L’Angoisse du roi Salomon

“He had climbed into my taxi on Boulevard Haussmann, a very old gentleman with a fine white mustache and beard, which he later shaved off once we knew each other better. His barber had told him it made him look older, and since he was eighty-four-odd years old, there was no point in adding to it”: the burlesque tribulations of a taxi driver drawn into the life of a former trouser virtuoso turned benefactor of humanity, told with immense tenderness and emotion in the second-to-last book published by Romain Gary (before Les Cerfs-volants), and three years after winning the Prix Goncourt for La Vie devant soi — and thus the last published under his pseudonym.

The book appeared in March 1979, in a printing of 5,000 copies, including 45 deluxe copies; it went through three further printings at the Mercure de France before being taken over by Gallimard in 1987.