Farewell to Agnès Bolton (A Tribute)
After 26 years of service (bons et loyaux, as the French usage goes), the French department celebrated the retirement of Agnès Bolton as Assistant to the Chair on May 7th, 2026. This has been a long outstanding career at Yale that began in 2000 when Agnès was hired as “unique and ideally suited to the mission of the department”. She remained so until the end and grew in her position to become the memory of the department, recording its changes, challenges, and successes, and mastering all the intricacies of the job. Beyond assisting the chair, Agnès has served the department in many administrative capacities (too long to enumerate). They include managing the department newsletter, our lectures series, special conferences, the archives of the department, material and human. She was in all these functions, the trusted face of the department. But it is at the human level that she will be irreplaceable: she had a special touch with everyone, the faculty, the graduate and undergraduate students, the guests of the department. Above all, during these many years, she was the keeper of the French language, delighting the department with her attention to words, to grammar, to the life of the language, and the assurance of its excellence. This made her an added asset in the language faculty. In the same manner, all appreciated her exquisite taste and unmistakable French elegance. No surprise that current and former students, colleagues, chairs came on that day to wish Agnès many happy years in this new phase of her life. Mille mercis, Agnès, de tout cœur!