Adolphe-Julien Fouré, known as Abbé Fouré French nationality Born in Saint-Thual on March 7th, 1839 Dies in Rothéneuf on February 10th, 1910

"In the last ten years, I have become hard of hearing in order to isolate myself from the world. One day I became totally deaf, I was told that times had changed. I have retired here. I help out on Sundays at the parish, an old curator of a young priest. But this is not enough activity, and I have to keep myself busy. So I thought of going to the edge of the cliffs to talk to the ocean, my old friend. I cannot hear others anymore but I can hear the waves. And I begun to sculpt the stone on a daily basis." (Louis De la Noé, "L'Ermite de Haute-Folie", L'Eclair, Paris, August 28th, 1905.)

Suffering from paralysis, Abbé Fouré is forced to retire at the age of fifty-four. He moves to Rothéneuf, near Saint-Malo. Living in isolation, he starts decorating his house with wooden sculptures, a house he baptizes "High Madness". For the next decades, he sculpts the cliffs, of which emerge figures, animals, monsters that he connects to the Rothéneuf family, corsairs at the end of the 17th century. His only tools are a simple chisel and a big hammer.

Originally, his three hundred figures were polychrome, with inscriptions used to identify each one of them, La Haie, La Goule (The Ghoul), le Grand et le Petit Chevreuil (The Big and the Small Roebuck), Bas-Plat, L'Ours (The Bear), etc. The rain, the wind and the sun have erased the colors.

SEE ALSO: PREVOST (Claude), PREVOST (Clovis). Les Bâtisseurs de l'Imaginaire, Editions de l'Est, 1990.

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