Achilles Cichinelli walked out on his daughter when her mother died. The mother — Amelda Menouti — was barely in her thirties; the daughter — Ines (then Agnes Cicchinelli, the future French Resistance survivor and later wife of Dr. John Lazare Jeannopoulos) — was a young girl who would carry her own past largely alone for the rest of her life. “She was very secretive about her past,” Aline Pepe, Achilles’s granddaughter, wrote in May 2026. “I believe her father left at that point. My impression was that she hated him.”
He was Sicilian. His own father — Ines’s paternal grandfather — was Demetri Cichinelli. Almost everything else about him is missing: where in Sicily he was born, when, whether he emigrated, where he went after walking away.
The first name Achilles recurs by coincidence on his daughter’s husband’s side too: Ines’s husband John Lazare had a brother also named Achilles Jeannopoulos (who anglicized to Alfred A. Johnson). The two Achilleses were unrelated; the name simply landed on both sides of Aline’s family tree.