Where to start in reviewing this book???  Perhaps it is best to start at the end and end at the beginning.

The book was given to us by the translator, Jose Abete, one of the owners of a magical resort high in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.  Susan and I had arrived at this oasis after a 4 hour drive from Essouira on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, our driver leaving the flat, desert-like land outside Marrakesh and winding higher and higher into the Atlas.  After checking into our pavilion (no rooms, just nine spacious pavilions with decks outside the sliding doors and on the roof), we made our way to the roof of the bar for a glass of wine.  A chilly evening led to a distinguished looking man leaving his group of friends to offer Susan a burnous, a hooded Berber robe.  He introduced himself and we discovered to everyone’s surprise and joy that he was one of our hosts and we were, to use his phrase, “The famous Epsteins”.  Quickly joined by the designer and owner of the resort, Fabrizio Ruspoli, we enjoyed a brief conversation which ended with an invitation to join them for drinks at their home in two nights, the night we would move to one of their guest houses since our booking had only been possible for 2 nights.

The evening at Fabrezio and Jose’s house was magical.  Fabrezio had been to Nantucket where friends had built the Summer House, one of our favorite restaurants in Sconset. Jose had gone to HBS and knew Cambridge well.  We marvelled at their art (including an original by Jose’s friend, Andy Warhol) and the 16th C. tapestries that had been in the Rusoli family since the Pope had declared them one of the 15 princely families of Rome. Conversation was easy—books, music, art, travel—and at the end of the evening, Jose presented us with this book.

I had not heard of Pierre Berge, though that is due to my mid-American naivete, not the lack of fame of this famous Frenchman who lived with Yves St. Laurent for 50 years and ran the eponymous fashion house from 1961 to 1999.  Berge went on to become the president of the Foundation Berge-Yves. St. Laurent and later the president of the Paris Opera.  Honored with Orders by both France and Morocco, Berge died in 2017 at the age of 87.

One of 9 books he wrote, this one is unique in its form and content. It begins and ends with eulogies that Berge gave at first the funeral after St. Laurent died on June 1, 2008 and then again at the one year commemoration of YSL’s death.  In between these two formal speeches are dozens of letters that Berge wrote to his dead husband from Paris, Normandy, Provence, Spain and Morocco as he struggled to come to terms with the death of his lifetime partner and lover.  These are beautiful letters, not falsely creating a perfect ideal but wrestling with the faults, failures, and defects in both St. Laurent and their relationship, always returning to the love, respect, desire, and beauty of their life together.

Whether sharing with the unhearing St. Laurent the details of the sale of 703 of their paintings (Picasso, Cezanne, Goya, Matisse) and beautiful furniture and objects or the specifics of the move from their Rue St. Babylone home to one on Rue Bonaparte  Berge writes honestly, with rawness, and with a mixture of love and anger about the man who changed women’s fashion forever.

We had visited the Jarden de Majorelle in Marrakesh two days before arriving at Olinto.  The Jarden was the property on which a French artist established beautiful gardens and buildings in the early 20th C only to have them fall into disrepair until St. Laurent and Berge purchased them in 1999.  Resurrecting the gardens with the help of Madison Cox (the dedicatee of Berge’s book and the current president of the Foundation whose board also includes Jose Abete) and turning the buildings into museums of Berber life and Yves St. Laurent’s accomplishments was the labor of love that Berge and St. Laurent did together. In the midst of the gardens is a memorial to Yves St. Laurent.  Berge donated the property to Morocco and it is now open to the public and welcomes over 1 million visitors/year.

This is a remarkable book by a remarkable man about his life with another remarkable man.  In it Berge writes that ‘….these letters had a single goal: take stock of our lives. Explain to those who read them who you were, who we were. Share my memories, and tell you that, when all’s said and done, that I was happy with you. I hope I’ve shown your talent, taste, your intelligence and kindness, your tenderness and energy, your courage and naivety, your beauty, your gaze, your integrity, your honesty, your intransigence, your exacting and uncompromising nature.”  Well done, Pierre Berge!  Well done, Jose Abete.