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Paris (AFP) – The writer René de Obaldia died at the age of 103, the French Academy, of which he had been a member since 1999, told AFP on Thursday.
Asked regarding the death of its dean, announced first by L’Obs then Le Figaro, the guardian institution of the French language confirmed, adding that it did not know the circumstances.
Born in 1918 in Hong Kong, he was a poet and playwright, and had published shortly before reaching his 100th birthday “Perles de vie” (Grasset editions), where he noted the proverb: “To become a centenarian, you have to start young” .
This son of a Frenchwoman and a Panamanian, a diplomat in the city under British control, had then grown up in Amiens, in the region of his mother, then in Paris, where he had very early demonstrated his literary skills.
A prisoner during the Second World War, he then became a jack-of-all-trades writer, with a biting humour, cultivating detachment.
“I have always had this derisory side in me, which allowed me to put certain things at a distance”, he declared to L’Express in 2009.
In 1959, for example, he published “Le Centenaire”, a long romantic monologue by an old man who dwells on a multitude of memories.
His theatrical work earned him worldwide fame, with plays such as “Du vent dans les branches de sassafras”, “Monsieur Klebs et Rozalie” or “La Rue Obaldia”.
In his introduction to “Perles de vie”, he welcomed an “existence rich in metamorphoses: poems, novels, theater, memoirs”.
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