Bossy-Sans-Avoir is not too far from Paris. The reason why this small village is of interest, is that Romy Schneider was buried there at the small cemetery next to the church after dying from an overdose of sleeping pills in 1982. But if you visit Paris by train or by plane then it's not so obvious how to get there. For that reason, since starting the photo collection for this website in the early 1990s, a visit never took place. But this time it was on the list. We concluded that we should take the train from the Gare the Montparnasse to Garancieres-la-Queue or Montfort L'Amaury. I had seen on a planner on the Internet that between those two places there should be a bus line 2 stopping at Boissy-Sans-Avoir. So we took our train and arrived at Garancieres-la-Queue without a problem. Of course the bus stop was right in front of the station. So far so good which was nice because the weather was bad. Allthough we read French, we found the timetable to be very confusing, but the time we aimed for was on it. Only the bus didn't come. After inspecting the timetable again we conclused that this bus only went on Wednesdays. I had picked the Wednesday on the planner but now it was a Thursday.
It was a cold day and something slightly more like rain than like snow fell from the air. We looked at each other. Shall we take the next train back to Paris of shall we walk to Boissy-Sans-Avoir? Of course we decided to walk. And of course when we were out of Garancieres-la-Queue there were no footpaths so we had to share our way with the cars, frequently stepping into the wet grass when a car approached. However, finding our way was easy using the Maps With Me app and in less than an hour we reached Boissy-Sans-Avoir. There we found the church and it took little effort to locate the grave of Romy and her son David, who died before her in 1981 and was reburied next to her after her death. Far away from the hustle of Paris we took our pictures and thought about her tragic life and death and about her parents Magda Schneider en Wolf Albach-Retty, who were buried far away from each other and whose graves we had visited many years before hers.
We decided to take the other way back and the rain had stopped more or less. Stepping aside for the cars, we walked about five kilometers to Montfort L'Amaury and took the train back to Paris. I would have preferred a more sunny day to visit the grave of this wonderful actress, bit it wasn't to be. The pictures will be on the site soon.
