The portrait
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Shy and reserved, the business owner has been at the helm of the family bakery since the sudden death of her parents twenty-two years ago.
She says. That the day after her parents died in 2002 in a helicopter crash off the coast of Cancale (Ille-et-Vilaine), she decided to take over the company – she was 18 years old and had 110 people under her command. She says. That she had always been a reasonable young girl. She says. That the issue of mourning remains difficult to address, but that we will come back to it. She says. That the sourdough used in Poilâne breads, which gives them that very particular sour taste, comes from the same strain, 92 years old; a sourdough «chef», already used by her grandfather Pierre, who had opened his shop in 1932 at 8 rue du Cherche-Midi, in Paris (VIe), where we meet. She says all this, therefore, but in a thin, trembling, almost broken voice. We strain our ears, the microphone; we would like to amplify all the sounds on these fragments of life but it is all the more difficult because outside, a deluge is falling. Then, depending on the downpours, a theater of intimacy opens and closes on our conversation; we move forward, groping. Apollonia Poilâne’s shyness is indomitable.
Three “punishments” later, named after the house’s butter shortbread, we know that her birth already has something romantic about it. Apollonia’s mother, Irena Bozena Ustjanowski, a gallery owner and jewelry designer born in Poland, lived between France and the United States in the early 1980s. She gave birth in New York a little early; the father was then at the stove on rue du Cherche-Midi. It was he who said
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