In the darkest depths of adversity, some men and women are able to reach into the recesses of their characters and find astonishing reserves of strength and courage.
Jean-Dominique Bauby, 45, was one of them. Although a stroke in December 1995 left him unable to speak or move or even to eat without assistance, the French journalist, who had been editor in chief of the fashion magazine Elle, wrote a book.
Lying inert on his hospital bed, he dictated by blinking his left eyelid, his only means of communicating with the outside world.
The book, “Le Scaphandre et le Papillon” (“The Diving Suit and the Butterfly”), already has 146,000 copies in print in France only a week after publication, and foreign translations are coming soon.
“I can’t compare it to anything I’ve seen in my life as a publisher,” said Antoine Audouard, a friend of Bauby and general director of Robert Laffont, the book’s Paris-based publisher, referring to the demand for the work.
Bauby died Sunday. On Friday, in a program planned before his death, France’s leading television show on cultural affairs, “Bouillon de Culture,” featured Bauby and his book. French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Beineix, who made the cult favorite “Diva,” presented his documentary about the determined author.
In his book, Bauby reflects on his sudden transition from an “earthling in perfect working order” to what his friends termed “a vegetable.” (He preferred to think of himself as a “mutant.”)
Doctors diagnosed the editor’s affliction as “locked-in syndrome,” a rare condition in which the brain stem, the living link between the brain and the rest of the body, has been destroyed after a “cardiovascular accident.”
