Trouvé, artists and writers.

The detail inventory of Trouvé’s belongings, made in the weeks following his tragic death in July 1902, recently-re discovered in the archives of France’s National Library reveals that in a shed belonging to Monsieur Fournaise at Châtou on the River Seine, Trouvé kept a mahogany skiff, two pairs of oars, four rowlocks, a small triangular sail and a mast.

We also learn that, since 1884, Trouvé rented and sometimes failed to pay the rent for rooms in a house belonging to a fisherman Léon Levanneur beside this shed.

It was during this very period that now legendary Impressionist painters such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Alfred Sisley would come to lunch at Fournaise’s guingette, paint pictures of sailboats on the river and go canoeing.

Writers such as Guy de Maupassant al so rented a room from Levanneur to write such novels as Bel Ami. They all knew Trouvé!

Although neither the authoritative Impressionist archive in Paris, nor comprehensive biographies of Maupassant make any mention of Trouvé, here is proof of his “chilling out” from those remarkable inventions. In a group photo of some yachtsman at Châtou, one of them a strange resemblance to G.Trouvé.