Since their betrothal, the parents had decided to smile, always smile: that is how they would live well.

Claudine Vincenot (1938-2024)
Author of Le maître du bonheur, à mon père Henri Vincenot

“As a matter of fact, in my home I never heard gossip about the neighbors, nor any speaking ill of others. We spoke of others so little that I didn’t even have a notion of their existence except to politely say hello, or to excuse myself in passing in front of them. They were a sort of dull entity for me, to whom I paid little attention, closed as I was in my luminous bubble which had for boundaries the irises, peonies, lilies and walls of the Buissonnets. All there was to do at home gave the outside world little importance. A house full of life, laughter, and corrections, a house which smelled comfortingly of polish, washed laundry, jams on the stove, turpentine and lint oil mixed with cerulean blue, and burnt sienna, and verona green on the painter’s palette. And all of it under the ever-present eye of my mother, whose skin had the golden softness of a ripe peach and the spiced perfume of cloves. It is colors and smells that bring back my childhood home the most for me, that dreamlike home composed of so many different little places, but always deeply rooted in me – its cellar deep down in my gut, its airy attic right at the top of my head. The smell of boxwood, foremost: warmed by the beating March sun, they breathed forth their characteristic, heady, resinous odor. These were the trees that furnished the Dijonnais with the palms for Palm Sunday. My mother decorated ours by hanging little figurines made of bread with white and pink spiced icing. In our Sunday best, and proud as peacocks, we would leave for Mass in Saint-Bénigne in an innocent and joyous family procession along the path parallel to the railroad and we would pass near the Chartreux where my father used to bring us to admire the Well of Moses. What he sculpted upon returning home was the echo of what we had seen, and this circulation of life between our home and the sacred or historic places encouraged us, covertly, to think that we were part of an enormous world.”

Claudine Vincenot (1938-2024)
Author of Le maître du bonheur, à mon père Henri Vincenot