In this year 2014, it will be thirty years since Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of the world's largest democracy, died under the bullets of her own bodyguards. I would like to pay tribute to her by publishing this photo, which shows her smiling.

This was during her promotion to the title of Doctor Honoris Causa of the University Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle. The university council's decision was not a given: our dear colleagues who do not hesitate to take a political position every day feared, in this case, being accused of being political. Well, well! Of feminists too, why not?

The ceremony fortunately went well. The Lady of New Delhi delivered a speech in French, also won with great difficulty, the Foreign Affairs fearing to offend her by imposing our language on her. After which everyone remembered that she had done a good part of her studies in Switzerland, and in French!

When I presented Tristan Tzara's Complete Works, I was reproached for having insisted on the unity of the poet, through all the vicissitudes of his existence. I will not give up on this as far as I am concerned. Yes, it is the same individual, immersed up to his neck in modern poetry, who was in charge of welcoming a high personality on the steps of the Sorbonne. I shivered when I saw the armed lookouts on the roofs of rue des Écoles.

Finding this photo again, I understood why Cabu caricatured me in a sackcloth robe. He didn't know me, but he suspected that I sometimes donned the three-tier ermine toga.

January 25, 2014 Henri Béhar