Philippe Bassuet
14 Juin 1949 - 12 Novembre 2023

Philippe was born in Loudun on June 14, 1949, located in the North of the Nouvelle Aquitaine region, South of the Loire Valley, 320 km from Paris. The area is famous for its easy drinking red wines such as Saumus, Bourgueil, and Chinon which supplies many of the French bistrots. Loudun is also famous for its horrific events, which have built the public's perception of the region, and fueled Philippe's imagination growing up as a child. 
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Loudun, in 1634, was the stage of the famous execution of priest Urbain Grandier, as thoroughly recounted by writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley in The Devils of Loudun, who was accused of summoning evil spirits and bewitching the nuns of the Ursuline Covent. The event became a national controversy and one of the first example of witch hunt and mass-hysteria.   
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Following the post-war desolation period, Loudun was also the home of Marie Besnard, the alleged arsenic serial killer, who was accused of murdering 12 of her family members, in order to enrich herself. She was acquitted on the grounds that the soils surrounding the coffins in the Loudun cemetery naturally contained arsenic, which could have contaminated the victims' s corps after their death, hence releasing her of a possible incrimination. She spent the rest of her life free and enjoying her wealth and fame, after a highly mediatized 15-year long trial. Philippe's parents crossed paths with Marie Besnard, and often told tales of civilians being terrified of her presence and sometime bowing in the streets for her mercy.
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The first years of his life, Philippe grew-up in a backward sinister farming country, where he found amusement in the hundred rumors and gossips of the region, crossing fences looking for hidden treasures, fishing, and fleeing the authority of her mother and dysfunctional parent's relationship.
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He was the son of Marie-Louise and René Bassuet. Marie-Louise decided to move to Loudun to distance René from his busy post-war Paris life-style. Philippe used to speak fondly of his father, and had the feeling that he missed opportunities to engage more with him because of the incessant criticisms of his mother against her husband.
 
At the time of Philippe's childhood, René had come back from the war as a broken man. Before the war, René was in the aluminum industry. He was married to Simone Del Duca, whom he dearly loved, and the couple enjoyed navigating the Parisian elite circles. During the war he was captured as a soldier, and sent to the German camps. During his encampment, Simone wrote she fell in love with his best friend Cino Del Duca, owner of a prominent publishing company, whom he had charged to protect Simone during his absence. Enraged by the news, he led a group evasion from the camp to come back to Paris to straighten his couple situation. Now listed by the Germans as a dangerous individual for leading a major evasion, he got re-captured, and sent to the death camps of Rawa Ruska in Poland, as a high-risk prisoner. There he experienced the horror of the camps, the death of many of his compatriots, but survived, as he recalled, because of his smaller physical stature. Later, towards the end of his life, he began to lose his mind, and would regularly escape his home, like he did from the camps. Philippe also recounted that his father thought that life after the camps was a form of bonus that he did not expect, which gave him a sense of detachment and humor about the torments of his new life. While having survived the horror of the camps, René had maintained his elegante manners, and fashion from Paris. Philippe naturally adopted his father's manners, and by compassion for him, developed an insatiable desire for liberty. 
 
After the war, René created a champagne distribution company in Paris. It gave him a sense of his old lifestyle and flamboyance, which participated to seduce his second wife Marie-Louise, whom he met at Mimi Pinson Dancing club, on the Champs-Elysées. She was a hard-working widow with two daughters, motivated to get her life back on track. With the financial help of René, they left Loudun to realize her dream to run a hotel restaurant, and acquired La Commanderie on the border of the Loire River in Montsoreau, near Tours. Over the years, her increasingly authoritative and belligerent personality eroded her relationship with René, and pushed Philippe to regularly leave their home to escape the incessant arguing. She, however, had an elevated taste for French cuisine, and the culinary arts, which she transmitted to her son. Her cuisine quickly became famous in the region, featuring classic dishes from the Loire Valley, such as Brochet au Beurre Blanc (Pike), Filets de Marcassins (bore) et de Chevreuil (venison) Sauce Grand Veneur, Ecrevisses à la nage (crayfish), or Asperges Sauce Mousseline (white asperagus). Through his entire life, Philippe would keep his mother hand-written recipes, and augment them with his own. Until his last days, Philippe was still reviewing recipes to advise his son's 2023 Christmas dinner. 
 
Philippe had facilities with mathematics. He joined the Tours University in 1968, towards a bachelor's science degree. Having worked for guests at La Commanderie, he became famous on campus for setting-up parties. The Loire Valley is separated on both sides by limestone cliffs. Easy to carve, and with steady temperature, the stone makes perfect caves for wine preservation, and troglodyte habitations. Philippe and his friends had negotiated access, and at the peak of the wave of American rock music in Europe, and Bossa Nova, they organized regular and well-attended music parties, surrounded by giant wine barrels, singing drinking songs. This is also the time when young Claudine Hoyau joined the University to become a teacher of French literature.  
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Claudine first met Philippe while accompanying his roommate at his apartment to pick him up for a party. One of the only times he had decided to study, Philippe declined pretexting an upcoming exam. It is only two years later that Claudine and Philippe would meet again, on a dance floor, and fall in love.
 
However, Philippe's interest for mathematics did not manifest in diplomas, but rather in prowess at card games. He had become an expert at French Tarot, a game which requires a mind for calculation, strategy, and foresight. With a circle of friends, sitting on the steps of the university, he played for money and would challenge anyone for a game, which would provide him for pocket money to spend at parties, or filling his car trunk with champagne bottles. 
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Claudine grew up in Tourcoing, one of textile capitals of Europe in the early twentieth century. Her mom Rolande had worked as a modiste and hat maker, and her dad as a chief of manufacture in a metal factory. They moved to the Loire Valley when Claudine was 18 years old, after her mom had won the lottery. Her father, Andre Hoyau, was an embodiment of early 20th century France, with unrivaled moral standings. Claudine's parents dearly loved each other, and created an environment of stability, mutual respects, responsibility, and strong ethics. Claudine was the extraverted of the family. She imagined her life through her books, or painting along the riverwalks of the Chenonceau castle, fantasizing about the characters of her readings (Musset, Racine, Flaubert), or dreaming about her life. 
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When she met Philippe, he appeared as a manifestation of her readings. He immediately reminded her of the actor Gérard Philipe interpreting Julien Sorel in Stendhal's famous novel Le Rouge et le Noir, one of her favorite novels. His physic, allure, and manners stood out from any real person she had ever met. Claudine became a muse and a North star for Philippe, while Philippe created the whimsical unpredictable universe that Claudine would welcome in her solid up-bringing. From that point on, Claudine and Philippe would become un-separable partners until Philippe's passing in 2023.
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Philippe had to leave for his military service in 1970, where he worked in encryption and code messages. Philippe's parents offered the young couple to renovate and run a hotel restaurant they had just acquired in Tours after the sell of Montsoreau. Immediately after, he worked for a short time as an extra at the Grand Cercle in Tours, a high-class restaurant and gambling facility, to prepare for running his parents' new place with Claudine.
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The couple worked day and night for a year to renovate and bring the 25-bed hotel up to code, and transform it into a luxurious facility, located on the heights of Sainte Radegone, in Tours. Claudine and Philippe married in 1972. While the hotel was running at full capacity, Claudine gave birth to Alban in 1974. Unfortunately, Marie-Louise's personality grew more and more sour, and created difficult living conditions for everyone around her, with regular arguments and mood swings. Eventually, Philippe and Claudine had enough, and decided to leave the hotel and the Loire Valley to move to Paris, and start a new life.
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Philippe started in Paris as a real-estate agent, motivated by his brother-in-law, Michel Vardi, who had just married Claudine's sister Monique, while Claudine started as an admin staff for an electronic company. The quickly rising population in and around Paris, and the needs for mortgages meant that there was a lag in mortgage financial regulations in France in the early 80s. To make 1st time homeownership more affordable to middle class families, many real-estate agencies would inflate property values to obtain larger mortgages at low rates, and provide additional funds for downpayments. Philippe fell in that market when it was at its peak, which was enriching many of his colleagues. He recognized new markets in the Southern part and suburb of Paris, and decided to open his own agency, with offices near Porte d'Italie.
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With the boom of the suburbs, his agency quickly grew to become one of the most active agencies in Southern Paris, and Philippe opened three more agencies in each corners of Paris. He was handling hundreds of sells per month, and moving large sums of money between banks and notaries. One of Philippe's clients worked at Johnson Wax, subsidiary company in France had left his business card on his desk, and one day Claudine decided to give him a call. Given an interview on the spot, she started as a sell's rep., and both Philippe and Claudine started to rise the echelons of French society, and in the midst of the 80s, spending most of their money on food, clothing, cars and a yearly vacation in Corsica, while Claudine started to make savings for a house.  
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One of philippe's colleagues originally from Thailand, noticing the exchange of money and an opportunity, connected Philippe with an investor group located in Thailand, which was interested in selling a bauxite mine. Philippe was invited to Bangkok to meet the investors. He was received in grand style, and given access to fancy restaurants and hotels, and driven around in limousines, in early modern Bangkok, where elephants were still crossing highways. They obviously wanted to impress him, and when presented with the details of the deed, Philippe quickly realized that the purchase of the mine was in fact a money laundering operation that the mob was asking to conduct on their behalf. While Philippe had always lived on the fringe of society, he panicked and never accepted to the transaction. He quickly left Thailand, and for many years after this event feared that the mob would retaliate, which never happened.
 
Growing tired of real-estate work, he decided to focus on mortgages and created a mortgage company, using his network with banks and escrow employees, who loved him for the amount of deals he was bringing, and the reliability of this clients. Philippe would serve his altruistic inclinations by helping regular, and often un-qualified borrowers, to gain access to mortgages, including many policemen, or fire-fighters. Borrowers were so grateful to Philippe, that he prided himself that none of his borrowers had ever defaulted on their payments. Alerted by a growing and un-regulated industry, the French government started to impose new laws and legislations around mortgages. Ultimately, Philippe's operation was halted due to unfounded judicial frauds, and he had to close his activities.  
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In the meantime, Claudine ascended corporate France, and was able to sustain the family through Philippe's adventures in real-estate. She left Johnson as France sell's manager, and moved onto UniLever as a director, and ultimately as CEO of her own firm in the industrial cleaning industry. 
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Claudine bought a house in Queue-en-Brie, in the Val-de-Marne Paris suburb. Philippe took a few years off to recover from his turbulent real-estate period, and to help taking care of Claudine, who would often come back in tears from work, suffering from French chauvinism that would cripple her career development.
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Philippe's next move was telecommunication. Before the rise of the world-wide internet, France, which used to stand out for his telecommunication engineering, had developed in the 90s a primitive form of digital communication using small computers called minitel. Minitels used phone lines and were provided freely by the phone company, but for a higher communication cost, and which people could use to look up yellow pages, find a business, play games, and in an early form, join online chat rooms. Ahead of the curve, Philippe had noticed people's draws for minitel, and decided that he would create a server to host online gaming and chats, and negotiate a cut from the cost of communication with the phone company. This started by ordering the phone company that 360 phone lines be installed at their home, which came as a shock to their neighbors, when the cable was trenched to their residential compound. The analog server filled out an entire bedroom, clicking all day and night long, with incoming telecommunications. The games and chats were becoming very popular in France, and Philippe moved his operation to Paris. His office space surrounded a huge pile of gifts that online gamers would come pick-up. Chatting was a more profitable operation, by keeping individuals connected for longer periods of time. Chat rooms eventually became erotic discussions, for which Philippe had hired a number of actors to entertain their online guests. Several nights a week, Philippe would drive his car to hang advertisements on fences of construction sites, with the names of his sites, and replaced, in his car trunk, the bottles of champagne of his youth with glue and paper.  
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Eventually, the rise of the Internet would crush the French minitel experiments, and once again Philippe had to stop his business. This also coincided with the departure of their son Alban to the United States. Partly because of his father sensitivity for music and science, Alban studied sound engineering and became a researcher in acoustics. He moved to New York to pursue his career in architectural acoustics. Claudine had grown very tired of the French corporate environment and continued to work hard to sustain the family, and once their only son had left, they started to hitch for their next adventure, outside of the French hexagon this time. 
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Philippe and Claudine throughout the 90s would take one lengthy trip abroad every year, scanning the planet for a place to live under the tropics, and possibly retire. After considering Brasil, Vietnam, and Mauritius, they narrowed down on Tahiti, where people speak French, and with robust infrastructure, stable economy and descent hospitals. They found a sandwich shop for sell located in the center of Papeete, and decided to sell their house, cars, and empty their bank accounts to purchase the business and start a new life in Tahiti. They were 50 years old when they permanently left France. 
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Both of them had lots of experience with hospitality from their youth, and rose the standards of the Papeete shop above many others in town - its name Le Motu describes a small piece of land above the ocean. Philippe was leading the staff, and had prepared tasty recipes for French sandwiches and salads. At its peak, the sandwich shop was so popular that lines would block vehicular traffic in town. And because Philippe was always very complimentary with women, and serving sophisticated lunch food, the snack became a popular destination in town to watch or be seen. The shop was even known to islanders living on remote island away from Papeete.
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Philippe ran the Motu for several years, but his drinking started to hurt the business. Claudine opened a coaching business building-up from her years of experience in the corporate environment, and helped pay for the high cost of living of Tahiti. In the end, they sold the sandwich shop, because of Philippe’s health issues. Claudine expanded her training operation with additional space, which gained an excellent reputation across French Polynesia.  Tired of working, Claudine sold her entire operation, and both Philippe and Claudine retired in the house that they had built in the heights of Tahiti, facing the ocean, like they wanted. 
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Ultimately, Philippe's lifestyle caught up with him, and the years of smoking and drinking resulted in lung and liver cancers. He passed away at Papeete's hospital on November 12, 2023. 
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Philippe came from a troubled youth, and remote French country under post-war reconstruction. He carried with him the manners and traditions of an older France, and maybe like his father after the camps, lived his life without seriousness. Initially escaping his dysfunctional family, he found happiness in parties and cards, and later in entrepreneurship, cooking, pets, and admiring and supporting his wife Claudine. Philippe was a free and unconventional spirit. Life with Philippe was not easy, but his attitude in life reminds us of the fragility and preciousness of the present moment, never to be wasted, and to be lived to the fullest.