#15103, Edmond GRIOTTERAY

Edmond was a small, plumpish, energetic man with an authoritarian yet fun-loving nature, fiercely loyal to his country.  His father raised him that way: a few years before birth, Alsace-Lorraine had been annexed by Germany in 1871 following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war.  It was a bitter blow for Edmond's family and their fellow patriots.  Neither he nor his father were ever to acknowledge Alsace's changed legal status, and there was much rejoicing when the area was joined once more to France under the Treaty of Versailles.

Edmond traced his Savoie ancestors back to Jean Baptiste Griotteray whose French naturalisation papers had been signed by Louis XV, 'Roi de France et de Navarre' and by the French regent, le Duc d'Orleans in 1716.  During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Griotterays prospered, serving as lawyers, judges, mayors and merchants in the small alpine community.  In 1832 Edmond's father, Thelcide Constantin, moved to Paris, looking for a more interesting lifestyle.  In 1848 Thelcide is recorded as working as a chemical engineering merchant in Paris, then a highly unusual professional occupation.

It was around this time that he fell in love with Rosalie Weiler, the Swiss-born daughter of a Geneva banker whose beauty and energetic, enterprising personality endeared her to everyone she met.  Thelcide and Rosalie went on to marry and have three children.  The eldest, Julie worked alongside her brother in his chemical engineering business, their son, Marcel served in the First World War and was killed at Verdun in 1916 and Edmond chose to study architectural interior design at the Ecole Boulles in Paris, where, according to Alain, he met Auguste Rodin who was particularly generous to his students.