The Capture

Pierre Bergounioux is one of the major writers of our time. If his work has a worldwide impact, it also has its privileged domains: history and literature, remembering and writing, childhood and the Corrèze. A voice, indeed, but also a body – gnarled but stirring, like one of Giacometti’s sculpture. Devoured with passions, Pierre is a man who fiercely gathers things, scrap iron, insects, everything, and a man who collects words to tell us about it with the same intensity.

Six months ago, together we left for the plateau of Millevaches. I had asked him to catch his favourite insects for us: a beetle, a butterfly and “hoplies”… We had ten days. It was in June, normally it would have been sunny days, abounding with insects. But it would have been too great, too easy. It wouldn’t have been the plateau. It wouldn’t have been Pierre.