ABSTRACT
A few months ago the author's friend Romain Gary killed himself. He left behind a last note, written in his almost childish handwriting which, as the author knows from the days when they were classmates in the same French lycee, had scarcely changed over the long years: the same tiny script in which he wrote, never altering a stroke, his fifteen or twenty books, of which the best were not the most successful, and the easiest became best-sellers and famous films, all unfailingly less than good. Some of his novels are obviously very close to his own personal adventures; others take place in German-occupied Poland among partisans and refugees or in Vichy France among youth gangs; and although he was at the time either in London or in Africa, these were among his strongest pieces of fiction. The day after his death had been reported in the newspapers came a telephone call from a popular illustrated Paris weekly.
