Régis Debray’s tribute to Bernard Pivot

An old remorse, become a very close friend. To have him, one day, after a television broadcast in Quebec, the microphone remaining open without my knowledge, decked out, with a drink in his nose, with bird names (monopolist, dictator, suffocating Christian, etc.) without even remembering it the next morning, a reputation came to me: the bitter resentment of a little careerist bastard attacking the smiling apostle of literature. Enough to abandon the “cultural” interim at the Élysée, to embrace the “third world”.

It was undoubtedly the idea – false, I know today – that an austere servant of the Muses does not have television as a launching pad. We would be a cursed poet in his garret or a tout under the flashes. Or we work in the basement, only to resurface a century later in anthologies, or we strut on the terrace to end up at the Academy. Or very proud or very pushy. As if we don’t get used to everything in life, including the happy medium.

The football and semicolon lover who cherishes…