From Eaux-Bonnes to Tehran: the story of two sisters who left the Ossau valley for love in the 1950s told in a novel

The story is true though René Arripe wrote a novel about him. With 17 works to his credit, most of them historical, the expert in the traditions and history of the peoples of the Ossau valley could not miss this program, despite a great limitation. “I didn’t get permission from the “Persanes d’Ossau” family, because the descendants are always afraid of Iran‘s revenge,” explained the 77-year-old writer. So the first and last names of people were changed in the novel, which was published in September.

As in any good story of love and adventure, there is a bit of geopolitics, history and mystery in this story that begins in the snowy Pyrenees in 1950 with the unlikely meeting on the ski slopes of Gourette between captains in the shah’s army from Iran, Kouros, who came for paratrooper training in Pau, and Juliette, an 18-year-old girl from Eaux-Bonnes. Love at first sight is instant.

Then a hairdresser, Juliette aims to be a young person in a big fashion house, in Pau, living with her aunt. He is a career soldier, an officer in the Iranian army. Three months later, despite the scandal and the displeasure of Ossaloise’s parents, the wedding took place in the mountain town. The future Shiite groom must be converted to Catholicism a few hours before the ceremony.

The couple left the valley of Ossau, heading for Le Bourget, where at the time there was only one plane a week allowing them to fly to Tehran. “Tehran was further away than it is today,” the writer laughed.

From Ossau to the East

A few months later, the union between the other sister, Jeannette, and Kouros’ brother, Navid, was arranged by sending pictures and letters. The younger one then goes to Iran, where she will get married in Mashhad.

The sisters’ parents are devastated: they have now lost both of their children. The author admits his interest in these daring girls: “It must be recognized that they were very dishonest girls for the time and place. Among those people from Ossau who are very attached to their land​​​​, they turn out to be global spies who go to a completely foreign country.”

The fairy tale goes a little off track after that: death and illness lurk and the Iranian revolution in 1979 forces the two career soldiers, who had been part of the Shah’s guard for a time, went into exile with his wife and family.

The writer drew inspiration from the memories of the daughter of one of the two sisters, who is now 73, to write the work. “For two years, we called in the evening: I would ask her questions and she would tell me the story of her family the next day. He finally goes to meet her. “She received me as an Iranian, a warm welcome, she shouted a lot and showed me a lot of pictures of the family. Unfortunately I could not integrate them into the work. »

In particular, she tells him delicious news about the couple’s Iranian family. Before 1920, the father left in a car from Iran to look for precious stones in Russia, returning in the same way to Mashhad and returning to sell his jewels in Austria, accompanied by a translator.

Fact and fiction mixed together

If in the novel he delights in the extraordinary life of his characters, the native of Aas sometimes draws on the local history of the Béarnaise valleys. Drawing on threads of fiction, he begins his story a hundred years before the love story of the sisters, with the story, this time entirely imagined, of the migration of their ancestors. If their ancestors really came from the forgotten Ouzom valley, he creates coal quarries for them in the Baburet iron mine and then tells how they left for Eaux-Bonnes after the violent closure of the mines in 1866.

Under the leadership of Empress Eugénie, the spa village then welcomed around 5,000 spa guests throughout the year, including a good number of people from high society. Russian nobles, diplomats from South America, colonels, military officers… René Arripe plunges his two characters into another world, a whirlwind of “little Paris” that is different from the rural life of the time. After these exiles from valley to valley, the descendants of the charcoal burner and his wife go on a much further journey.

« The Persians in Ossau »René Arripe, self-published, 20 euros, available on Cairn.