Pierre Bergé: fashion, collecting and a great book in 2003

I suspected indeed the certainty that I had made a mistake in telling in one of my books fifty years later (It was in MayMarsilio, 2018) what had happened in 1968 in one of the iconic places of the Parisian “joli mai”., i.e. in the Odéon theater that the students occupied for a few weeks. I had been to the Odéon a couple of times to listen to what the occupants recited into the microphone one after the other, and I wrote about it like this: “For three weeks, citizens of all types to have their say, preferably in a loud and hoarse voice: one afternoon I spent hours listening to them, mostly rants without rhyme or reason”. And so far my judgment was absolutely correct. Only that after reading a fine book by the French fashion entrepreneur / great art collector / writer Pierre Bergé (Les jours s’en vont je demeureGallimard, 2003) I realized that I had incorrectly reported the attitude of those who had been the rulers of the Odéon until the time of the occupation, the great actor and theater director Jean-Louis Barrault and the actress Madeleine Renaud, two who had been a couple since 1936.

Who better than Bergé (who died at the age of 86 in 2017) could tell their words and their emotions, given that on the evening of the occupation he had entered the theater to listen to the students, he who was a friend of Barrault and Renaud and who late at night he drove them home. From what I had read about him in the newspapers at the time, it seemed to me that the attitude of those two giants of the modern theater had been one of condescension towards the occupants; Barrault had in fact pronounced a “Barrault is dead” and he seemed to me he meant that the theater traditionally understood was dead because overwhelmed by the real living of people in the manner of the occupiers. But no. The confrontation between the occupants and the Barrault/Renaud duo had been heartbreaking. In the sense that those thugs were defiling everything in the lives and careers of those two heroes of the modern theatre.

“After a few hours – writes Bergé – it became evident that all was lost, that Madeleine and Jean-Louis would be forced to leave their theater, that bestiality would win”. And all the more so since the government made the two actors pay for having attempted to negotiate with the “populace”, with those whom the Gaullists considered scum and that’s it. The Minister of Culture, none other than André Malraux, refused to receive Barrault and Renaud. When the government decided to clear the theater, it was keen to show everywhere that it had been necessary to disinfest the premises as to how many homeless people had slept in the Place de l’Odéon and perhaps had deposited something there. From then on, the Barrault/Renaud duo wandered from one theater to another, in the manner of someone who no longer had a real home. “They aged badly,” writes Bergé. Barrault died at the age of eighty-four in January 1994. His contemporary Renaud died a few months later, in September of the same year.

Why am I giving such importance to Bergé’s testimony? Because it’s an outstanding character of Paris which for most of the twentieth century was the world capital of culture and the arts. A character we have no equal in recent Italian history. Entrepreneur very expert in the world of fashion, the one who with the “talent” of Yves Saint Laurent (he was his lover for 18 years) created the legend of one of the great fashion houses of the French post-war period. A highly envied bibliophile, and this in the homeland of bibliophilia. As collectors of all the good things of the modern arts, he and Saint Laurent lived in an apartment which, in terms of furnishings, was perhaps the most dazzling in all of chic Paris. As for the auction house founded by Bergé, over the years it has offered the best of the private libraries put up for sale in France. And I’m not done, actually.

As a writer Bergé he stands up to comparison with so many fine French writers of his time, so rich is the range of his interests, the refined grace with which he tells the important characters he met, the independence of judgment with which he evaluates and catalogs painters, writers, politicians. Some of you who are reading me are not as addicted to 20th-century French culture as I am, but I assure you that Bergé’s book from which I started is a diamond weighing I don’t know how many carats. I started reading it one afternoon and never stopped until late in the evening, after reading the last line. It’s not that you read it, you savor it.

To savor is a verb that suits Bergé when he is talking about Jean Cocteau, Andy Warhol, Rudolf Nureyev, Louis Aragon, Anne Marie de Noailles, even François Mitterrand, of whom it is clear that Bergé liked the fact that he loved books as much as if not more than politics. She last saw him seven days before his death (January 18, 1996). The disease that Mitterrand had long fought against had tried it. He couldn’t swallow anything anymore, he was curled up in an armchair in his house. “Keep me informed about Zola,” he told a Bergé who was taking his leave and who had spoken to him about the need to preserve a house where the great French writer had lived. And in any case the chapter of the book that moved me the most is the one dedicated to Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a writer whose reading had made Bergé “collapsed”. It is none other than the story of a visit to the last French house where Céline lived and died, in Meudon. There is a Céline who talks about it, who always tells it in her own way, who sees enemies everywhere, who is angry with the whole world. But who cares, it was Céline and she stood before him.