Aymé, Marcel

French author born in the town of Joigny, Burgundy, as the youngest of six children. His father was a cavalry farrier. His mother died when he was very young, so he was raised by his maternal grandparents who owned a brickworks at Villers-Robert, a small village in the Jura. After his grandparents died, he was looked after by an aunt who lived in the nearby town of Dole. These are the places in which many of Aymé’s novels are set. The family was radical and anti-clerical, a fact that plagued the young Marcel during his first years at school when he was persecuted by children whose parents belonged to the opposite camp. The schoolboy’s bitter experiences of the adults’ political and religious feuding fuelled Aymé’s intense dislike of all forms of clique behaviour and clan feuds.