Jean-François Pagès was born in 1943, in Castenaudary, and spent his entire childhood in Plaine, a small village in Aude, where his parents ran the grocery store-café. He wrote “Plaine et moi” and “In the claws of Lucifer” with the desire to leave to his children and grandchildren a little privileged corner of his life, his first carefree and turbulent years in the village, then the discovery of harsh conditions of confinement in a priests’ boarding school. In a nervous, rapid style tinged with humor, the author takes us back to rural life in the 1950s, punctuated by white bottoms and red bottoms. Indeed, if the teacher rigorously prepares his students for the school certificate, the church and its celebrations regulate the daily lives of the villagers. Little Jean-François, a good student but troublemaker, will have to leave his adored mother to her devotions and his father to his passions for hunting and fishing to enter college where children are only given time to pray, to work, to pray. , to work again and again… Five long years at the end of which he did not become a priest but a professor of classics. “In the Claws of Lucifer”, several incidents attributed to “the hooked hand” punctuate little Jean-François’s first year of boarding school; they are so many anecdotes about the harsh living conditions in these institutions and the nostalgia of childhood pampered in the village.
The books are available in the press section of Carrefour Contact, in Saint-Étienne-de-Tulmont, and on deposit at the Yohann Services hardware store.
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