They were neighbors in southern Brittany near Quimperle. She and her husband lived in her family mansion called Berluhec that had been seized by the Nazi during the Occupation. They had lost a son and she in particular had been overcome by the war years and by grief. Her husband was imprisoned. Two other children were young teenagers living with their mother in what were formally the servants quarters. After the war her husband returned to his family to find his wife paralyzed with grief, seeking the counsel of priests, succumbing to long periods of weeping. At one very daring moment he Charles gathered up their deceased son’s clothes and memorabilia of any kind collected by or about him, carried it out to a large trash barrel, and burned it all over her desperate screams. She hit him furiously with her fists and finally collapsed. She had never written anything more than a grocery list or a letter. On the advice of a priest she began to write an account of the burning. The work entitled La Brulure, was published, and received a national prize for the best “novel” of 1957.She met Louis Massignon through Catholic literary connections and joined him in several public demonstrations for peace during the Algerian War period. Her husband, as a military officer, was a friend and admirer of their fellow Breton General Beladier, who was the military commander in the French period of the War in Vietnam. It was he who suffered the defeat at Dien Bien Fu, declaring that the war was the inevitable conclusion to French colonialism and could not be won. He was decorated for bringing the war to an end with honor. In many rightest minds he was a traitor to France. He could not understand why the Americans had assumed responsibility for a war that could not be won and then expanded its carnage and unconscionable human suffering throughout Southeast Asia.Yvonne and he became staunch opponents to the development of Nuclear weapons in France and to their proliferation in the world. He was a young highly decorated general with a deep religious devotion to Christ and to compassion for the victims of violence, torture and war. Charles was a skeptic and ironic tease at times,but was tolerant of his wife’s intense religiosity and to the moral integrity and determination of their distinguished neighbor.HWM