By Lucie Gosselin | Editor
Passionate journalist, for more than 10 years, I have been carrying out investigations, portraits, reports or interviews.
On May 6, Bernard Pivot bowed out at the age of 89. In order to pay tribute to him, his two daughters Cécile and Agnès decided to publish a book entitled “The taste of others”. Interviewed about the work in the pages of “Parisien”, Cécile chose to talk about the last years of the man of letters and they were not easy.
Bernard Pivot more autonomous: his last years far from being funny, his daughter Cécile testifies
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On May 6, one day after celebrating his 89th birthday, Bernard Pivot died in Neuilly sur Seine. With him went one of the greatest defenders of the French language and literature that his show Apostrophes helped to spread and popularize.
Since his death, his memory has been fervently maintained by Cécile and Agnès, his two grieving daughters. This is how they decided to publish a work in tribute to him. Titled The Taste of Others and published by Calmann Lévy, the book notably brings together unpublished photographs and reveals who Pivot really was. Cécile, her daughter, says that to achieve it, she “read dozens of articles, rewatched his broadcasts. I wanted the selected photos, taken from his albums, to be associated with written documents, quotes, testimonies, interviews, extracts from books, tweets… she specifies on the Calmann-Levy website, where it is published. To report on the formidable literary journalist that he was, but not only that. He was a passionate fan of football and wine, and a fine connoisseur of both drinks and football.”.
“It wasn't funny for him“, confides the daughter of Bernard Pivot
While Cécile evokes in the columns of Parisian this Sunday, December 22, this work which salutes the memory of the great man of lettersshe says more aboutthe father he was and about the last days he lived. “Even if he was not very present because he worked a lotthis did not prevent us from building a very strong relationship with him. Thanks to books, I formed a great bond. We had a great childhood. He was very close to his daughters. says Agnès' sister, recounting specific anecdotes, notably these jewels which he gave to his children for Christmas and which he went to pick up in a flea shop in Clignancourt.
This father of whom her daughter speaks with undisguised love – and who did not live with his last partner – she misses today. Thus, after explaining that she had cried a lot during the writing of the work, she confided: “November 22 was Saint Cecilia's Day and it was the first time he didn't celebrate it for me. This silence was painful.” A silence fell over the home last May, occurring after difficult years for the literary journalist, as his daughter Cécile still reports in this same interview: “Over the past four years, he was in great old age with loss of autonomyand it wasn't funny for him. He was wonderful, never complained. On the contrary, he never stopped thanking us, saying that he was lucky to be surrounded.”
This is so that the public knows even better this man full of kindness that his daughters choose today to honor him in bookstores, as a posthumous declaration of love.