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.