Edmond Spalikowski (1874-1951)

Edmond Spalikowski was born in Rouen on the 1st of June 1874. He was the fifth child of François Spalikowski, a painter born in Poland in 1835, and of Aline Andrzej-Kowicz, born in 1843. The couple married in Caudebec-en-Caux in 1867. Young Edmond was a student at the Mont-aux-Malades Junior Seminary and then at the Lycée Corneille. Health issues prevented him from becoming a doctor. He joined and campaigned for pacifist organisations.

The war was a painful period during which he practised medicine in difficult conditions. Nevertheless, he obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Literature at this time. After the war he was at one point an economist at the Grugny Institution before becoming a professor at the Mont-Cauvaire College of Normandy from 1921 to 1934. From 1930 to 1940 and from 1946 until his death in 1951 he lived in Clères in his little house nicknamed ‘Les Friquets’ (tree sparrows), a tiny house cluttered with books, drawings, documentation and more, and which was surrounded by a little garden. He adored this modest property and wrote numerous descriptions of it.

During the German occupation he found refuge in Argèles-Gazost ( Upper-Pyrenees). During this time of exile he produced a large number of drawings and manuscripts. He had given his house keys to the mayor so as to possibly house refugees fleeing the the bombings of cities.

When he returned to Clères a woman from Le Havre and her children were living in his home. After a six-month legal battle he retrieved his house but “the walls are indescribably filthy, the floors smashed up, the doors falling apart, most of the furniture had been used for fire-wood, the piano is in pieces...”

(conference given by Gabriell Sueur at the Normandy Book Salon on November 30th 2002 : Edmond Spalikowski).

In February 1950 he was made a Knight of the Légion d’Honneur.

Edmond Spalikowski died in Clères on August 3rd 1951 aged 77. He is buried in the communal cemetery.

On April 19th 1953 a medallion, created by the sculptor Richard Dufour, was placed on one of the gables of the Clères market-hall. This is in homage to the writer from the Society of Normandy Writers of which he was a longtime president.

His wife, Marie (born Leclanché), steadfastly gave him her support, her presence and her help so as to facilitate his work. Their love survived all of life’s ordeals and those of the famous Edmond Spalikowski, even in his final years. She died in Clères on September 7th 1955 and is buried next to him. The couple had no children. The couple had the constant help of an exceptional woman, their servant Marguerite, an orphan, who, from the age of 15, worked for them until their deaths and even beyond as she continued to lay flowers on their graves until her own death in 1964. Her grave is near that of the Spalakowskis. Edmond was simultaneously a journalist, a columnist, a drawer, an art historian, a poet, an author of manuscripts, a water-colour artist and a lecturer. Normandy is the background of his prolific body of work. Together with Mr George Cave, a justice of the peace and another local scholar, Edmond wrote a work about the departmental institution in Grugny.

His friends affectionately called him ‘Spali’.

He was a member of the Rouen Academy of Science, Fine Arts and Literature and of the Departmental Antiques Commission (CDA).

(Portrait - My comrade and friend Edmond Spalikowski. E. Cariat 1932)

A portrait of Mr Edmond Spalikowski in his modest office-library in ‘Les Friquets’, Clères,

surrounded by his books and paintings; oil painting (64 by 54 cm),

offered to the Rouen library by his wife Mme Marie Spalikowski in 1956.

“In the meantime so many famous people have come to the modest little house,great writers, scientists, artists, novelists or poets, painters, sculptors and scholars. Their names will fill a memorial, which will not be the least ornament in the studio; a studio upholstered with books, paintings, drawings and engravings where I received these guests in front of my table loaded with papers and brochures, overflowing with projects, drafts, sketches and manuscripts between boxes bursting with hugely diverse volumes and the piano bearing the weight of knick-knacks and the latest publications, still wet with China ink or glue”.