LEarly morning coffee spent chatting with friends at Chez Gigi, it's over. Three months since the emblematic tobacco bar in the town of Saint-Angeau, in Val-de-Bonnieure, closed its doors. A bad fall was all that was needed to force Ghislaine Plissonneau, 95, to hang up her gloves on August 6. “I opened six days a week,” says Gigi, who took over the old hotel-restaurant in 1962 and still lives in the house behind the bar.
Sixty-two years behind the counter is not that common. An institution. It's no coincidence that its reel is displayed as a poster inside. “A gift from the tobacconists of France: she is the oldest tobacconist in the country and a mascot for Saint-Angeau, known for miles around,” smiles Aurélien Debouchaud, her grandson, who, with his sister Glwadys, their cousin Bruno, his partner and his parents, take turns taking care of their grandmother.
“My customers were like my family. »
The years have not softened his strong character. But you shouldn't count on Gigi to tell the story. “It doesn’t have to last long, I’m not a freak!” says the nonagenarian, her eyes darting. I'm a direct person, there are no surprises with me. »It makes his grandchildren laugh. “With us, she was always gentler. But without this character, she would not have come this far, admits, admiringly, Aurélien Debouchaud. She still ran the establishment alone all these years while raising two children. »
“With someone from time to time to do the dishes,” adds Gigi, whose four hotel rooms housed sales representatives until the 1980s. Since 2004, all that remained was the bar and the office. tobacco. “If I stayed on my sofa, I wouldn't see as many people,” Gigi told CL in 2009. A lot of people were there, locals, truckers, footballers from the Saint-Angeau club… “I put on the team scores on the board,” says Gigi, who has long delighted her customers with her coq au vin, her cagouilles or her snacks cut from the loaf.
Even after the restaurant closed, its tables were available for people coming with their picnic. “The garbage collectors still stopped at 9 a.m. every Wednesday before I closed,” says Gigi, who hosted a number of tavern evenings and only closed on Sunday afternoons… to go to the tea dances at La Cigale in Chenon.
A hell of a number
No need to ask him about his best memories. “I took everything, everything was good! », says Gigi, originally from Vendée, who worked for several years as a saleswoman at the Saint-Simon store in Angoulême before buying the old Saint-Angeau post house. “When you’re young, you want to create something.” His worst memory? “Having closed,” she replies straight away.
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“The closure was sudden, many customers are still knocking on the door, their children or grandchildren offering small gifts. The hairdressers come to do her styling at home, says Aurélien Debouchaud. We are doing everything so that she can stay at home as long as possible. » Inside the bar, only the packs of cigarettes have disappeared from the shelves. Time has stood still on the bottles of whiskey and Malibu, still above the counter, next to a Suze collector's clock. “She was probably one of the last to offer coffee from an electric coffee maker,” laughs her grandson. The first gulp could be intense! »
Still, a lot of people are missing him in Saint-Angeau. “No longer having a friendly place to meet in the morning around a coffee, it creates a void,” confides Marie Artaud, who runs the Les Gourmandises grocery store, opposite the tobacco bar. Since his arrival in Saint-Angeau in 1998, Gigi's neighbor had never seen it close except on Sunday afternoons. “We had a good laugh. Gigi is quite an act, some of them were sent to the wall,” admits Alain Starosta, who went there for coffee every morning. By buying a pack of cigarettes which he left behind. “It forced me to come back and smoke a cigarette. That way, I smoked less! »
Business for sale
Seeing the Saint-Angeau tobacco bar reopen is the dream of Gigi and her grandchildren, who have just put the business and its IV license up for sale. “The last one in the town, we don’t want her to go elsewhere,” confides Aurélien Debouchaud, one of Gigi’s grandsons. Here there is everything, two grocery stores, a restaurant, a health center, a pharmacy… We want a tobacco bar to be able to revive in the town. »
