This sloping street that goes down from Saffin Street to Gambetta Street still has the peculiarity of having a double carriageway: wide steps in stones of Thabor on the left, an calade in pebbles of the Lot on the right. Its name comes from the sound the hooves (esclops, in patois) made when it was run down. But for a long time, the Clairacais called it Rue Pissebach among themselves because, during the heavy stormy rains that the valley experiences in summer, the water rushed down the valley like a pissing cow…
Today, it has unfortunately lost some of the cachet it had at the beginning of the 20th century from the houses that lined it, especially the houses whose top floor was decorated with a large wooden gallery, a "sun". This is what had seduced Guillaume Alaux, painter of a famous dynasty of Bordeaux artists when he drew this painting exhibited at the 1905 Salon in Paris. As for the house in the foreground on the right, it was scandalously cemented in the 1960s. In the foreground, the cemented basin at the foot of the slightly tilted lamppost (!) still collects water from Font-Grand.
Henri Maurousel is one of those atypical figures who give interest to a village like Clairac. His family was originally from Cambes. Son of Jacques Maurousel and Marguerite Hugon, he had one brother, Jean-Louis (died prematurely in 1929), sales representative for the Trussant company, in Sainte-Livrade ; a job that Henri took over after Jean-Louis' death. Henri was a house painter, but he indulged in "artistic" painting as an amateur; moreover, it was often postcards that served as a model, as here to represent Esclopière Street. In 1905, he married Alice Françoise Duchamps, a smoother by profession, and had two children: Jean (died in 1922), and Francine, wife of the teacher Pierre Tuminy. In the South-West, a smoother was a woman who ironed clothes.
On two photographs above by Gabriel Martin, published as postcards, we see Henri Maurousel, in his white painter's suit, brush in hand, staring at the photographer.
