Toulouse. Marie Blazy, the doyenne of the sea bream, left us
It is to bet that this Tuesday, February 15, the inhabitants of the Daurade district will be numerous to come and say goodbye to Marie Blazy, sparkling grandmother of the district. This local figure passed away on February 9 at the age of 96, after being hospitalized at the Purpan hospital. “She was physically exhausted,” says Leslie her granddaughter.
It is hard to imagine the sea bream without Marie, of her marital status, Maria de las Mercédès, born in Spain on January 24, 1926. She who never counted her efforts, even at an advanced age, to help, support, advise those in need. A benevolence certainly due to his life course and his young years lived under Francoism, before arriving in France in 1941, to flee the war and its violence. A period of which she spoke little but of which she had kept a solidarity towards the other. “When she arrived in France, she Frenchified her first name as Marie instead of Maria, perhaps to forget all these horrors”.
During the war, Marie will hide people in the Ariège maquis before arriving in Toulouse. “She was also imprisoned by the Germans in the Saint-Michel prison for acts of resistance. But all this, my grandmother spoke very little about it. We learned about her life through bribes” .
In her youth, Marie worked in a cutlery place Olivier. Always quick to help, she also looked after the children. In 1953, she married Georges, thus becoming French. “My grandfather worked at Aérospatiale, on the Concorde and the Caravelle. My grandmother was very proud of him”. In 2004, Marie was widowed. Evoking with emotion her fifty-one years of marriage, she also has very feminist opinions on social issues.
Three times grandmother and four times great-grandmother, Marie has always been involved in civic life: president of the Daurade senior citizens’ club for more than twenty years, she was also very involved in neighborhood town halls and present at all election counts.
For more than 70 years, the nonagenarian lived in the only house on the square, nestled in a corner. A house that used to be a bakery in which the furniture, photos, memories of a busy life were strewn about. A house she had to leave on a sad February evening to continue on her way to other places.