C’était bien

This book is not a novel, or at least not a work of fiction. It is Jean d’Ormesson’s testamentary collection. For the first time, he recounts, without literary artifice or pretense, his experience, his past, and the most exhilarating hours of his long and adventurous life. The occasion allows the academician to reflect on the reality of happiness and on the world’s capacity to produce cruelty and vice. Jean d’Ormesson touches on his many passions: books, women, the Mediterranean Sea… A confession that reveals the writer’s intimate thoughts, as he stages himself with his characteristic gentleness. A fine literary moment blending the melancholy of passing time with the joy of an extraordinary life. Lightness and gravity.