READERS UNRAVEL PHOTO MYSTERY
That didn’t take long. On Tuesday we published a photo found hidden inside one of the books donated to the Times Colonist Book Sale. Who are these people and what is that thing on the table in front of the woman in the hat, we asked.
The first reply came at 6:41 a.m. Scores of readers, many of French origin, wrote in to identify the “thing” as a delicious, delicate, difficult-to-make pastry tower used in France to celebrate special events — weddings, often, or baptisms.
Most called it a croquembouche or croque-en-bouche — little choux pastry puffs filled with crème pâtissière or custard, piled into a cone or pyramid and held together with caramelized or spun sugar. The same confection is also referred to as a profiterole tower or pièce montée (as legendary Victoria restaurateur Dominique Chapheau called it).
Other readers focused on the rest of the picture.
“My guess is that this is a photo of a wedding in the late ’40s in France,” wrote Martine Goddard. “These assumptions are based on the hairstyle of the lady on the right, the way the window curtains are hung, the fact that the croquembouche is lop-sided, and the traditional apron worn by the waitress.” Reader Lucie Larivière made similar observations.
Then Prof. Ted Walker called from Nanoose Bay. The couple in the photo — the woman in the hat and man in the glasses — were his long-lost colleagues Jeanette and Dick Jeanes from Toronto. They all taught in the French department at Victoria College at the University of Toronto.
The picture must be from Dick and Jeanette’s wedding in Paris, Walker said: “Look at the number of wine bottles.” The distinctive windows — portes fenêtres — were also a clue, as were their coverings. Such window netting was common in postwar France when material for curtains was in short supply, he said.
Then came a call from Victoria’s Marguerite Gayfer, who said it was less of a shock than a pleasant surprise to open Tuesday’s newspaper and see Dick, her late husband, and Jeanette, his first wife, smiling back from their 1948 wedding picture.
Gayfer had been in her native England when a nephew did her a favour and dropped off three boxes of books for this weekend’s sale at the Victoria Curling Club. The photo must have been in one of the books.
Gayfer and Walker filled in the story. Dick Jeanes grew up in Victoria until he was eight or nine, then moved to Toronto with his family. Joined the army during the Second World War and found himself in France when the shooting stopped. Rather than come home, he used his veteran’s benefits to take his PhD at the Sorbonne.
That’s where he met the stylish Parisienne Jeanette Rebeyrolle, a cousin of the controversial French painter Paul Rebeyrolle, in 1947. After their wedding they moved to Laramie, Wyoming, (imagine her culture shock!) where he taught at the university.
In 1953 they moved to Toronto and Victoria College, where she, a gifted linguist and translator, was an instructor and he was a professor of French phonetics and linguistics until his retirement in 1984. Dick played a key role in the development of the first Canadian French-English dictionary. “They were both great colleagues,” Walker said.
Gayfer and her first husband met Dick and Jeanette in 1955 when they all lived in the same Toronto apartment building. The couples were fast friends, even after Gayfer and her husband moved to England. “We used to go on holiday together,” she said.
Dick Jeanes had always wanted to return to Victoria, and that’s where Gayfer and he, having both lost their first spouses, wed in the mid-1990s. They remained married until Jeanes died in 2015 at age 91.
So, there you go, mystery solved. That’s the thing about all those photos that turn up in books. Every picture, every person pictured, has a tale behind it. Walker has one about teaching in Reims, France, in the schoolhouse where Gen. Dwight Eisenhower accepted Germany’s surrender in 1945.
Some of the best stories from the book sale aren’t even on the printed page.