He loved the number five, yes for being born on 05/05/1935. I don’t think he never played it at roulette, but there you have it, without being superstitious for a penny, he liked this number and he waited until the day after his 89th birthday to accept that this life he had loved so much no longer had any reason to exist. Diminished, without balance, dependent, affected by two of the “four horsemen of the apocalypse – cancer, heart attack, stroke, Alzheimer’s – and the fear of the body sinking” as he wrote in his last book, …but life goes on (Albin Michel, 2021). “How do you wish to die?” François Busnel then asked him on his set of The Great Bookstore including the former host ofApostrophes was the exceptional guest. “By reading Paul-Louis Courier, La Fontaine or Giono, while listening to Mozart,” replied the interviewee. Not without adding “as late as possible, of course”… The latest possible has arrived. Did he listen to Mozart at the American hospital in Paris where he stayed too often instead of writing or (and) appearing on stage in France? Certainly. We can also bet that the graduate of the Journalist Training Center, class of 1957, eternally passionate about current affairs, must have continued to devour the press, The Team on your mind.
So he left, without any decoration (he refused them all), but with, as we can already hear, a concert of praise. Let’s not kid ourselves. There was a time when, even if publishers and authors flocked to his set, certain media and intellectuals spoke of the broadcasts of this son of Lyon merchants with a certain condescension. Too popular, Bernard Pivot, too populo, not selective enough. And then he loved wine and football. Not very chic… This son of Beaujolais recalled with humor in his Wine lovers dictionary the charges brought against him during the years ofApostrophes : “Could we rely on a consumer of Beaujolpif to talk with Marcel Jouhandeau, Marguerite Yourcenar, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Dumézil, Julien Green…?” But let’s have a short memory, as he himself had, let’s be selective, let’s listen to the national emotion.
In fact, Bernard Pivot always bowed out on time. Party ofApostrophes, in 1990, after fifteen and a half years on the show, to, at the age of 55, “embark on new adventures, avoid routine and weariness”. Monthly management party Read (founded in 1975 with Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber) in 1996, then passing the baton to Pierre Assouline, so as not to rush the job (as he would cease his literary contributions to the JDD in February 2022). Party of Culture broth in 2002, at age 67, before France 2 kicked him out after eleven successful seasons (a great longevity, all in all, due to his intact hair, he used to say, half-jokingly, half-seriously). Left the Goncourt academy in December 2019, of which he had held the presidency since 2014 “to find free and full use of his time” he said, but also before facing a year 2020 source of severe ills on which – out of modesty or exorcism – he will never have dwelt.
Likewise, he had stopped acting (reading-show of Memories of a head scratcher and D’Help ! The words ate me), this new costume worn late, to his great joy, as he confided to us during the publication of Memory does as it pleases, in 2017: “You experience an almost carnal relationship with the spectators, who applaud and, above all, laugh. Making people laugh is a joy that I discovered late in life. When I left television, I operated on a total reconversion and I found pleasure in it. It proves that there is life after television.” On the other hand, he continued to tweet until last November, accumulating, through his witticisms, some 1 million subscribers (“It’s a very pleasant exercise in style. To maintain my spirit, instead of doing crosswords, I tweet”). Under his name, on the social network, joined in November 2011, at 76 years old, he summarized himself as follows: “Apostrophes, Culture Broth, Double I, Writing, Football, Gluttony, Man, Interview, Journalism, Kiosk, Reading, Words………….Damn.” “I have a taste for words, expressions and circumflex accents,” he confided to us on this subject; I am in favor of adding more, moreover. Like fashion accessories, they make up the aesthetics of the French language.” In short, Bernard Pivot will have had a thousand lives, like the cats he loved.
“Bernard Pivot, from the Académie Goncourt and the Cave cooperative de Quincié”: the letterhead of the journalist and writer well sums up the man who knew, despite the television madness and the Parisian jokes, to keep his Beaujolais roots and his humor – one of the reasons for his extraordinary popularity, certainly. The other qualities, which will have contributed to his capital of sympathy with the French for ages? He was a hard worker, of unalterable curiosity, endowed with a certain malice with a zest of irreverence towards the powerful, with a false naivety and good nature but with real intelligence, absolute honesty, little subject to cronyism, not at all sensitive to false glories… Qualities which, all combined, ultimately make a fairly rare cocktail, to which the general public has been sensitive. Well, we will have understood, your devoted person is not completely objective because let’s say it, Bernard Pivot will have been her master, her mentor. It is he, with Pierre Boncenne, his deputy editorial director of Read, who will have put my foot in the stirrup, given his confidence by integrating me into the teams of Read and D’Apostrophes in 1987 then Culture brothresponded willingly to my interviews when he multiplied his own bestsellers (The profession of reading, responses to Pierre Nora, 100 words to save, 100 expressions to save, Wine lovers dictionary, Words of my life, Yes, but what is the question ?HAShelp! The words ate me, Memory does as it pleases, Read!, with Cécile Pivot).
Does the master have any faults? Yes, impatience, and a failing memory (how many times in front of a “known stranger”, has his dear assistant, Anne-Marie Bourgnon, served as his “prompter”). Yet, strangely, in Memory does as it pleases, the lively octogenarian recounted memories easily. Explanation from the maestro: “It’s quite strange, in fact. I wonder a lot about how memory works. Mine is not very good, since I have never been able to recite, like Robert Sabatier, hundreds of verses, or list, like Jorge Semprun, the names of the members of the Politburo of 1936. But, at the same time, I I kept the memory of very specific things: my departure from Figaro, my first broadcast, or the progress of the Saint-Etienne-Bayern European Cup final match, in Glasgow, without remembering anything about the city. It was this inability to memorize places that dissuaded me from writing novels, except Love in vogue, my pleasant mistake of youth.” And to evoke Karen Blixen, the author of The African Farm, with a body eaten away by syphilis, a sort of “Voltaire, all bones, ridges, at the end of his life” interviewed at Drouant, the “distant and cold” François Mauriac, the “fine scholar” Jean-François Revel, Maurice Druon, “lesson-giver full of arrogance and arrogance”.
At this point, my memories flood. In a mess. The composure of Bernard and his guests (Michel Tournier, a blind photographer…) when they appear on the set of Culture broth “the man with the knife”, threatening to kill himself live, during the broadcast of March 15, 1992 entitled “Clins d’œil” (sic); the last performance of François Mitterrand, recorded without an audience and in an external studio a few days before its broadcast on April 14, 1995; the first meeting of the children of Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (with two beds as they said) who came to listen to their father’s Nobel Prize in physics; the impressive Alain Delon, walking in circles, for half an hour before the show, like a caged beast; Michel Serres arrived by bike from Vincennes on a strike day; Luchini’s antics; the flight of Marc Dugain’s first novels (The Officers’ Chamber) and Daï Sije (Balzac and the little Chinese tailor) ; the visit to the Babelsberg studios with Volker Schlöndorff to prepare a Berlin show…
And always, after the live broadcast, a quick phone call to Monique, then his wife, to find out her verdict, and before the live broadcast, the same simplicity of the host: that his interlocutor is a great writer (Soljenitsyn), a high religious authority (the Dalai Lama), a political figure (Raymond Barre) or an illustrious stranger, he treated them equally, said the same words to them, of appeasement and trust. And again, Pivot as a schoolmaster, at the podium of the UN General Assembly, in New York in 1992, during the super final of the dictation of the famous Dicos d’or (world spelling championship ). And also, as a Goncourt academician this time, trips to Beirut, Tunis or even the Grand Hôtel de Cabourg in 2019 to celebrate the hundred years of Marcel Proust’s Goncourt prize for In the shade of young girls in flowers.
Of course, we should also remember all the memorable plateaus ofApostrophes : Raymond Devos, Pierre Bourdieu, Marcel Jouhandeau, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the new philosophers, Claude Hagège, William Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov and his famous “teapot”, the drinking binge of the American Charles Bukowski, the clandestine interview with Lech Walesa , the tête-à-têtes with Françoise Dolto, Georges Dumézil, Julien Green, Georges Simenon, Marguerite Duras, Jules Roy, Marguerite Yourcenar, the Romain Gary/Paul Pavlowitch affair, the multiple invitations from Michel Tournier, Jean d’Ormesson, Max Gallo and Philippe Labro… And Solzhenitsyn, obviously, met four times (“four extraordinary moments”), the first interview dating from the end of 1973, when The Gulag Archipelagoin one of the broadcasts ofOpen the quotes, Solzhenitsyn, the Russian giant about whom Bernard said: “The author from One Day by Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Pavilion was really impressive. By his stature, his beard, his physique. Everything he represented, the war, the gulag, cancer, in short, everything he had escaped, and his incredible courage made you feel stupid and small in front of him. It is as if you had received de Gaulle!”
So, time for one last personal memory, anecdotal, but precious (in my eyes). Equipped with two tickets for a PSG-Saint-Etienne match taking place at the Parc des Princes on November 3, 2012, I suggested to Bernard, trembling and a little daring, to accompany me. He accepted, as a big fan of the Greens. To our great surprise, Saint-Etienne won 2 to 1. A feat! And Bernard, in heaven, for thanking me. More warmly than he had ever done.
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