Early Life
Natteau was born on 15 November 1920 in Istanbul, Turkey. His father, Edouard Chiuminatto, was a captain in the French Army who had fought in World War I and was wounded multiple times in the battles of the Somme, Chemin des Dames, and Verdun. After World War I, his father was dispatched to Turkey as part of the Allied occupation force where he met Rosine Foscolo, a direct descendent of the 19th century Italian poet, Ugo Foscolo. Edouard and Rosine married and gave birth to their only child, Jacques Etienne Chiuminatto. Under the terms of the 1919 Versailles Treaty, the defeated Ottoman Empire, as an ally of Imperial Germany, surrendered and was occupied by Anglo-French forces. The French Army seized Turkey’s railways and Edouard was put in charge of administering the railway network.
When Natteau was three years old, Kemal Ataturk came to power and forced the Allies and all foreigners to leave Turkey. The family settled in Paris and the young Jacques Natteau won admittance to Paris’s prestigious Lycée Henri IV where he graduated in 1938 earning his Baccalauréat.
Growing up in Paris's artistic 6th Arrondissement in the 1930s, Natteau came to know such luminaries as Jean Cocteau, Jacques Prévert, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso.
Read more about this topic: Jacques Natteau
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“In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”
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Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.”
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