Claude Vigée spent part of his childhood in the home of his maternal grandfather Léopold Meyer. Our house was one of the tallest buildings in Bischwiller. It was a rather shabby old building built like the old brick warehouses and barns. In fact, it originally served as a hop dryer, before Mr. Julius Cahnmann, at the head of a handsome fortune built by the brewing industry, had it converted around 1863 into a large dwelling for his large family. Even today one can read the initials J.C. with the date of inauguration engraved on the brown stoneware lintel above the old door that was walled up at the time of restoration following World War II. A discerning eye can still discern traces of the building's original purpose: its unaccustomed size, the excessive number of rooms, their large size, the steep stairs that replaced the old ladders in the huge storage room where hop cones were dried in the previous century. The spacious attic ventilated by several dormer windows, the old wooden floorboards, cracked, moth-eaten, creaking, instead of the beautiful parquet floors of bourgeois houses, the wood-frame outbuildings with lopsided roofs-all these elements were reminiscent of the craft and production use for which the building was intended. Our curious lodging seemed materially inseparable from the figure of my ancestor Léopold, who constituted its soul and embodiment.