Valéry Giscard d'Estaing on January 30, 2020 in Paris -

Michel Euler / AP / SIPA

It was as a writer that Valéry Giscard d'Estaing had spoken for the last time.

The last interview of his life had been for

Le Figaro

, which had the exclusive right to announce the publication in early November of his fifth novel,

Far from the noise of the world

(XO Editions), which tells of the flight of a former president of the Senate in the Central African Republic.

The hero will learn to hunt the elephant, a practice which he loathes.

"As soon as you pick up the quill to write, you talk about yourself," he confided.

"Literature makes it possible to create characters, to invent situations with borrowings from reality, memories or observation".

"I had a lukewarm reception"

The former president, aged 94, then gave his agreement in principle for an interview on this book addressing "the loneliness of power", in the words of its editor.

The interview never took place.

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing did not harbor any illusions about his own worth as a novelist.

Literary criticism was too harsh for that.

The reception given to his first novel,

Le Passage

, published in 1994, when he was 68, had been grating.

The press had made fun of it and the Guignols de l'Info had imagined a film adaptation… classified X. “I wrote in secret.

And, when I showed the first draft, I got a lukewarm reception.

(…) It hurt me.

He was an editor.

And then I said to myself: he must be right.

And I got back to work, alone, in the countryside, a whole summer, ”he told L'Express at the time.

Elected to the French Academy in 2003

Nothing had discouraged this admirer of Guy de Maupassant.

He had returned to the novel late, publishing in 2009, at age 83,

The Princess and the President

, fiction about the love between a French head of state and a British princess, he called "comic novel."

Asked about TV5Monde, he began by joking: “I had published a much better book, didn't I, which was the European Constitution!

Unfortunately, part of the French voted against ”.

It was first from an autobiographical angle that the books of the former President of the Republic were read.

The Princess and the President

 had aroused, above all, this cruel remark from the

New Obs

 : "Anne-Aymone, his wife, remains the simple creature who gardens while he writes a book in which he dreams not only of cheating on her, but of her. put to death to replace her with someone more glamorous ”.

Whatever, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing followed with

La Victoire de la Grande Armée

 in 2010, where he imagined the consequences of the success of Napoleon's Russian campaign, then

Mathilda

 in 2011, on the fate of a German in Namibia.

The professor of letters and pen of several politicians, Jean-François Brighelli, took a severe look at this work.

"Giscard - we remember his farewell to the French and this empty throne - never resigned himself to his defeat in 1981. Literature, starting with fiction, unfortunately, seemed to him a tool of perpetuation".

His great literary success remains his election to the Académie française in 2003.

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