Translator: Gianna Carroni Reviewer: Denise RQ
Being an old man is not so bad.
For most people, life is like eating asparagus.
At first, childhood is sweet, happy, and lighthearted.
Teen age is always good,
the first loves, the hopes, the discoveries.
And then it gets harder, the career, the responsibilities;
but you can still enjoy it.
Then it comes a time when it gets so hard, sour and full of fiber,
that you are just happy to end it all.
I had to swallow my asparagus life the other way around.
The beginning was leathery, pugnacious,
the school, the strict parents, and then the war.
The gas masks, the alarm sirens,
and then the Nazi occupation, the yellow star.
My family would go into hiding in Dordogne under false identity.
Way better was my early apprenticeship as a print maker, since I was 14.
Then the hiding in the bush, the resistance.
Bit by bit sweeter, the liberation, the love, the children.
My business life, the creation, the journeys.
Today I find myself at this crispy and delicious point,
free, happy, I write books,
and the only thing I am afraid of, is that my asparagus will come to an end.
As Woody Allen said,
"I am not afraid of death,
I just don't want to be there when it happens."
The sour, tough beginning of my asparagus was occupation.
When I was 15, I joined the Maquis in Corrèze
and took the position of liaison officer.
In fact, I carried envelopes from a bush to another,
by bike, with a schoolbag on my shoulders
so that to look like a boy going to school.
One day in 1943, on a bridge,
German soldiers helped by some militants checked the papers.
The militants were those extremist collaborators
in charge of arresting members of the Resistance, Jews, Gipsy and Maquis,
and handing them over to the Gestapo.
A militant stops me, makes me get off my bike,
and asks for my papers.
They were false,
and the message I was delivering was particularly compromising.
I was about to show him my papers,
when a German soldier at the other end of the bridge
calls him and asks him to come immediately.
What a miracle! The militant signals me to leave.
After that time,
I told myself that nothing really bad could possibly happen to me.
I am still astounded. I am 89 and a half years old.
(Laughter)
Since I was 80, we celebrate the half year anniversary,
like they do with babies.
(Laughter)
You never know!
(Laughter)
Sometimes during my life, I asked myself, "What does being old mean?"
What do you think of? What do you do?
What do you love?
Do you wait for death with a mixture of patience and fear?
Or maybe you repel the idea, trying to live yet so intensely,
looking around you, participating,
making an effort to understand what's going on in the world?
I chose the second option. I find my way out in writing books.
The road to happiness does not exist.
After all, should it exist,
it'd be so very crowded that it would not be walkable.
In compensation, you find a bustle of narrow secret paths,
while looking around you, of tiny charming delights.
I rarely happen to think about death.
It is a word that I don't like, anyway, it is a sinister word.
"End of life" seems to me more appropriate to what I feel.
One day, this beautiful adventure must as well come to an end.
On the other hand, my friend's passing is difficult to accept.
Sometimes I feel like I am in a forest that endured a hurricane,
and I am going to be the only tree still standing.
What I fear, is the relaxing armchair on which one falls asleep
in a sugary and cottony half-sleep.
But as for now, I am not there yet.
People often ask me,
"What do you do to stay fit and good-humoured after all this years?"
I am not a guru, I cannot teach how to live a joyful life.
But what I can do
is sharing with you some things from my huge trunk of memories,
mixed with happiness, melancholy, and some kind of bliss.
There are years and years of that, a friend used to tell me,
"What annoys me most in you is that you are always blissfully happy."
70 years later, I am still always happy, in front of inventions, innovations,
films, books, music, design.
Yes, I am happy.
When I browse my tablet to know everything about Blaise Pascal,
or to find a new washing machine,
and it blinks as if saying, "Got it!",
and in a few seconds it tells me
everything about the dear Blaise,
while showing me the last 100 washing machine models.
In the past, if you wanted to quickly get some information about a philosopher,
or about the last appliances,
you had to subscribe to a pay telephone service.
You would type SVP 11 11
on your telephone's keyboard
and ask your question to an operator.
She would check her notes and call you back.
SVP 11 11 answered to about 5,000 questions per day.
Today, there are more than three billion searches on Google per day,
that is almost 40,000 per second.
Yes, I am happy...
when I take the Channel Tunnel,
of which I had the chance to witness the connection of its two halves
during its building.
I am happy when they treat me with radiotherapy
instead of slicing me like other times.
That's the kind of things that give me hope
and make me believe that men can be extraordinary.
And women as well, of course. Starting with my wife.
I want to tell you about how we first met. She was rather surprising.
It was the epoch of surprise parties, slow dancing and swing.
Everyone brought their 45 rpm records and their whiskey bottles.
I ask a girl to dance.
I ask her name,
she replies, "Lise Weill."
"That's funny, mine's Claude Weill."
"Oh, yes, that's funny indeed!"
"And the girl over there, she's my sister, Micheline Weill."
"Oh well, my sister's name is also Micheline Weill!"
"Please, don't tell me that your father's name is Robert!"
"But it is indeed, my father's name is Robert.
But he is dead."
"My father's dead too."
"That's incredible! Where do you live?" "In the 17th road."
"Me too."
"And you are 19?" "Me too."
We left together.
We walked along Niel Avenue, it was dark and very cold.
Lise put her hand in my coat's pocket.
And this is how we have been together for 70 years.
Our jobs were completely different.
I was the manager of a retail advertising company.
Lise was a dental surgeon.
Beside her dental practice, she'd created a free dental care service
in a Parisian hospital.
It was before CMU started.
Later, she funded an association with some colleagues,
they went to far-off regions where no dentists used to go.
They treated people that sometimes were at risk of dying of malnutrition,
since their teeth were in such a bad shape that they refused to feed themselves.
Lise trained the inhabitants in basic dental care.
She has also worked in the Andes, at an altitude of more than 4000 meters,
or in Nicaragua, during the war.
To operate in those regions without electric power,
Lise had created a special suitcase together with an engineer.
The top part enclosed a solar panel,
and the inner part a complete kit of dental care tools.
Lise's suitcase, as we called it then,
it's a tool that is nowadays used all over the world.
For this commitment and many more, she received the Legion of Honor
from Bernard Kouchner's hands.
When we met again, we had so many things to tell each other,
and that is perhaps one of the secrets of our couple's vitality.
My bliss didn't prevent me to be often insurgent,
indignant, upset because of injustice and fanatism.
Lise and I have been active members of Amnesty International for 40 years,
to defend human rights.
And while fighting for this common cause,
we met amazing people that became close friends of ours.
In Madagascar, I took part in the building of a school,
and of a refuge village with 100 houses,
that still progresses thanks to his creator, Daniel Dupuis,
in spite of the huge problems they are facing in that country.
One day, a friend that I really admired said to me,
"One cannot die before having written a book."
He died without writing any.
As for me, I followed his advice, I've already written fourteen.
But I have to hurry!
After what happened with Charlie Hebdo, at the kosher shop and at the Bataclan,
I was bewildered, despondent.
I felt disquiet and demoralization around me.
In defiance, in revolt against it I wanted to write a joyful and carefree book,
trying to give back for a moment their smiles to my loved ones
and to the unknown people that will read it.
I wrote "Zero Sadness!", illustrated by Claire Maupas,
whom I also entrusted with this talk's drawings.
Here then, you will have understood that being old is not so bad.
I haven't got any recipes for a happy old age to give you,
but what I say is that, at 30...
At 30? No, at 89 and a half,
(Laughter)
I still want to learn, to love,
and to stuff myself with asparagus!
(Applause)
Thank you!
(Applause)
Thank you!
(Applause)