Pleasance, ô Plaisance

                                                                                        " One is not born by chance
                                                                                                  somewhere,
                                                                                                  To be born in Plaisance
                                                                                                   is a chance "
 

           Pleasance, the village  I like. Of course, I was born there one cold night in winter  1948 after the war, baby of the baby-boom. I spent my childhood, my adolescence there, how not to like this village where I often return exiled that I am in the North... in Bordeaux

            Lots of places haunt my memory,
they have often haunted my dreams, they still haunt them, I always return to Plaisance, I am on the Church place, I fly over "the Rue des Pyrénees", I am in the church
The church?
 I was an altar there, Blessed be the Lord, tasting the communion wine, confessing my first sins. I also collected money at the end of wedding ceremonies, earning my first Francs. I accompanied the deceased to the cemetery , I saw them as they were buried into a large hole which smellt of fresh earth and the child  I was, observed, already almost indifferent. And after the burial, quickly I walked back to my classroom opposite the cemetery

           At the age of nine, I had, so to speak,already buried many dead people, celebrated many marriages and burials . Life it was. The church,
baroque in my childhood, overloaded with gildings at the time of a priest  from the Aveyron with his rocky accent, then stripped by his successor,  a fan of
 Vatican II ,the church, now, famous by its organ, built by two " immigrants ". Beautiful organs with radiant, imposing sounds in the chorus, with  dark gates however. The colorist that I am regret it sometimes, because I am also a painter . I like colour, the colours made of lights, the juice of the sun. Imagine the world in black and white, how awful !
 

   In this church built on the model of the first church of Lourdes, by the same architect, I was baptized, I was confirmed, I sang Tantum ergo and smelt  the incense  around black and purple draped coffins , I often answered " And cum spiritu tuo " to  " Dominus vobiscum ".

           Most terrible, theVespers  offices on Sunday afternoon at 15. I lost 20 minutes of the rugby match at the other end of the village to serve the office and I ran out of breath towards the stadium after the service not to lose a "crumb "of a spectacle, this one  more virile.