“We owe it to him for having enlarged our lives”, confides the writer Erik Orsenna

“The debt we owe to him is a debt of happiness, of openness, of possibilities.” Erik Orsenna, writer and member of the French Academy, imagines Bernard Pivot, who died Monday May 6 at the age of 89, as a “big brother, an uncle, a father or a mother who says to us ‘Hey, why don’t you take this trip?’ And then we followed him, we said thank you because I expanded, diversified, I was different. That’s culture.”.

“We owe it to him for having enlarged our livesconfides Erik Orsenna. We are sad at the same time [à l’annonce de la mort de Bernard Pivot]but infinitely aware of being immensely lucky to have met him, either via television, or concretely when we had the immense luck of being his friend for 40 years”, he explains. For him, Bernard Pivot “made us love the French language” and his dictations were a way of saying “You realize what a treasure you have which is called the language of your country ?”

Concerning the programs presented by Bernard Pivot, Erik Orsenna remembers that his friend invited a variety of people and that he liked a variety of books: “There were beginners and sacred monsters. It was incredible about him, he could have both light discussions and then he would confront Yourcenar, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov. He had no bias . He asked himself, ‘Does this book move me or not?'”