Simone Leboulanger Faflick, long-time resident of Lexington, Mass., died Feb. 18, 2019 at age 96 after a long decline. Her husband of 64 years, Carl Edward Faflick, had passed 10 months earlier. She is survived by three children--Annick Mansfield, Philip Elmer and Simone Coble--seven grandchildren and three great grandchildren.

Madame Faflick, as she was known at Boston University, where she taught French for 23 years, was born in Corbeny, France, the mayor's daughter in a village destroyed in the first world war. She rode out the second in Algiers, where her parents ran a school for French and Algerian children. "We watched from an open window the amazing spectacle of German bombers flying over the harbor and the streaks of light of the antiaircraft bullets trying to shoot them down," she wrote in a self-published autobiography, My Journey to America . "One night a hissing object passed between us, hit a dozen eggs and splattered the walls of the living room."

It was in Algiers, she liked to tell her students, where she mixed with French resistance fighters and danced with Albert Camus, one of the authors in their assigned reading. It was there, too, in 1943, a second lieutenant in the French Army translating for the British, American and French forces, that she met and married her first husband, Waldo Darwin Elmer, a radio engineer from Seattle who had landed in North Africa as part of the first U.S.-British expedition of the war.

Transported to America by Liberty Ship and widowed by age 29, with two small children and a half-built house, she was nearly ready to go back to France when her Lexington neighbors--many of them architects--pitched in to finish the house on Moon Hill Road where she would spend the next six decades.

In 1953 she married Carl Faflick, one of her first husband's classmates at Harvard, who adopted her two children and gave her a third. The extended family--which included her mother, Eulalie, who had moved to America to help with the children--took regular pilgrimages to the Val André, the beach town in Brittany where Simone's childhood friends still gathered every summer.

She was a voracious reader, an energetic sportswoman (tennis, skiing, sailing, trout fishing), a witty conversationalist and a warm hostess who never said no. Her home in Lexington--and a summer house on Vinalhaven Island in Maine--soon became popular stops for her husband's business partners and for generations of French friends and relatives making their own journeys to America. A private graveside service was held at Westview Cemetery in Lexington.