“Help yourself, it’s free”slides François-Xavier Bustillo, radiant, with this inimitable mixed accent which marks both his Spanish birth, the Italian education of his Franciscan youth and, for thirty years, his French religious life. What a lovely evening, this August 29, in the softness of the summer sun setting over Ajaccio. The cardinal's coat of arms – the coat of arms of his Basque-Navarrese family associated with a Moor's head – is stretched from the first floor of the newly restored bishopric. Tents and copious buffets of Corsican specialties are set up in the courtyard for the hundreds of friends invited to celebrate the Legion of Honor of the 55-year-old prelate, the subject of a fascinating “Bustillomania” in Corsica even before his last title. of glory: attracting the pope on the island.
For this ceremony, the cardinal wanted to do things in a big way. He drew up the guest list himself, “personal for a personal evening”few priests and priests, but all the figures of power on the island. The future minister Catherine Vautrin, today in charge of the island file within the Barnier government, the prefect of Corsica (since named prefect of Brittany), the new rector, gendarmes and lawyers, bosses, without forgetting the elected officials of the island (now mostly nationalist). “Just reading the names and their titles before my speech took me five minutes”, jokes head chef Mathieu Pacaud.
It is he who, “in the name of the President of the French Republic”presented the cardinal with his knighthood insignia. The young chef and the man of the Church met at Laurent, the Michelin-starred and posh Parisian restaurant where Mathieu Pacaud officiates and meets all the French political world. “We call each other often, it’s become like my shrink, said the chef. Rarely has anyone made as much of an impression on me as him, except perhaps Guillaume Gallienne, twenty years ago. What strikes me is that he is never judgmental. »
“What is there to bless?” »
This August 29, the first president of the Bastia Court of Appeal, Hélène Davo, on vacation, is absent. A chance for her. Because, in the small assembly, there is a man convicted several times before the Corsican courts: Paul Canarelli, the boss of the sublime Murtoli hotel estate, a resort luxury sheepfolds located between Bonifacio and Sartène where ministers, people and also thugs on the run like to hide. His horizon is crowded: in a few months, he will be summoned to the Bastia court, where a new major case targeting Murtoli is being investigated. In the courtyard of the bishopric, the businessman rubs shoulders with the gendarmerie general Jean-Luc Villeminey, whose men are responsible for investigating Murtoli. But how can we imagine that Mr. Canarelli “sponsored” these feasts?
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