LUNCH LITTERAIRE A QUILLAN

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Literary Lunch in Quillan - Sunday 18 April - 11:30am

There will be an opportunity to hear more fascinating insights into the years of Occupation in the Aude and Pyrenees Orientales on Sunday 18 April, when Rosemary Bailey returns to Quillan to give a talk (in English) at Le Brantalou Restaurant at L’Espinet Vacances. She will also be available to sign her books.

Details and reservations: for aperitifs and talk only, 11.30am start (7 euros) or including lunch (25 euros) from tony@lespinet.com or by calling 0468 208888


The lone memorial on the rugged stretch of road between Couiza and Alet-les-Bains puzzles many incomers to the region, not least because of the impossibility of stopping the car to take a look. It honours the memory of Lieutenant Paul Swank who had been parachuted in to aid the Maquis, a week before the liberation of the region in 1944.

The full story of the bravery of this young American serviceman, a promising literature student from Missouri, is included in Rosemary Bailey’s award winning book "Love and War in the Pyrenees – a Story of Courage, Fear and Hope, 1939-1944".

In 2006 Rosemary attended the annual ceremony on August 17 to remember Paul Swank who died during a mission to ambush a German convoy moving supplies out of Couiza. As a result she was invited to the annual reunion of the Maquis of Salvezines in Quillan. Just one example of how her painstaking, patient research unravelled threads of stories from the dwindling number of survivors from those years.

She acknowledges that ‘the black years’ remain a veiled history, much less readily discussed than the ancient Cathars. But recently she senses a thawing in attitude. The new generations, she says, are beginning to lift the veil on the painful, suppressed history of life under the Vichy government.

Rosemary Bailey, who has a home near Mosset in the Pyrenees, is also the author of ‘Life in a Postcard’, an account of her life in a mountain village, ‘Scarlet Ribbons: A Priest with AIDS’, about her brother, Simon Bailey, and ‘The Man who Married a Mountain’ about the 19th century mountaineer Sir Henry Russell-Killough. ‘Love and War in the Pyrenees’, first published in 2008, won the British Guild of Travel Writers Award for best narrative travel book.

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