A childhood in the Picardy countryside

A childhood in the Picardy countryside

Was it destiny that this future archaeologist from Picardy was born in Amiens, in the suburb of Saint-Acheul (Somme) in 1926? His parents both worked for the French railway company, the SNCF.
His health was so fragile that he was sent to breath "good air" at his grandparents' house at Prouzel, a little village near the Picardy capital. All his life, Roger Agache has kept the wonderful memory of the green paradise of his childhood.
His grandfather instilled in him a sense of observation and a taste for independence. Little by little he acquired a passion for nature, for solitude, and for contemplation, somewhat in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose autobiography made a strong impression on Agache.
Later, in memory of this rural world, Roger Agache would dedicate one of his collections of photographs to the farmers who had constructed this landscape that was still preserved at the time:

"In homage to the old Picardy farmers and to their ancestors, who passionately cultivated the land instead of exploiting it, to those rural people of another age whose incessant labor shaped a deeply humanized, harmonious, and balanced landscape fashioned from a thousand years of agrarian wisdom, but which today has been ravaged by the barbarians of our time: the technocrats, promoters, and speculators."

His grandfather wanted him to be a virtuoso pianist. But for love of the countryside, all Roger Agache dreamed of was becoming a village policeman. He became an archaeologist — for the same reason. After his grandfather's death, he returned to Amiens where he continued his studies.