If I told you about the moped

If I told you about Lionel Langlais' moped, you would probably be convinced that I was making up a story, a kind of parable for the sole purpose of promoting the improbable, almost comical, tenacity of the individual Langlais.

Especially since no one around him had ever heard of this moped story! Not even his closest friends! Only me! And even then, I've only recently become aware of this. For a very long time, Lionel was the only one who knew. Well, him and his thief, of course…

Because in the story there is also a thief. "Lionel, his moped, and his thief" would be the title of the fable, if it were one.

To begin with, you just have to imagine a late afternoon and Lionel, seventeen years old, sitting on an orange and black moped, a helmet on his head. His moped was one of the most essential things in his life at that time. He couldn't even conceive of being separated from it. It was unthinkable. Lionel was an apprentice electrician, he lived in Louviers, and his apprenticeship was several kilometers away; his moped was his indispensable means of transportation to get to work on time in the morning. Let's just say that, roughly speaking—very roughly speaking—in his mind at the time, imagining someone stealing his moped was about as impossible as a Parisian imagining someone stealing their subway!

So that day, in the late afternoon, while sitting on his moped, Lionel suddenly saw a guy rush towards him, grab him, pull him off, punch him on the helmet and steal his moped.

Lionel is completely panicked. He's never been in a fight, he doesn't know how to defend himself, feels utterly incapable, but he clings almost unconsciously to his moped. The other man accelerates, zigzags, tries every possible way to shake off his lunatic, and surely thinks he's succeeded the moment the moped stabilizes. But not at all. The madman clinging to the seat has simply sat down on the luggage rack.

For an hour, the thief will drag his stolen vehicle around Louviers. He will do everything to unseat him: going up onto sidewalks, down onto them, brushing against cars, trees, running red lights… For an hour, Lionel will be terrified, literally scared to death, but he will not let go of his motorized bike, his tool, his possession, his only possession, his moped.

Incredibly, almost unbelievably, the thief ended up finding it rather amusing. No doubt finding the situation unbelievable himself, he went to his friends to show them this guy clinging on from behind. Everyone laughed, and the charade resumed. For an hour. A full hour, and I'm not exaggerating or making anything up! Lionel himself said today: "At least an hour!"

Finally, no longer amused at all, and with his moped badly worn out and a flat tire, the thief is about to give up. But first, as if out of respect, he stops at a gas station, fills up, and leaves Lionel on his machine, saying to him in a friendly tone: "You see, I didn't break your moped..."

To my great surprise, when Lionel tells me this story, he is serious, talking about a cowardice he is still ashamed of today, an act kept secret and from which he has not really recovered.

He's very surprised to see me laugh, really laugh, at the end of the story. He's still so shaken by the fear of that long ordeal that he still doesn't see the strength of his determination and the beauty of his cause. He has trouble believing me when I tell him that his thief himself must have been very impressed by this guy who doesn't give up…

Ferré, telling me about his beginnings in cabaret, once said to me: "when people ask me what talent is, I answer it's when you never stop."

If it were today, I would say to Ferré: "for me, talent is when you never let go of the moped…"

If I told you what the child is thinking

"If I told them what the child thinks," that's what I thought that day when I thought of you.

I'm used to seeing Lionel sing, to say the least, and it's not uncommon for him to surprise me, to take me completely by surprise. And of course I love it. Between you and me, it's all I look forward to. In truth, it's something about him that grabs hold of me and draws me back to you.

When Lionel sings, I think of you. And I cry.

Yes, I cry when I think of you. That's just how it is. And it's not your fault, don't go foolishly starting psychoanalysis for it, it comes from me, I cry when I think of you. And it's nothing new at all, even as a child I cried when I thought of you.

This is a real confidence I'm going to share with you, surely the most intimate, perhaps the most secret: it is in the tears, in the tears, in those salty drops that have always come to me when I think of you, that is where the secret of my commitment to making Lionel known lies hidden.

I am not Lionel Langlais' manager.

No more than when I was eleven in Nevers, I was Adamo's manager when my parents took me to see him at the Palace, and in the dark I cried, watching the people and their big eyes brimming with happiness. No more than when I was at Brassens's concert in Rouen, in the front row, at the foot of his microphone, and the same tears came to me, feeling so intensely that large hall behind me, filled with people all together, united by the idea that life could also be like this: being together, happy, wishing each other well. How good the people were that evening, and how they loved each other, knowing that they were all capable of this, of this almost foolish feeling, which would make people laugh everywhere else but not in that hall that night, which Brassens, so modestly, absolved of guilt for his good feelings, freed from their daily burdens. Macias too!! Yes, indeed! Enrico Macias! I can attest to that! I was 20 and couldn't have cared less about Macias, but I went to his concert, because ever since I was little I've gone to concerts like moths to a flame, and because that night it was free! But the same tears welled up in my eyes seeing them all around me so happy, so radiant with that genuine happiness, so grateful to him for taking them all far away, so far from who they were before the concert, so far from who they would be after… The same for Aznavour, Trenet, Ferré, Montand, Lama, Béart, Barbara, Devos, Souchon, Bruel, Bénabar… I cried, I'm crying, I'll cry. And the same at the circus, I cried, I'm crying… And the same I cried in the Place de la République when Mitterrand died, seeing them all huddled together in the rain, thanking him for how, beneath the surface, he had changed their lives…

Each time I cry, it's a childish sorrow, of course. That's all we ever cry about.

Everyone does what they want with their child. In my life, it's the child who decides everything. Whatever I do or say, nothing truly binds me except the agreement or refusal of that inner child. It's a carefully considered choice, a very deliberate decision: I always listen to him, and I always trust him. And it's in him that you'll find the secret of my tears. Because it's him who cries when they stream down my cheeks. Just as it was also him who one day discovered Lionel.

And I understood why pretty quickly. Especially when I saw Lionel on stage. It's because the little boy rediscovered with him the taste for the emotions he wants to feel in a concert hall. Until then, he'd been bored stiff. For a long time now, at almost every show I dragged him to, he'd fall asleep by the third song. He didn't see any artists, and no audience. Just people. People in the audience, people on stage, the singer, the musician, the lights, the sound, the talent, the craft—all respectable things that I respect, but not that something that makes people an audience, that gives them that extra something that unites them and nourishes them, seemingly without effort, and that ultimately moves the little boy so much he cries, the way he likes it.

One evening, while listening to Lionel on stage, it went beyond tears. It was as if the kid in me had decided to speak to me while Lionel was singing. I felt anger rising within me. Anger I could understand, but which I would have been inclined to stifle with perfectly reasonable arguments.

For him, I sense, things are simple and should remain so. For him, Lionel is an artist the likes of which music rarely sees; it's simply a matter of saying it loud and clear, not apologizing, and not expecting anything from anyone. Just rallying the troops and shouting it from the rooftops.

But rally whom, shout what?

The kid doesn't care. He doesn't even answer me. He watches Lionel singing, sees how happy he is, knows perfectly well that there will always be enough people in the audience, that even if there were only one person, he would sing the same. That if we added two thousand more, it wouldn't change a thing for him. That it's only for the audience that it would change everything, and that it's for that audience that we should fight, not for Lionel.

That kid's crazy… I can tell him all I want about production costs, promo budget, distribution, press agents, journalists, advertising, shady dealings, subsidies, and he just laughs, he's not crying at all anymore, he's cracking up, he says that all that stuff is for singers, but that Lionel isn't a singer, he's an artist who makes songs, that it's not the same at all, it's the complete opposite, that a singer needs an audience to exist, whereas for Lionel, it's the audience that needs him and it's not the same thing at all, that the audience is hungry, it's thirsty, it needs artists to feed on, that singers are fed by the audience…

— Just on a whim, I finally asked, what would you do if you were Lionel Langlais' manager? After all, it's true, you're probably the one who discovered him…

— I would put all the good bread in the bottle, and I would throw the bottle into the sea…

— The bread? The bottle? What bread? What bottle?

— Feed what I tell you to the fish in the great sea. And just tell them at the end that Lionel sings... you don't even need to tell them where, they'll find it, you'll see... Tell them also that I cry tears of joy when I think of them…

- It's done.