History of the club: media from 2000 to 2022 rediscovered! To see in the gazetteGo to info

Saturday 2 May: Grand-Est regional meeting at Col du HaagGo to info

Bulletin de l'Amicale des Cyclos Cardiaques N° 166Go to info

Commemorative gathering at the Alsace balloon: presentation and new articlesGo to info

13/08/00 : Death of Louis Nucera. Michel de Brébisson wished to reproduce the article in Le Monde written by one of Louis' friends

Louis Nucera

A passion for literature, friendship and cycling

WEDNESDAY 9 AugustLouis Nucera died on his bicycle, hit by a motorist, in Carros (Alpes-Maritimes), in the hinterland of Nice, where he had cycled so often. Cycling was one of his passions, along with literature and friendship. His friends felt very lonely and abandoned. One of his best books, Le Roi René, retraced the career of René Vietto. He was one of Louis' role models, because he loved style and courage. At the end of each summer, I would ask him: "Did you have a good ride? How many kilometres? And the second question would come straight away: "How many pages? The two were inseparable, the performances of the 'champion' and those of the writer...

Born in Nice on 17 July 1928, Louis Nucera grew up with memories of the First World War. He listened religiously to the stories his uncles told him at dinnertime. This produced very thoughtful, dreamy children. Nucera's father died in 1933 and his mother was "suddenly aged beyond repair". This kind of sentence sums up Louis' style: a very classical writer, he knew how to organise the conspiracy of grammar and emotion.

After his father's death, Louis Nucera was forced to earn a living, becoming a "telephone operator" in a bank. Jean Giono himself had worked in a branch of this bank. It was an excellent omen. Nucera then went into journalism. This enabled him to meet Joseph Kessel, Georges Brassens and Jean Cocteau. His teachers or his literary mentors. Magical mentors. The first convinced Louis Nucera that the French language was a kind of "monastery" that had to be entered with great care. The second gave lessons in modesty and the third in politeness. Cocteau used to say that you had to erase from your texts the trouble you had taken to write them. Louis Nucera retained all three lessons. In his novels (L'Ami, 1974; Avenue des Diables-Bleus, 1979; Chemin de la Lanterne, 1981; Le Kiosque à musique, 1984; La Chanson de Maria, 1989; Le Ruban rouge, 1991...), he delicately portrayed the little people of his town, the little people of whom he was the heir. But he asked himself: why "little people"?

THE POLITENESS OF DESPAIR

Perhaps his finest book was Mes Ports d'attache, published in 1994. In it, he makes a sort of tour of lost friends. It introduces us to two lovers of bicycle rides, Henry Miller and Vladimir Nabokov. And, of course, Cocteau, Brassens and Kessel. Louis Nucera was a master in the art of portraiture. He said, for example, that "Kessel's face interpreted the movements of his heart, like the sky and the sea interpret the vagaries of the weather". It's superb.

Last winter, Louis Nucera brought together his columns from 1994 to 1999 under the title Une bouffée d'air frais (Le Cherche Midi, 2000). In it, we saw a man guided by a desire to admire, a desire to do justice to the beauty of things and to the beauty of certain people. He was making an inventory of his passions and preferences. He loved delicate people, the politeness of despair, the painting of moods, tango, the alchemy of feelings, the 18th arrondissement, the old quarters of Nice, French landscapes... and teachers who pass on to their pupils, from the back of the classroom by the radiator, a taste for reading. In his enthusiasm, Louis Nucera mixed the winners of the Tour de France with the champions of literature. He had read a lot, but he didn't flaunt his erudition. It remained a matter of the heart.

Epochs are made to be denigrated," grumbled Flaubert, when he was in a bad mood. Louis Nucera would have liked to contradict this pessimism, but he looked at our world as a moralist. And what he observed too often saddened him. Indeed, how can you not get angry when the speeches of a rocker or a television presenter are more important than the words of writers? And yet, for Nucera, writers were "the envoys of beauty on earth". However, even when he denounces the vanity fair, his pages breathe the joy of writing. A defender and servant of the French language, Louis Nucera had what we call style, both in his praise and in his criticism. In this day and age, that's not so common.

François Bott

Louis Nucera published his first novel, L'Obstiné, in 1970 with Julliard. Most of his work was subsequently published by Grasset. He wrote numerous articles for «Le monde des livres» from the early 1980s onwards. He has won a number of awards for his work, including the Prix littéraire de la Résistance (1975) for Dora (Lattès), the Prix Interallié (1981) for Chemin de la Lanterne, the Grand Prix de littérature sportive (1987) for Mes rayons de soleil, and the Prix Jacques Chardonne (1991) for Le Ruban rouge. Finally, in 1993, the Académie française awarded him its Grand Prix de littérature for his body of work.