the Havas agency in 1921 and 1922 in Belgrade, journalist, then financial editor.

Remained in hospital for three years due to serious illness, he wrote on the suggestion of Benjamin Crémieux des Nouvelles (1931) of which he took the theme in international intrigues and the stories of espionage which he knew or experienced. In 1932, he won the Prix du Cercle Littéraire with "Le Revenant" and in 1934 that of the adventure novel with "The Chinese fish", where he created the character of Captain Sauvin who reappears in a whole series of volumes of " Dame de Valparaiso "(1938) to" Chinese fish in Tehran "(1974). The "Chinese fish killed Hitler" reached a draw of 296,000 copies.

Jean Bommart

He wrote some forty spy or police novels plus novels such as "La Ronde de jour" and "Les Feux de la nuit" (1947-1948) or "Celui-qui-va-seul" (1955), anticipation novels and two plays, one taken from the "Revenant" and "Blanc et Rouge" (Prix des Escholiers 1936).

Source : Notice Wikipedia - to consult

Jean Bommart lived for a while in Chiroubles as a family stay during the Second War.