“Good sheets”. Brassens, Adjani, Truffaut, Dalida, Eddy, Yourcenar… For twenty years, Jacques Chancel, has received France Inter, artists, writers, or intellectuals to confess in his show, ” x-Ray “. Among the great interviews together in a book (” x-Ray “, 352 pages, Editions du sous-sol, 49 euros), “The World” has chosen to publish the meeting with the writer Romain Gary, carried out in June 1975, then he will receive, five months later, a second Goncourt prize under the pseudonym of Emile Ajar.

You do not have the impression, Romain Gary, for you to be a little too scattered ? You are writer, filmmaker, you have been consul, adviser of minister of information, you have without a doubt been tempted by the politics…

I pass on the trades that I made in my pre-order to survive, because I am of a medium that is extremely poor. I am engaged in aviation at the age of 23 years, I stayed for the aviator nine years, an instructor air weapons to the air school of Salon-de-Provence. I then joined de Gaulle, there has been the England, the battle of britain, Africa, Abyssinia, Libya, Syria, the whole nine yards until the landing in Normandy. After that, I’ve been a diplomat for seventeen years, and I conducted a consular career that I ended as consul general in Los Angeles in 1961. Then, I was, in effect, an adviser to a minister, I have done a lot of journalism, and I worked in film as a director.

But, there is more serious than that, in this dispersion. If I look at it in a cultural perspective, I see three things. I was born in Russia, I have stored up to the age of 7 or 8 years the Russian culture and the Russian language. Then, my mother had immigrated to Poland, and for five years, I have stored the Polish language and culture. And then, at the age of 12 years, I landed at Nice, and I topped up…