Of love of words and country
Pure reflections of their contrasting lands, the writers of Gers often have two loves: their country and words. Joseph de Pesquidoux is the best representative. His name has been forgotten and yet is immortal. Elected to the French Academy in 1936, he is also the inventor of the plantation of vines in line. Poet(Premiers verses), playwright(Ramsès or Le sang fatal ), he forges his pen in the colors of his land that he praises(Chez nous : travaux et jeux rustiques, Pour la terre or Gascogne). He does not deny himself any lyrical flights of fancy to signify his attachment to the land: " A field that falls fallow is a portion of France that dies An observation that the writer and herbalist Maurice Mességué (1921-2017) would not deny. Author of the book C'est la nature qui a raison, this former mayor of Fleurance did a lot for the diffusion of phytotherapy in France. He is also one of the first to have sounded the alarm on the presence of pollutants in food. Your daily poison was published in 1964.
Various fields
Raymond de Lacvivier (1852-1930) had only one love: Catalan. An ardent defender of this language, which he learned from his mother but also from his maternal grandmother, he was born in Fleurance in 1852. In his veins flowed the same ardor as his ancestors, knights and counts, both Gascon and Languedoc. Notary, writer, landowner and reserve officer, he created with others La Revue catalane, a publication aiming at promoting science, but also literature and arts. Murdered in 1930 in his property in Elne, he died without ever having seen the Catalan dictionary he dreamed of... At the other end of the political spectrum, Joseph Noulens (1828-1898), a vigorous writer driven by an anarchist spirit, opposed the coup d'état of Napoleon III in the magazine Le Suffrage universel. This led to his arrest and deportation to Algeria. On his return, he published collections of poems and became interested in heraldry and the genealogy of the great Gascon families. At the end of his life, he returned to his mother tongue by publishing a collection of poems in Gascon: Flahuto gascouno (Gascon Flute). This language, Alcée Durrieux (1819-1901) honors it through his Belhados de Leytouro(Lectoure evenings) or his Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue gasconne. Closer to us, the astrophysicist and poet Michel Cassé (1943-), devoted his work to the relations between the universe and man. This Florentine author wonders in Les Trous noirs en pleine lumière if it is possible to calculate the brightness. François Darnaudet (1959-) also uses chiaroscuro in detective stories and fantasy novels as black as ink. A prolific writer, he divides his work between paper books and original works published digitally.
