“Damn Castle” illustrates a little-known chapter in the history of Carneville Castle, which housed a brothel during the Second World War. The pink walls and graffiti in the castle's attic still bear witness to this disturbing episode. Of course, the years have passed, and in 2026 we will celebrate the 80th anniversary of the closure of brothels in France. Of course… and yet, on certain evenings, when the visitors have left and silence has returned, the spirits of the girls still haunt the old walls of the castle that was their home, telling their lives, their dreams and illusions, their joys and tears to those who know how to listen. Constructed from literary and journalistic texts from the 1880s to the 1930s, interwoven with the most beautiful "street songs," this musical performance transports us to a bygone, unimaginable, perhaps even monstrous world, where the brothel is more than an institution: it's a cog in the machine of society. With "Putain de château" (Damn Castle), the Château de Carneville becomes intimate, revealing, by candlelight, a secret chapter of our history and paying a vibrant tribute to these women with enslaved bodies and free spirits. June 21 at 4 p.m., July 14 and 15, August 26 at 8:30 p.m.

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Lyrical and melancholic, the repertoire composed for the accordion during this golden age that were the 30s and 40s, speaks to the heart from the outset. And this music that had not been played for almost a century, this music that we had never heard, is nevertheless immediately familiar and intimate, because it has remained in the collective unconscious. Our parents, grandparents or great-grandparents met and loved each other on "Coeur sentimental", "Nostalgie nocture", "Frivolité", "Etoile des guinguettes" or "Idilio de Amor". The poignant vibration of the accordion of the origins remains secretly in our DNA. It is this musical secret that IMPASSE des VERTUS reveals today, on the instruments for which it was composed. In this concert, the resurrected masterpieces of the original bal musette dialogue with the most beautiful songs of this era: they are the faces, the voices and the lives of the little people of France who still sing and dance in secret around us... to the sound of the accordion.

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If some of the greatest successes of Fréhel, Damia, Berthe Sylva or Lucienne Delyle have reached us and still sing in our memories, most of the Songs that accompanied and illuminated Life during the first half of the 20th century have fallen silent: they were nevertheless Life, the joyfully banal or tragic daily life of the generations that preceded us, their Hopes and their Dreams; and listening to them tenderly, we find our own, intact and thrilling. They dialogue here with the most beautiful instrumental works composed for the accordion, and take you, for the duration of a concert, a show or a ball ... into the mists of time.