Edmond Spalikowski (1874-1951)

Edmond Spalikowski was born in Rouen on June 1, 1874. He was the fifth child of François Spalikowski, a painter born in Poland in 1835, and Aline Andrzej-Kowicz, born in 1843. The couple married in Caudebec-en-Caux in 1867.

The young Edmond was a student at the Petit Séminaire du Mont-aux-Malades and Lycée Corneille. Health reasons prevented him from becoming a doctor. He joined pacifist organizations in which he was active.

Edmond Spalikowski wrote, drew and published a great deal: he was a journalist, columnist, cartoonist, poet, art historian, anthropologist, an author of manuscripts and watercolour drawings, and a lecturer.  Normandy is the backbone of his fruitful work.

With another local scholar, Mr. Georges Cavé, a justice of peace, he wrote a work on Grugny which includes a long chapter on the departmental asylum.

In Grugny, he was the bursar in charge of the management of stocks. Considerable sums were at stake. He carried out his duties with seriousness and competence, but his heart was often broken by the condition of the people welcomed.

His friend Camille Robert Désert recounts:

"The leisure left to him by his duties as bursar at the Departmental Establishment of Grugny, he devoted it to visiting the boarders, disinherited of fortune and health, on whose fate he looked with affection, to the arrangements to be taken to provide them with as pleasant and salutary a material existence as possible, to the supervision of the farm and the supervision of the accounts"

 Testimony of Spalikowski himself

Grugny, a sad village with a sad Welfare Establishment, where I spent the saddest years of my life! I will never forget the morose barracks and joyless jail where I brushed against other administrative prisoners, most often trying to make the incarceration of inmates even more painful by their bad understanding, their impotent rages and their narrow-mindedness.

I was there first under a director with a big heart, Mr. Dequen, whose name everyone pronounces only with respect, then under another fierce and narrow-minded one.

I suffered for three years from all my sensitivity as a poet in absorbing and poorly paid positions. But what would the money have been worth even without the free expansion of oneself? And I come out of it with a comfortable heart, happy to have broken my chain of servitude, very happy also that the burden of it has earned me a few thousand francs of pension, which has made me curse this hell a little less, from which comes the endless complaint of those whom fate is riveted by necessity and the hope of a retirement.

Edmond Spalikowski.

 Across Normandy   (Library of Rouen. Volume II. M 5557/2)