Le Dernier des justes

2026 was to be the year a new season of Koh-Lanta was broadcast. The Librairie Walden, which has neither a television nor any streaming subscription, could nonetheless not remain entirely indifferent to the event once it learned that one of its bibliophile clients — and a friend — would be among the cast. A familiar figure of Parisian bibliophily, in the prime of life, he was staking his bet on an adventure that was first of all a family matter, and then resolutely personal: to prove to his children that one can still reinvent oneself, and to himself that he was not condemned to raids on bookshops alone.

The preparation lived up to the desert-island fantasy: an almost exclusive diet of white rice, a drastic cut in sugar, kick-boxing sessions at dawn, interval training in the rain, core exercises in the living room between two catalogues. Alongside this physical asceticism came a genuine mental preparation: Robinson Crusoe to tame solitude, Walden to sketch out an unofficial manual of gentle self-sufficiency, L’Enfant et la rivière to recover the childlike instinct to jump off the jetty without thinking, and finally 1984 as a survival manual for facing obscure rules, forced alliances and rewritings of reality. A pocket library to withstand the tribal council.

What no one had anticipated was that the novel would tip over into uncomfortable documentary territory. Normalized cheating, a stolen immunity necklace, shifting instructions, tacit “arrangements”: as the days went by, several contestants watched the spirit of the game give way to a moral improvisation that became increasingly hard to swallow. Despite having signed a confidentiality clause — heavy with legal and financial threats — some felt they could not simply file this season away among their shameful memories. Hence this “whistleblower” approach: to speak, to testify, to document, so that what happened there would not simply vanish onto an erased hard drive.

As a preview, and with the agreement of the “whistleblowers” and the magazine’s editorial staff, the Librairie Walden presents this issue of Paris Match that lit the fuse: a collector’s issue, above all a pre-publication issue, sought after by these eliminated contestants who will never have their moment of prime time, but who will at least have found refuge on the tables of a bookshop with no television.

The bookshop lends its full support to this act of speaking out: readers will discover, next Sunday at their newsstands, the full extent of the affair.