Stèle et square à la mémoire de René Guy Cadou

A local poet Born in Sainte-Reine-de-Bretagne in 1920, René Guy Cadou (1920-1951) died at the age of 31 in Louisfert. Close to Pierre Reverdy and Max Jacob, he was the creator of the poetic movement known as the École de Rochefort (Rochefort sur Loire, between the Loire and Layon rivers). As a young man, the poet was appointed substitute teacher in the small town of Bourgneuf-en-Retz in 1941. He did some substitute teaching, and spent some time at the village school. It was during this time that he boarded at the Chiffoleau parents' hotel, La Boule d'Or. It was there that he met their son Sylvain, a fellow student at the Lycée Clemenceau in Nantes, who became his friend and later his publisher. This was the beginning of his strolls through the Pays de Retz. René-Guy Cadou, often accompanied by his friends, discovered the Breton marshes, the Bay of Bourgneuf and the port of Collet. René Guy Cadou has a great love of nature. His descriptions of the countryside in his poems are very close to his own. It was above all his wife, Hélène Laurent (1922-2014), who permanently attached him to the area. It was on June 17, 1943, that René Guy met the young woman at the Clisson train station. The two lovers fell under each other?s spell and began a long correspondence. She introduced him to her childhood village, La Bernerie-en-Retz, where they spent their vacations. Even as a child, René Guy Cadou spent his vacations on the Côte de Jade, in Pornic, in the house of the gardener de Monval, which his paternal grandmother rented out in the summer. A tribute to the initiative of his poet friends His death from cancer in 1951, at the height of his fame, caused quite a stir in the Pays de Retz. It was too short a life for a man whose poetry combined themes linked to nature, fraternity and love, but also to death. His poetic style, out of fashion for a man who fiercely refused to go to Paris, left a lasting impression on his contemporaries. His poet friends had the idea of erecting this small monument in his memory. The stele is made of granite stone in the shape of a menhir. The stone is carved with the poet's bronze medallion. By municipal decision of February 1964, the square in which it was installed (in 1971) also bears his name. This small garden, surrounded by low-lying houses, is close to the former Hôtel de la Gare, where he first stayed, before the hospitality of his friend Sylvain Chiffoleau's parents.