• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

We haven’t talked about Sarkozy, you said. Frankly, that’s no harm. And I propose that we continue to keep him out of it, a book without Sarkozy being something of a miracle these days.

Nor have we mentioned his opponents on the left, and that’s no loss either. As for my becoming minister of culture, frankly, the post would be so opposed to my lifestyle, to my most pressing literary and philosophical needs, and also to my taste for independence, I think we’d better forget about that.

Among the list of the omissions you regret, there are only two names that I’m also sorry we didn’t get to talk about more, and I don’t want to finish up without saying at least a word or two about them.

First, Malraux. That giant. Along with Malaparte, perhaps, the most underestimated writer of the twentieth century. Except that in my case I wouldn’t describe him as a “model,” for the simple reason that I am too torn, fractured, divided, and my taste for multiple, parallel, and contradictory lives is too strong for me to have one single model, no matter how immense, radiant, incontestable he might be …

I told you how, when I was a child, I fixed up a hut at the bottom of the garden, among the trees, where I used to hide in order to imagine my funeral and declaim my future oration.

What I didn’t mention is that I regularly changed the speech I made, as in the meantime I’d changed my biography and destiny.

I might be a writer whose premature death was lamented.

Or an explorer to whom the word owed the discovery of a city that had been engulfed, an Atlantis.

Or a revolutionary, as incorruptible as Robespierre, as angelic as Saint-Just, as surrounded by women as Danton or Mirabeau.

Or the John the Baptist of a religion whose liturgy and rites I imagined in detail.

Another time, in my musical period, I was a virtuoso who, like Glenn Gould, dropped dead onto his piano.

Another time I was a hero of the Resistance and in a trembling voice I conjured up the tortures he had been forced to endure in order to make him give up his network, before dying without having said a word.

I can’t even say that I was always a hero, a great this or that, lamented by the community of honest folk. My appetite for trying out destinies was so strong, the spectrum of the lives that seemed to me to be worth living seemed so vast, that sometimes I also slipped into the roles of the bad guys, bastards, or official scum, into whose eulogies I put just as much effort: Tony Camonte in Scarface, whose execution I considered shameful for the police but rather glorious for himself … Cody Jarrett in the final scene, apocalyptic but beautiful and also worth a eulogy in White Heat by Raoul Walsh, or, of course, Michel Poiccard, alias Jean-Paul Belmondo, killed by Inspector Vital in the last scene of the great À bout de souffle, which contributed no less than the Comédie humaine or Phenomenology of Spirit to make me the man I am. Jean Seberg was there before me in my garden, in the front row, choking with emotion, grief, and remorse when she heard my oration …

And the worst thing is that at those moments when, at the summing-up, the tears came to my eyes as well, it was less my death that I was lamenting than the concentration of merit that I had just been praising, with which Plutarch’s Lives or Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives could hardly keep up, and I also mourned all those other lives, the ones the men I buried had renounced and that I didn’t have enough of my childhood or—what am I saying—enough of my life left to fit in also.

Fifty years later, I’m still in the same place.

Les vies—Lévy* … the lives of my infinite number of models.

Malraux, of course, without whom there would have been no Bangladesh and no Bosnia.

But Sartre also, the man of the century. And Camus—I dream of writing an equally extensive book about him one day. And Baudelaire, to whom I’ve already devoted a book containing some of my real secrets. Hemingway because of Spain. Ovid because of the art of loving. And my rabbis. My criminals from Sarajevo. Leibniz of the thousand