Anny Antoine

Anny Antoine

The life of Anny Antoine
Anny Antoine was born on 25 April 1897 in Saint-Gilles-les-Bruxelles. Her father was a railway official with a lively interest for art and especially history. The atmosphere in the family must have been such that the only daughter looked forward to returning home.  

Her mother’s death in 1913 cast a shadow over this happy childhood; her father remarried in 1914. There was a great deal of affection between Anny and her second mother from the very beginning. World War I and the German occupation hardly went unnoticed by the Antoine family, which also included a son from the first marriage. While father was fighting in France, mother and the children were left to their own devices during the painful famine while living in Ukkel. Anny Antoine continued to suffer the consequences of the occupation. From then on, her helath was poor, suffering from a stomach disease, and she never lost the disgust she felt for the 'furor teutonicus'. There are few traces in her life for any interest in Germany, though she was interested in England, and it might not be too daring to suppose that her love for French culture in general and the French language and literature in particular was intensified by her war memories. She had actually been spoon-fed this love: her family was of French descent. It's unclear what education Anny had after primary school in Ukkel; her great intellectual interest and energy make it probable that she began her career as a private French tutor as an autodidact. In any case, she had all the necessary books for this at home.

No matter how fond Anny Antoine was of her parental home and the quiet life in Ukkel, she felt the need to break free as time passed. In 1921, the moment finally came: Anny moved to Antwerp with the expectation of teaching her Flemish fellow countrymen to speak French. Students proved to be hard to come by, which made life on the river Schelde that much more difficult, as she also craved her financial independence.

Anny lived at a home for young ladies, ‘Le Foyer des Alliés’, apparently in the form of some kind of social club, with all the friendships and outings it entails. Her housemates called themselves ‘mouettes’ (gulls), and Anny maintained friendships with several of them. Nevertheless, she still wanted to leave Antwerp: Paris was calling. Anny managed to earn some money as a lady companion with a good family, and she departed for the capital of the promised land in May 1924.

There could of course be no question of teaching French there. Anny found a job at a respected fashion house on the avenue de l’Opéra, where she came into contact with better circles and was able to perfect her perhaps somewhat Belgian French. She also developed a great deal of cultural activity, visiting theatres (a great passion of hers), museums and galleries, and acquainting herself with contemporary literature, which she had until then disregarded in favour of classical and romantic literature. It was fitting that she who was so devoted to Balzac had her residence in Passy, close to the Musée Balzac. Her horsts supported her in every possible way, and even gave her the idea of resuming her language tutoring, now that she was in The Hague. She arrived there in October 1925.

After a short stay at the hotel Astoria (which has now disappeared) and boarding houses in the Bazarstraat and the Anna Paulownastraat, she found a residence she liked in 1928 in the Van Speykstraat 10, with a family that was very fond of her. She could receive her students there and had enough space for her growing book collection (four bookcases in the end), and all this in the neighbourhood of the groves and the shoreline of The Hague and Scheveningen. No wonder that she stayed there until the very end.

The Hague ultimately proved to be a good choice: quite a few well-to-do families lived there, for whom studying French was considered good form. But Anny Antoine was of course not the only one to discover this: there was so much competition that she was forced at first to take a job as a saleswoman at fashion house Maison de Paris, an engagement that was ended in the course of 1927 after a period of illness and recuperation in her parental home, in Erps-Kwerps since 1923.

After this, her fortunes changed for the better. It cost her less trouble to find students, most of whom were young ladies. An interesting detail is that she tended to pass herself of as an actual Frenchwoman; this made it easier to acquire new students. These probably came to her mostly through recommendation, for Anny Antoine was an excellent tutor: serious, methodical, but also a likeable person who knew how to make her students enthusiastic. Some of them were friends of hers, who went on trips with her on her spare time, which must have been scarce. Besides her tutoring practice of around twenty-five hours per week, she also took classes herself. She prepared for her secondary school French teaching certificate, which she obtained in 1931, to continue thereafter to study French at the university of Utrecht. She also studied Italian and Latin there, and made a serious attempt to improve her flawed Dutch, with an eye on the teaching certificate and possible translating work. Her request for being sworn as a translator still exists. Then there was her reading, and of course her writing. She liked to write mood pieces, unpretentious sketches, but also essays on literary subjects, rather schoolish at first, but later more academic in tone. This work included the thesis paper 'Corneille et Racine' for professor Valkhoff, and a treatise on the 'acte gratuit' by André Gide and others. The rest of her time was spent on simple pleasures such as walks, theatre visits, social contacts and the occasional trip. She led a full life for someone with a weak constitution who required plenty of rest.

It is deeply tragic that all of this was ended by a horrible accident. One beautiful Sunday morning, 25 June 1933, Anny Antoine was hit by the trailer of tramline 8 on her way to pier of Scheveningen. She was killed instantly, and was buried a few days later at the cemetery of Erps-Kwerps.

See also the multi media presentation about Anny Antoine and Louis Koopman.