And she found them.Īside from annual visits to Switzerland, there were three-month stays in Hong Kong three years running and numerous trips to India, the first one having been in 1960, and well as many other countries. Gaby was gifted with a keen aesthetic eye: museums, art, fossils, geology, and archeology were among her many interests and she always was on the lookout for an as yet undiscovered arrowhead, fossil, or archeological relic whether it was on site or hiding in the local flea markets and auctions. Their trips were well researched and they always found the hidden treasures in the less accessible venues of the places they visited. Luckily Armand’s work brought them opportunities to not only travel but to spend extended periods of time abroad. Gaby and Armand were passionate travelers and nature lovers. Finally, with a tenure offer from the Institute for Advanced Study, in 1957 Gaby and Armand made their permanent residence Princeton, NJ. After Princeton, an exhilarating trip to Mexico, and a turn in Chicago, they returned to Switzerland, where Armand was then teaching at ETH in Zurich, and a second daughter Anne was born. She and Armand then both reconnected in Geneva, where he taught at the University of Geneva, and in 1952, following an offer from the Institute for Advanced Study, Armand proposed, they married, and then sailed to America, where their daughter Dominique was born two years later. In her spare time, she drew sketches of a sadly bombed out cityscape and continued to meet more fascinating people. In 1947, while Armand was securing his doctorate in Paris, Gaby went to London to learn English where she helped make ends meet by working and initially living in the Moral-Armament center. Upon completion, she was hired by the meteorological institute in Zurich to draw weather maps, and it was in Zurich that she met and fell in love with her future husband, Armand Borel, who was doing his graduate work at the Zurich Polytechnic Institute (ETH). Gaby was then able to follow her true calling, painting and drawing, at the Lausanne School of Beaux Arts. As was her nature, she managed to have fun there regardless and to master German while making more lifelong friends. He signed her on for a short stint in the Swiss army’s complementary female division because she had waved at some soldiers on a departing train, and sent her to perfect her German at the Iseltwald girls boarding school run by no-nonsense nuns on Lake Brienz. Gaby’s spirit and unquenchable appetite for life was countered by a father who, though caring, was a strict disciplinarian. There, she formed what were to be lifelong friendships, attended dances, town balls, and made mischief. She often referred with heady enthusiasm to her youth in Payerne as “ma belle jeunesse!” Those years covered pre and early WWII years which included the standard curfews, rationing, and schooling without heat (which she ascertained resulted in children never being sick rather than the opposite). Gaby’s father, after postings in various parts of Switzerland, settled with his family in Payerne, where Gaby spent the rest of her growing up years. Her brother, Edouard, was born the following year. Gaby’s mother, Odette Gillieron-Pittet, skilled in the artisanal arts, ran an efficient household. Gaby Borel, 100 years old, left us peacefully early on the morning of Jat her home of 65 years in Princeton.īorn in Bière, Switzerland, a farm village with a military base, in the French part of Switzerland, on June 2, 1922, her father, Auguste Pittet, was a Major in the Swiss army and an avid alpinist.
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