The former best friend I had never replaced. My brother from another mother. We’d known each other forever; my mother’s family and his father’s family both hailed from Montaldicio, an Italian village in Piedmont. Before my parents were offered housing on the campus of Saint-Ex, we had been next-door neighbors on the chemin de la Suquette in Antibes. Our houses offered a sweeping view of the Mediterranean; our gardens, separated only by a low drystone wall, provided the venue for our games of soccer and our parents’ barbecues.

Unlike me, Maxime had not been very good at school. Though far from stupid, he was a little immature and more interested in sports and blockbuster movies than the subtleties of L’Éducation sentimentale and Manon Lescaut. During summer vacation, he would work as a beach attendant at the Batterie du Graillon in Cap d’Antibes. He cut a handsome figure: sculpted torso, shaggy, surf-rat hair, Rip Curl trunks, and laceless Vans. He had the blond, wistful innocence of a teenager in a Gus Van Sant movie.

Maxime was the only son of Francis Biancardini, a well-known contractor in the area who had built up an empire at a time when regulations about the awarding of public contracts were more relaxed. Because I knew him well, I could tell that Francis was a complex, ambiguous, intensely private individual. But to most people he seemed like a boor, with his coarse bricklayer’s hands, his potbelly, his rough manners, and the drunken ramblings that often echoed the rhetoric of the National Front. It didn’t take much for him to get going. He lined up in his sights those he believed responsible for the country’s decadence—“Arabs, commies, feminazis, and faggots.” He was a bigoted white alpha male who hadn’t yet realized that his world had disappeared.

Having spent years in the shadow of a father he both worshipped and despised, Maxime struggled to carve out a place for himself. Only after the events of December 1992 did he manage to break free of his father’s grip. His metamorphosis spanned twenty years and occurred in stages. Once a second-rate student, Maxime began to study hard and earned an engineering degree in building and public works. He then took the reins of his father’s business and transformed it into a leader in green construction techniques. He was involved in setting up Platform77, the biggest start-up incubator in southern France.

Around the same time, he came out as gay. In the summer of 2013, a few weeks after the same-sex marriage bill was passed, he and his partner, Olivier, were married at the Antibes city hall. Olivier Mons, another Saint-Ex alumnus, was director of the city’s multimedia library. Now, in 2017, they were raising two little girls, born to a surrogate mother in the United States.