A great name of French literature and journalism has just left us.
Jean d'Ormesson was a writer, a great writer in Le Figaro, the author of more than forty novels, among them «La gloire de l'Empire», «Au Plaisir de Dieu», «Le Bonheur à San Miniato». A wonderful storyteller, he knew how to combine humour and scholarship with an incomparable sense of formula.
Elected to the French Academy in 1973, he will have known in his lifetime the honors of the Pléiade.
A man of pen, a man of letters, Jean d'Ormesson was just as much a man of speech, and in all circumstances a man of spirit, who at first liked to play with words and cultivated like no other the beautiful art of conversation. Reading it was a delight, listening to it an enchantment.
Jean d'Ormesson not only wrote, he made us want to read: his works, and those of the great authors he liked to quote.
For literature, he was more than a writer: he was a daily ambassador.
My thoughts are with his loved ones.