Anne-Marie Finkelstein and the friend who wished her well

His death ? Anne-Marie Finkelstein had no intention of letting herself be dispossessed of it. This former press boss, one of the few in a man’s world at the end of the 1980s, intended to keep control of her destiny with the same authority as she had led her career and her private life. A few weeks after learning that she was suffering from an inoperable brain tumor, in February 2015, she urged a childhood friend, Odile Rosenthal: “I warn you, I want a mass at Saint-Sulpice! Then you will have a drink to my health at the Café de la Mairie. I’ll tell them what wine I want them to serve. »

Odile Rosenthal remembers this meal very well at La Rotonde, the All-Paris restaurant where Anne-Marie Finkelstein then had her habits. On the table, a good bottle, one of those great vintages that she likes. Next to it, a pack of cigarettes, as essential as the burgundy. She drinks like she smokes – too much. Her glass in one hand, her cigarette in the other, Anne-Marie Finkelstein recounts the headaches, the fall in the street, the emergencies at Pitié-Salpêtrière, the discovery of glioblastoma and the advice of her friend, the neurologist Olivier Lyon-Caen: “Get your affairs in order, it could be in six months. »

It lasted almost eight years and it did not end as Anne-Marie Finkelstein had decided. The control of his life has escaped him, like a large majority of the million French people affected by a brain disease which leaves them totally dependent on their loved ones, not always well intentioned. According to a report by the National Health Agency published in December 2020, these neurodegenerative disorders, a major health problem, will affect around one million eight hundred thousand people by 2050.

“Margaret Thatcher to the tenth power”

Neither her education nor her career protected Anne-Marie Finkelstein. She was still in her head when, in the spring of 2015, after warning friends, she warned the major media figures she was close to. She invites Yves de Chaisemartin to lunch, whom she advised to the management of the Figaro and at the head of Marianne : “She told me she was going to die with amazing composure and detachment. I had known her without qualms at work, a sort of Margaret Thatcher to the power of ten, I found her intact. »

She invites the publisher Christian Brégou, founder of CEP Communication (former main rival of Hachette), for which she left the general management of echoes and of which she was the right arm for fifteen years (he notably entrusted her with the general management of the Express group in 2008), before joining The Parisian. She also confides to him her concern to ensure the continuity of her heritage. Christian Brégou understands very quickly, they have already discussed together the drama of the life of Anne-Marie Finkelstein: the bipolarity of her only son, Cyril Rojinsky, struck down by illness at the dawn of a brilliant career as a lawyer.

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