Claude André Strauss, son of Robert and Germaine Strauss, was born in this house in 1921. I came into the world on the night of Sunday to Monday, Jan. 3, at home, around 6 a.m., without the help of a midwife or midwife, who was called too late, at the end of a long winter night, as she lived at the edge of the forest, outside the hamlet surrounded by snowy countryside. "It was I, alone, who pulled you out," my father proudly told me some 30 years later, "then washed you in the sky-blue enamel basin filled with hot water." He had rushed her from the kitchen to my mother's bed, where I was beginning my earthly career with vague cries of fear in a poorly heated Grand-Rue apartment, still plunged in darkness. I still see myself in my shiny golden brass bed, early in the morning, in the first room of my memory. Suddenly I become aware of the nearby sloping roofs of the house across the street, which is on the corner of the small square of the restaurant "At the Anchor," at the beginning of the rue du Diaconat, called at the time the "Strauss Ascent." The house belonged to Aunt Elise, well-known throughout the neighborhood. I see myself crouched against a stone, on the side of the road, toward my two years of age, along the gutter dug along the corner wall of my birthplace, across from Miss Elise Pfister's gothic-looking mansion. I see myself playing, during the long winter mornings, with the mud of the rivulet, dreaming, soaked by the rainwater falling on my head, cascading precipitously down from the steep roof, through the punctured gutter.