| Paco lived in Montmartre, at the top of what is now Junot Avenue, near the Fontaine du But, just behind the Moulin de la Galette. (...) Paco had a workshop there on the ground floor, cluttered with display cases where his jewelry and vases piled up. (...)
How did Paco survive? Oh! certainly in all honor. But her day was a tissue of secret deprivation. (....)
He had a whole series of sketches by gauguin, some hasty, a few others enriched with this thick watercolor, clogging the paper like a gouache, which makes certain pages of Noa-Noa bright. And then the portrait made by memory, or rather imagination, of his own mother by Gauguin. At that time (I mean around 1920), the truths emerged. And Paco would have easily found a buyer for his drawings and his painting. He didn't think about it yet. (....)
There then existed - it certainly still exists - a Society of Friends of Paul Gauguin. Many of us thought that justice had not been sufficiently done to the reincarnated cacique who represents such an exciting moment in the history of our art. Girieud, Warnod, Paul Jamot, Marcel Guérin, Paco, your servant .... But we had, I believe, no statutes, no meetings, no budget.
However Paco had taken it into his head to affix a commemorative plaque on the birthplace of Gauguin, 56 rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, which would be a real ceramic monument. He would have ensured its composition and execution on condition, of course, that he was provided with the funds necessary for this enterprise. who we? And then, how to put such a machine on a facade which did not leave, so to speak, a free surface once the shutters were deployed? But Paco did not stop at such negligible obstacles. (...) Not a week passed soon, what am I saying, no more days when I did not receive a communication from Paco reproaching me with disillusioned bitterness for my indolence and my impiety.
So that one day, no longer holding it and feeling won by a very painful complex of guilt, I decided that I was all alone, the Friends of Gauguin and that I was going to act accordingly. (....) This plaque, I went there to determine its possible format, I wrote its text, I ordered it, as well as its engraving and its sealing, from a marble worker in Fontainebleau and, finally I paid the note. (....)
Finally the date well and duly fixed, at dawn, by fifteen degrees below zero, the city services brought, very obligingly indeed, a podium-puignol which was placed at the entrance of 56 in full air flow. (....) Between the deaf fingers of the speakers, the sheets trembled, which did not facilitate a speech which, already chattered. (...)
- Well! I say to Paco, everything went as we wanted?
Paco, thoughtful, did not answer me immediately. He nodded. Finally, in his warm and confidential voice, rising from the bottom of his insatiable heart: - Now, we will have to take care of his statue! he says |