I’m getting old, and of course my friends are getting old, and there are now quite a few people whose death I’m afraid to wake up to, but Benoît wasn’t one of them. I just didn’t see it coming. The news of his death plunged me into a state of horrified shock, and deep down I still can’t really believe it. I’m often about to call him to ask if he wants to do something together, visit a monument, eat in a restaurant, see a show, before reality catches up with me. This must be what the shrinks call denial. It’s strange because I don’t go in much for denial; I usually take tragic news on the chin, without my mind assembling the slightest escape. In the end, I don’t think you ever come to terms with the death of someone you love all at once; you have to come to terms with it over and over again, sometimes many times. The last people I had to mourn died after long illnesses, and you gradually resign yourself to it with each visit to the hospital. But with a sudden death it’s afterwards that you have to kill them inside yourself, and even then you can only kill them little by little.

It’s probably for the same reason that I didn’t manage to write the tribute to Benoît Duteurtre that I’d planned, so I’ll have to make do with my memories. I had put my favourite books by Benoît on my desk, and suddenly I realised that I couldn’t read them, that I couldn’t even physically open them. I was afraid to open them. I felt that reading the words in them would sign his death warrant. Since he won’t be writing any more, the words would become definitive, and I don’t want there to be anything definitive between us. We’ll be seeing each other again soon enough, anyway.

Strangely enough, our first encounter was an argument in print. At the time Jean Ristat was attempting to revive Lettres françaises, the magazine run by Aragon after the war. Ristat asked me to write an article on Prévert, who had just been published in the Pléiade. I wrote the article, which was frankly negative (and in fact I still don’t like Prévert), and sent it to him, though with some trepidation – the magazine was still financed by the Communist Party. Jean laughed out loud at the piece, and published it without the slightest hesitation, without the slightest cut; but in the following issue he published an article by Benoît, in which Benoît defended Prévert. (Jean Ristat was a rather peculiar Communist; he died in 2023.) I didn’t meet Benoît until two years later, in 1994, at one of the meetings held by another magazine, L’atelier du roman, where I also met Philippe Muray and Sempé. Milan Kundera came more rarely, as he was no longer on top form. There are more and more dead people in this article, I can’t help it.