Les marchands d’étoiles unfolds in a Paris fabric warehouse during the German occupation, where routine business can no longer remain separate from identity and danger. Raymond Martineau, the owner, carries the warmth and comic helplessness of a Pagnol character, unable to impose authority on either his daughter or his wife. The youngest employee, Joseph, introduces a sharper tension: his father is Breton and his mother is Jewish. Domestic friction, workplace relationships and wartime pressure occupy the same confined setting, allowing humour to sit beside fear without cancelling it. Presented at the Pyramide cultural centre in Romorantin-Lanthenay, the play asks audiences to watch ordinary behaviour acquire moral consequence. Its dramatic force comes from people who know one another closely yet must navigate a society in which family origins have become perilous.
Topic: events
Sainte-Thorette Sand-Flaubert Reading
The exuberant title of this dramatic reading comes directly from letters exchanged by George Sand and Gustave Flaubert. Puzzle Centre uses their exchanges to reveal a friendship carried by wit, affection, disagreement and a sustained pleasure in language. The performance lets the writers define themselves through the rhythm and tone of their own letters, avoiding a summary of two literary careers. Sand’s warmth and Flaubert’s exacting temperament create a productive contrast, making private conversation feel theatrical without requiring invented scenes. Presented in Sainte-Thorette, the reading also reconnects Sand’s epistolary life with the wider Berry territory in which she lived and worked. The unusual image of diamonds adorning a trumpet captures the spirit of the piece: playful, intimate and precise, with the force of correspondence transformed into living speech.
Empreintes et Paysages at Gargilesse
Empreintes et Paysages brings together acrylic painting and gum bichromate printing in a tribute to George Sand at Gargilesse-Dampierre. The pairing places a contemporary painterly practice beside a non-silver photographic process associated with nineteenth-century image making. Delajot and Mengual approach landscape through distinct materials, allowing pigment, texture and photographic chemistry to answer one another across the exhibition room. Sand provides the cultural thread: her attachment to Berry and her attentive writing about rural places give the displayed landscapes a precise literary setting. The exhibition treats nature as more than decorative scenery, inviting close attention to marks, surfaces and the ways a place leaves an imprint. Its setting in Gargilesse strengthens that conversation between artistic technique, local landscape and the writer’s enduring presence.
Sancerre Sand Letter Workshop
This Sancerre workshop takes the correspondence of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert as the starting point for new letters written in the present. Participants can work individually or collectively, choosing how to address one of the two authors and how to respond to the questions, tone or intimacy of their exchange. The exercise treats correspondence as a literary form with its own pace, voice and sense of audience, moving beyond a simple historical document. Puzzle Centre accompanies the writing process, helping adults move from reading and discussion toward a finished personal response. Sand’s ties to Berry give the session a strong local resonance, while Flaubert opens the conversation to a wider literary friendship. The workshop makes that relationship active again through handwriting, reflection and shared language.
Trouy Christmas Market
Trouy’s Christmas market brings more than forty craftspeople, designers, artists and local producers together around seasonal making and food. Stalls range from handmade objects to chocolates, regional wines, honey, preserves and foie gras, giving the market a clear connection to nearby skills and ingredients. Family entertainment includes balloon sculpture and festive appearances, while Mother Christmas takes on the role of storyteller through enchanted tales. The mix of edible goods, creative work and narrative activity gives different generations distinct forms of contact with the market. Decoration remains secondary to the people behind the products and the knowledge carried by their work. In Trouy, that combination creates a social winter gathering shaped by Berry produce, small businesses and the pleasure of choosing something made with a recognisable hand or local origin.
George Sand and Nature Reading
George Sand et la nature is a theatrical reading for two actors built from several parts of the writer’s work, with no single book dominating. Correspondence, autobiography, short stories and journalistic texts provide contrasting voices through which her relationship with nature can emerge. The performance allows private reflection, fictional imagination and public argument to meet on the same stage, revealing how Sand moved between literary forms. Designed for teenagers and adults, it offers an accessible route into writing that can be intimate in one passage and socially engaged in the next. Saint-Doulchard places the reading within Berry, where landscape was part of Sand’s lived and creative world. The two-actor format emphasises dialogue and shifts of perspective, giving her words dramatic movement while keeping the language itself at the centre.
En attendant George Sand
En attendant George Sand introduces genealogy by inviting participants to investigate the writer’s origins and descendants. Hosted at the Équinoxe media library in Châteauroux, the workshop turns a famous literary figure into a family-history case that can be followed through names, relationships and documentary traces. Participants learn how genealogical questions are formed and how a lineage can be reconstructed without losing sight of the people behind the records. The approach complements the libraries’ wider exploration of Sand by concentrating on kinship across generations, names and documented relationships. It also gives local history a practical dimension, linking Châteauroux’s collections with a figure deeply embedded in Berry memory. As part of the heritage programme, the session offers a methodical but approachable encounter with archives, ancestry and the construction of a biographical narrative.
Les Maîtres Sonneurs en chemin
Les Maîtres Sonneurs en chemin combines storytelling and music to enter the rural world of George Sand’s novel. Hurdy-gurdy, bagpipes and harp do more than accompany the spoken narrative: they make the book’s concern with itinerant musicians and transmitted knowledge physically audible. Each instrument contributes a different texture, from sustained drone to plucked resonance, supporting the movement between tale, encounter and musical memory. The show-meeting format also creates room to consider how traditional repertories travel between people and territories. In Saint-Amand-Montrond, the performance remains close to the Berry landscapes and communities that inform Sand’s country writing. Literature is therefore approached through sound as well as language, giving audiences a concrete sense of why music in Les Maîtres Sonneurs is not background decoration but one of the novel’s central forces.
Heritage Days in Coeur du Jura
Across Arbois, Poligny and Salins-les-Bains, heritage visits link salt-making, Comté and the life of Louis Pasteur. The programme ranges from the Grande Saline’s underground gallery to cheese dairies and Poligny’s ramparts. Lithography introductions, stained-glass demonstrations and encounters with heritage specialists bring working skills into the picture, alongside concerts and theatre.
Jura Wine Tasting in Arbois
The Fruitière Vinicole d’Arbois presents a tasting of wines from the Jura. The cooperative was founded by Arbois winegrowers. Children have their own games and can sample homemade syrups alongside the wine activity. The resort’s entertainment department organises the tasting and the accompanying programme for younger visitors.