We walked a little way together. Pianelli was my age, and, like me, a local boy. We’d been in the same class right up to our final year. I remembered him as a loudmouth, a brilliant debater with a keen sense of logic who often unsettled our teachers. He was one of the few students in the school who had a political conscience. After taking the baccalauréat, although his grades had been good enough to get him a place in the Saint-Ex preparatory course for Sciences Po, he decided to study arts at the Nice Faculté des Lettres, a university my father dismissed as an “unemployment factory” and my mother scorned as being filled with a “bunch of leftist slackers.” But Pianelli had always wanted to be seen as a rebel. At Carlone, the arts college there, he walked a delicate line between the National Students’ Union and the Young Socialist Movement. He had his first moment of glory one spring evening in 1994 during an episode of Demain les Jeunes, a youth-culture program that gave dozens of students a platform to rail against proposals by the government to slash student grants. I’d recently rewatched the program online and was struck by Pianelli’s self-assurance. When he was called on to speak, he used his time to heckle and humiliate seasoned political pundits twice his age. He was hardheaded and not cowed by anyone.

“What did you think about Macron getting elected?” he asked suddenly. He was clearly still obsessed with politics. “It’s good news for guys like you, huh?”

“Writers?”

“No, filthy-rich fuckers!” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

Pianelli was a joker and he could be malicious, but I liked him. He was the only guy from Saint-Ex I was still regularly in touch with, although that was because he interviewed me for Nice-Matin whenever I published a new novel. He’d never aspired to a career in the national media, as far as I knew. He preferred being a jack-of-all-trades, the “Swiss army knife of journalism,” he called it. At Nice-Matin he was given free rein to write about whatever he liked—politics, the arts, city life—and it was this freedom that he really appreciated. Being a hack armed with a pen always in search of a scoop didn’t keep him from maintaining a certain objectivity. I read his reviews of my books because he could read between the lines. They weren’t always positive, but even when he had reservations, Pianelli never forgot that a novel—or a film or a play—was the result of years of hard work, of doubts, of rewrites. He might be critical, but he believed it would be cruel and arrogant to dismiss a novel in a few lines. “The average piece of bad writing is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so,” he once told me, freely adapting the line by Anton Ego, the food critic in Ratatouille.