Madeleine Geneste was from the Corrèze region, but life's twists and turns led her to be born in Tarbes on May 16, 1944. She was placed with a foster family in Bagnères-de-Bigorre, a couple of Moroccan Pied-Noirs (French settlers in Algeria), journalists who also acted as guides (Resistance fighters, escapees, Spanish Republicans, etc.). At the age of five, she joined her mother, a teacher, in Ussac, Corrèze. She passed her baccalaureate in Brive and went to Paris to study drawing and painting. In the art world, she met Greek and Russian émigrés, often marginalized, but also celebrities from high society. Penniless, to finance her studies, she worked nights in the cafés of Montmartre and befriended prostitutes and vagrants. This nocturnal world left her with memories that she would later evoke in her poems (full biography, page 176).