“Monsieur Vieille left our midst on Tuesday, June 13, 2017. He departed this earth as he lived: discreetly, delicately, surrounded by his loved ones. He always managed to achieve great resonance between his personal life and his professional life. He lived unassumingly, preferring less to more, resilience to performance, shared simplicity to personal exploit.
Not only did he give us the name of our company, Albert Vieille, he left us the legacy of a corporate culture, one of generosity and exigence, rigor and humor, knowledge and curiosity. These are the things he taught me and, through the differing prisms of our personal perspectives, this is what I pass on.
In the life of Monsieur Vieille, I see the exemplarity of a great work, well and thoroughly accomplished.
He attended the École Centrale and, a chemistry expert, was happy to see how essential our analysis laboratory was to the company. He would appear there of his own accord, exchange a few kind words, and unobtrusively slip away again.
He had dreamed of being an agricultural engineer and his son, Jean François, attained this dream himself before becoming, in his turn, an expert, a master of distillation, like his father. We have perpetuated this connection to the land – this love of nature, this agronomist’s dream – in our way, through our supply chains of perfume plants – rose, angelica and Roman chamomile, everlasting flower and lemon balm, the full list would be long, indeed – and that pleased him greatly.
Monsieur Vieille was a sensitive soul and his daughter, Roseline, wrote a wonderful book, Coulanes, in which he is one of the characters. In those pages, he calls himself Virgile, Virgil. Virgil, a Latin poet blessed with great empathy for mankind and nature and the land. Coulanes is a poetic work that sings the true song of our profession, this bond forged with the soil and the flowers, and speaks of our raison d’être for several generations.
He was a man of faith, true faith, a man of fervor and prayer, and was pleased to see how ethics serve as our compass, presiding over every business decision we make within the company.
He was an entrepreneur and was satisfied to see how true we remained to his own values. Though he was rather embarrassed – as it offended his natural humility – by the idea that his name had come to be known in countries so very far from his native Golfe-Juan.
It is up to us, dear customers and partners, dear cooperative components of his company, to continue to hold high the banner – the one he was first to unfurl – of this living wellspring.”
Georges Ferrando
Chief Executive Officer
