His real name was Robert Ducasse. We still call him Kari, as we did in the Latin Quarter before the war. He was part of a group of talented young *taupins*, some of whom went on to join Polytechnique, others Normale Supérieure, and others the Ponts or Centrale. As young officers at the start of the war, we later found them all in the Resistance.
Thus, our friend Kari, a graduate of Centrale and a naval officer, the son of a pastor serving in Dieuze, Moselle, found himself after the debacle somewhere in the Gard with his family. I knew all its members—three sisters and two brothers, of whom he was the eldest.
This tall, silent, athletic young man, somewhat mysterious even to those close to him, had been part of all our student adventures. With him, we kayaked down the gorges of the Tarn. With him, a dozen of us would set off, *peaux de phoque* under our skis, to conquer the snowy peaks of Queyras, descending in a blaze of powder. He would summon us at night under the dome of the Paris Observatory to introduce us to the wonders of the sky.
He took magnificent photographs. As skilled a sailor as he was a mountaineer, he was the best friend one could have. But he had his secret gardens, which we could never explore.
Pascal Convert
Artiste, Auteur
Pascal Convert was born in 1957 from a painter father and a writer mother. He recently published to Grasset editions a biographical narrative titled The Lion’s Constellation in which he recounts his childhood years.
Plastician, author of documentary films and writer, the question of memory and forgetting is at the heart of his work. He questions intimacy, politics and aesthetics using materials such as glass or wax that recall the passage of time, light, and the remanence of the past.
