“It’s not enough to be a best-selling author, you have to fight against these injustices that you denounce in your books.” Dominique Lapierre, the philanthropic writer who made India his second home, has died at the age of 91.
After having written, alone, the city of joy (1985), on a slum in Calcutta, he gave a good part of his royalties to the destitute who had inspired him. The sum was plump: the novel sold a total of 12 million copies and was the subject of a film, directed by Roland Joffé, in 1992. The former journalist then joined forces with a “feather brother”the American Larry Collins: their six novels, including Is Paris burning? had sold some 50 million copies.
“One million TB patients cured”
In 2005, Dominique Lapierre ensured that, thanks to his royalties, donations from readers and earnings from lectures given all over the world, his humanitarian action “had made it possible to cure 1 million tuberculosis patients in twenty-four years, treat 9,000 leprosy children, build 540 drinking water wells and equip four hospital ships on the Ganges delta”.
In the Indian state of West Bengal, he was “raised to idol status”as shown by a striking report by Paris Match in 2012 when it was looking for new funding for its humanitarian centers to compensate for the drop in donations, due to the European and American financial crisis.
When he was not traveling, he occupied a house in Ramatuelle (Var), separated from that of Collins, who died in 2005, by a tennis court, acquired with the copyright of Is Paris burning?, (1964, 20 million readers, 30 international editions). Dominique Lapierre was born on July 30, 1931 in Châtelaillon, in the west of France, to a diplomat father and a journalist mother. High school student at Condorcet, in Paris, he became a journalist at the beginning of the 1950s. Paris Match, traveling through the hotspots of the planet.
“A drop in the ocean of needs”
In the early 1980s, after the publication of Tonight freedom, he arrives with his wife at Mother Teresa’s, in Calcutta. He begins by giving her $50,000, saying: “It’s a drop in the ocean of needs.” The nun replies: “Without them, the ocean would not be the ocean.”
He then gave several million dollars to programs to fight leprosy, cholera or tuberculosis, for the construction of housing or the distribution of microcredits.
Among other initiatives, Dominique Lapierre, who spoke fluent Bengali, had opened several schools in the region. Part of their funding came from the auction (2006, $825,000) of a dress worn by actress Audrey Hepburn, in the film Diamonds on couch (1961). He had received it as a gift from the couturier Hubert de Givenchy.