Familie LePechon
One of the great pleasures in my life is knowing this amazing family. When I went on the Experiment in International Living in 1965, I stayed with the Schmid family in Vocklabruck Austria, whom I respected and admired. It has been a lifelong joy to keep up with two Austrian “sisters.” In 2015, Lilli, Violet and I visited Christl Matousek in Vienna. This year, fifty-seven years after our first meeting, Edith LePechon and her family continue to provide a warm welcome to old friends.
In 1965 Edith and I both had serious boyfriends. Steve and I married in June 1966; Edith and Guy LePechon, in January 1967. When we saw them in Paris that summer, she was pregnant with Marc. Twenty-seven years later, we attended Marc’s wedding to Valerie in Dahouët, France, where Guy’s family has long had a home and a boat.
Marc’s sister, Francine, stayed with us for six weeks in the summer of 1989. The photo below shows her in New York City with Marc, who was in graduate business school there. After we all got Lilli settled at the University of Virginia in August, Shelby and I took Francine to New York to connect with my brother Harry, her brother Marc, and the Collins cousins who came in from Glastonbury CT. We saw “Into the Woods” by Stephen Sondheim and two other plays on Broadway before Francine returned to Paris. Marc visited us in Arlington that December.
Francine and Pierre-Yves Joubert married in 1997. Francine is an intellectual property lawyer; Pierre-Yves is a Professor of Electronics Management at Université Paris–Saclay. They have four children: Thomas, 22; Aline, 15; and twins Laure and Elsa, 10. They all speak English fluently. Lil and I had been studying French on DuoLingo, but hardly needed it. Lilli and Francine got their daughters together at the City of Science and Industry, the first day we were in Paris.
On Friday 8 July, Guy hosted a glorious reunion dinner at Brasserie Balzar. The photo at the top shows all of us but Guy and me. Two surprises were Clément LePechon, the son of Stefane, whom our son David stayed with in August 1990, and Ella Halley, an exchange student from Quincy MA, who had just arrived that day. Her arrival was a perfect example of continuing the “experiment in international living” that the Schmids and I began in 1965. Special thanks to Marc, who drove two hours from his home in Auxerre for the dinner. We missed seeing Marc’s wife Valerie, his daughter Marie, his brother Stefane, and his nephew Thomas, whom we enjoyed seeing in 2016.
On Sunday 10 July, we took a 20-minute train ride to Sceaux, where both the LePechons and the Jouberts live. All the LePechon and Joubert children have attended school there. Sceaux is a historic city with a population of 20,000 in the southern suburbs, about 10 km from the centre of Paris. Their daughters, Elsa and Laure, had already departed for Dahouët with Edith and Guy, so there were three Jouberts, four Smiths, and one Ella Halley from Massachusetts. Francine and Pierre-Yves had a lovely lunch ready for us in their beautiful garden. We had fun looking through Francine’s scrapbook from her 1989 stay with us and making music at their piano with Aline on trombone.
The eight of us then embarked on a long walk past Edith and Guy’s house and into the Parc de Sceaux. Sceaux castle was originally built by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the minister of finance to Louis XIV. In the first decades of the eighteenth century it hosted a glittering salon. The present-day château, rebuilt between 1856 and 1862 in a Louis XIII style, is now the museum of Île-de-France. To us, this park was preferable to the crowds at Versailles. It was a beautiful day and we walked and walked, observing sparkling fountains and many happy people at play, and enjoying delicious scoops of ice cream.
Click here for an album of photos we have of this lovely family and look for more posts about the wonders we saw in Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Heartfelt thanks to all the LePechons and Jouberts for showing us such a wonderful time in Paris and Sceaux. We’re so glad to see our experiment continue into a third generation. We look forward to hosting you soon in the United States!
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