Paul Harel

[1] Son of a Saint-Lô lawyer, Paul Harel often skipped school and was apprenticed to the pharmacist of Montreuil-l'Argillé at the age of fourteen, where he sold ointments while learning a little Latin from the local priest.

In the preface to his first collection, Under the Apple Trees, published in 1879, Paul Harel took care to explain why he embraced the profession of hotelier: "My father was a lawyer, my grandfather innkeeper; I took up the job of this one for the sake of the picturesque.

I thought I ought to give this bad example to my contemporaries, at a time when the sons of the earth are deserting their homes, where the life of the ancestors is unknown, if not scorned.

If he has not regretted his choice, it is also a little because for him, "the great secret of everything is in charity", and that the ancestral profession allows him to practice this virtue on a large scale by welcoming to his home the poor, the beggars who pass on the road.Paul Harel was loved in return.

But the splendours of the capital could not make him forget his native country: loving rustic simplicity, he soon resigned his directorial functions to return to Echauffour.