the stories of the Winter Town villas told again

CFor eight years he has been accumulating documents on the 350 villas in the historic and prestigious district of Arcachon, that of the Winter Town. It is true that Claude Leroy knows it by heart. He grew up there and still lives there. This retired teacher is passionate about local history, and has taken on a colossal task: cataloging the history of each of these villas and those who lived there. The result of this work is nearly 10,000 pages of archives and information, gleaned from everywhere, particularly by searching the Internet.

A mountain of papers and knowledge, which had to be summarized to make these stories of the villas in this district of Arcachon public and digestible. After “Between art and architecture, the winter city of Arcachon”, released in 2022 and which presented 54 villas, the second volume, “En Ville d’Hiver d’Arcachon”, has just been published and can make a nice Christmas gift. Also published by Éditions de l'Entre-deux-Mers (25 euros), it presents 59 new villas. Each is accompanied by a short text and above all by a careful and realistic watercolor by Maurice Bénitah. The watercolor style perfectly suits the charm of these elegant 19th century houses.^e century and early 20th^eoften built on behalf of the Compagnie des chemins de fer du Midi or Émile Pereire.

Personalities

They were inhabited by all the high society of the time: barons and baronesses, dukes and duchesses, counts and countesses and even a king of Spain and a royal princess, but also a president of the Council, ministers and their wives, traders, writers, journalists, doctors, artists, musicians or composers, and many others. This succession of names and qualities of the owners and tenants of these villas between 1865 and 1925 could have been boring if Claude Leroy did not provide sometimes tasty anecdotes. “We can't imagine how many interesting people have stayed or lived in the Winter Town,” he says.

“We cannot imagine the number of interesting characters who have stayed or lived in the Winter Town”

Villas which first of all bear names that are evocative, poetic, baroque, surprising, exotic, and often misleading since Alexandre Dumas never came, for example, to the eponymous villa. Then and above all they saw a large number of personalities pass by. Villa Val-Clair was that of the creator of the Raleigh cycles and the Bowden cable, an English citizen who regained his health in Arcachon and had a decisive importance in the history of cycling. The Shéhérazade villa had as tenant an abbot who invented the fire extinguisher after witnessing the fire in the Toctoucau forest in 1900. As for Villa San Antonio, it housed James Fowler who developed the ancestor of the paddle.

Maladies

Villa Croisette, built in 1882, is named after Sophie Croisette, the daughter a French dancer is said to have had with Tsar Nicholas I^is. Sarah Bernhardt would have gone to visit him and Camille Jullian lived there too. The Trocadero villa was the scene of a conflict between a Bordeaux liquor owner and a United States consul who did not pay his rent. Louis Feuillade, artistic director of Gaumont, lived in Villa Pasteur and filmed five documentaries in 1908 which are the first animated images of the Arcachon basin. Villa Irancy served as a setting for the escapades of a Minister of the Interior who had installed his mistress there. As for Marie Tarbes (villa Les Oiselets), she received the Medal of the Righteous for having saved Jews during the Second World War. And then, a specialist in oil research settled in Villa Coulaine in 1914 hoping to find black gold in the region… without success, but his inspiration was good since oil gushed out years later.

We cannot be complete without mentioning many painful stories linked to these villas since many sick people stayed there, as in Sylvabelle, intended to receive tuberculosis patients. Villa Tipperary, a mother shot herself in the temple alongside her daughter, her fourth child, whom she had just lost. The sailor and scholar Camille Papin Tissot, the inventor of the first wireless communication in France, died in the Villa Régine following a pulmonary illness. This is the case with history, populated by more or less tragic destinies.

The book can be found at the Arcachon general bookstore, but also at La Teste and Cultura. Claude Leroy also created a website, Izi travel Arcachon, which focuses on 40 villas: their stories, their names and those who settled there.