"Learn a new thing a day" my late gran said, "and you shall stay young". I remember my late Latin prof at the Lycée in Pau tracing down Allées de Morlaas... she certainly stayed young!
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It began with an unassuming granite stele in the Parc Beaumont in Pau. Set among the trees, it bears a globe in relief and a large Latin injunction:
LATINE LOQUERE UT CIVIS TERRARUM HABEARE
“Speak Latin, so that you may be regarded as a citizen of the world.”
Below the motto are the names of Latin authors and scholars from widely separated places and eras: Terence from Roman Africa, Seneca from Hispania, Ausonius from Bordeaux, Einhard from the Carolingian world, Thomas More from England, and, at the end of the sequence, Antonino Immé. The globe makes the intended point clear: Latin is presented not just as the language of ancient Rome, but as a language shared across countries, centuries, and cultures.
Antonino Immé
The final name on the stone led to Antonino Immé (1901–1988), an Italian educator and classical philologist who spent his later life in Pau. His inclusion is not accidental. The monument is a memorial to the humanist ideal he represented: Latin as a language through which a person might become, in the inscription’s words, a civis terrarum—a citizen of the world.
The stele was erected after his death, with the support of the City of Pau. It honours all those who, “of every race and every century,” contributed to Latin’s long history as an international language of literature, education, scholarship, and cultural exchange.
Geneviève Immé: a poet of modern Latin
The enquiry then leads naturally to Antonino Immé’s wife, Geneviève Immé (1929–2012). She was an accomplished poet who wrote in French, Occitan, and Latin, and has been described as one of the last important French voices in modern Latin poetry.
Her Latin was not confined to grammar exercises or to the distant past. She used it as a living literary language, publishing poems and taking part in the modern-Latin movement associated with the journal Vita Latina. In Pau, she helped sustain the idea embodied by the stone: that Latin could still be written, spoken, and shared beyond national borders.
Seen in this light, the globe at the side of the monument is more than decoration. It is a compact geographical statement. Roman Africa, Hispania, Gaul, the Carolingian empire, England, Italy, and France are brought together by the historical use of one language.
Before Immé: Madame Métais
But Geneviève Immé was known in Pau long before she took that surname. Born Geneviève Marie Duron in 1929, she was first known professionally and literarily as Geneviève Métais, following her first marriage in 1954. Her first Latin publications appeared under the name Geneviève Métais.
For many former pupils, however, she was not initially a poet or the wife of Antonino Immé. She was Mme Métais, a teacher of classical languages at the Lycée de Pau during the 1970s. An agrégée de lettres classiques, she taught French, Latin, and Greek, and also taught for a time at the University of Pau. Her teaching career continued until 1990.
She had a son and a daughter from her first marriage. This makes it entirely possible that a former pupil who knew her as Mme Métais in the 1970s remembered a teacher whose family life preceded her later, better-known identity as Geneviève Immé.
A local trail of discovery
The discovery therefore works backwards:
- A Latin stele in Parc Beaumont, with its globe and cosmopolitan motto.
- The name Antonino Immé, the Italian classicist commemorated on it.
- Geneviève Immé, his wife and a poet writing in modern Latin.
- Geneviève Métais, her earlier name: the Lycée de Pau teacher remembered by former pupils.
A public monument that first appears to be a general celebration of the ancient world thus turns out to contain a very local Pau story: a teacher, a poet, a classical scholar, a marriage, and an enduring belief that language can connect people across frontiers and centuries.
Sources: descriptions of the Parc Beaumont Latin monument; biographical material on Antonino Immé and Geneviève Métais-Immè; studies of Geneviève Immè’s Latin poetry and her work with Vita Latina.
AI composition stops here
Ode to Madame Métais
I wrote something today that came from the crucible of her teaching 50 yrs. ago the classics to our young minds:“A wo/man who stays quiet by themselves is not lonely. Insecurities have been worked out; boundaries have been drawn. S/he neither sold out nor bowed to others’ foibles. Truth is sought: when s/he fails, s/he neither makes it up nor blames others; it is learned at every step, up or down. Such a wo/man is not to be left because you think you’re right (pun intended): you may yet learn from them, and find one to cherish.”
I then asked AI for a poem from it in alexandrines & iambic pentameter cadence, which she expounded up in Latin classicism - you can tell it's AI by its em—dashes 😂
“Lathe from Heaven
A soul who keeps their silence is not lost to night;
Their boundaries stand steady, carved in patient light.
No bargain dims their spirit, no deceit is worn—
They walk the truth unshielded, resolute, reborn.
When faltering, they fashion lessons from the fall;
No blame is cast on others, no false tales enthrall.
Each step becomes a turning on the inner wheel,
A shaping of the self toward what the wise reveal.
Such quiet strength is rare, not easily set by—
Do not depart their presence thinking you stand high.
For in their tempered stillness, you may yet discern
A heart to hold with wonder, and a guide to learn.
Their solitude is forged where honest fires run;
A lathe from heaven turning one true, steadfast one.”
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