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Explorer, Eco-Warrior, Spy: The Battles of Jacques Cousteau

I wrote this long, intimate chart of Jacques-Yves Cousteau in the spring of 1993 and, for personal reasonableness, never publicized it. But at a time when deniers of scientific and of common sense are out to destroy the last better probability we have to slow climate change, it seemed an appropriate moment for this article to see the light of day. Cousteau had numerous flunks, but he changed the way we envision the natural world, and, unhappily, the world that he inserted us to is now in terrible hazard . — Christopher Dickey

PARIS, May 27, 1993 — After a long discussion about Antarctica, a continent he felt he had saved, and before the raspberries, which he anticipated with the greedy feeling of small children, one summertime Sunday afternoon in 1991 at the Brasserie Lorraine on the Place des Ternes, ogling out on Paris streets “thats been” warm and dark-green and pulsing with life, Jacques-Yves Cousteau talked about the death of his wife Simone a few months before. “For me it was terrible, ” he said. His look was reddened and the lower lids of his eyes were blood-red. At that time he gazed, uneasily, his 81 times. Chips of dandruff speckled the eyeglasses he used to read the menu. “For her the very best stuff was, I expended the last three days with her.”

Finishing the last of the Bordeaux, he went on. “The night she died, we had a exceedingly joyful dinner.” Simone was a minuscule woman, tough and reserved, who had wasted most of the last 40 times at sea on the research ship Calypso. She was known to the crew as “La Bergere, ” the shepherdess, and she dedicated herself to the ship she called “my best friend, ” to the fact-finding mission, its men and their Captain. “She is like a purser and a pastor, ” Cousteau liked to say. But in her seventy-first year she appeared as if beneath her skin skin there were bones of excruciating fragility. For the majority of members of the four months annually when “shes not” on the barge, she was in the Cousteaus &# x27; little suite in Monaco. She did not like Paris. Often alone, she left the radio and television turned on all the time to keep her company.

That night, however, her sister-in-law was there–and Cousteau. Simone was “gay, alert, joking, ” he remembered. They bided up late booze and talking before ultimately going to bed in their area overlooking the sea.

“At five o &# x27; clock in the morning she asked me to help her to the toilet. And I did. And”–he hesitated an instant–“she died in my arms.”

“I knew she was not well, but I had no idea “whats wrong” with her, ” read Cousteau. He told the doctor he pondered “she was drinking too much red wine.” But medical doctors, who had known the Cousteaus since the early 1950 s, and was the only physician Simone relied, said, “Jacques, it was either wine-colored or morphine.”

The old-fashioned explorer did not understand. Wine or morphine?

For the last five years, the doctor excused, Simone had had “a extrapolated cancer.” She had to have something to kill the pain.

“She made the doctor promise not to tell me, ” Cousteau supposed, “so as not to disturb my work.”

We ate the berries in silence.

Other patrons of the restaurants sector glanced our room sometimes. Undoubtedly they realise the “Commandant, ” as he is called in France. They were furtively inquisitive, but no beings oppress their curiosity with more neurotic strength than the Parisian bourgeoisie. They stood Cousteau his privacy and his secrets.

The rest of us think we know this old man of the sea because, of course, we grew up with him. From innumerable hours of television we &# x27; ve learned his accent and the rhythms of his speech and, in a general kind of path, we know how he changed the world. Can you remember a occasion when there were no scuba divers? When our imagination “of the worlds oceans” moved no deeper than the keel of a glass-bottom boat? That &# x27; s the direction it was before Cousteau. He fabricated the Aqua-Lung. He used it to explore oceans, creeks, caves in every corner the planet. And in the 50 times since World War II his cinemas, which always boasted his face and his expression, had two remarkable effects.

First, they communicated a wondrous excite about nature and–what is rare–a sense of good-natured intimacy with it. The spectacle beneath the seas was wildly alien when it was firstly revealed in the 1940 s, but through Cousteau it became unexpectedly and marvelously accessible. He and the members of his team seemed as fascinated as four-year-olds by just about everything they come across, whether sharks of Senegal or a skua sitting on its nest in Antarctica. Secondly, these scores of television curricula, programme and rebroadcast and translated into dozens of expressions, eventually obligated Cousteau himself the environmentalist emeritus of the global village. “He &# x27; s a educator, ” as Vice President Albert Gore said a couple of years ago. “He facilitates others to view “the worlds” and their relationship to it in a new way.”

In the last 15 years Cousteau has espoused the role of a visionary, even a revolutionary, preaching mainly to the young. As one generation would lose its fascination with him and move on from the world of true-blue adventure to the obligations of adulthood, the next generation would detect his undersea nature, sometimes at odd hours, often in reruns, and be hypnotized. There is no place he is not known. One biographer claims there are questionnaires that demo Cousteau grades second only to the Pope as “the worlds largest” familiar appearance on the planet. But that may banalize the skipper &# x27; s popularity, so singular and universal, so grandfatherly and benign is his image.

Which is one reason the narrative about Simone &# x27; s demise was so especially perturbing. Cousteau told it with plain candor, as if he was puzzled by what it intend. It &# x27; s not surprising for a genius to be filled with oblivious self-fascination. In France, at least since Diderot, the enlightened have rationalized comfortably the toll that the truly bright take over those close at hand.( “He is a tree which has stunted some others originating near by and extinguished flowers growing at its hoofs, but it has raised its heading to the heavens and its diverges have spread far and wide, ” as the philosophe would have it .) Still, ego alone did not quite show what Cousteau was alleging. There was something on his thinker that was missing from his account, and manifesting farther I pondered about Simone &# x27; s motivatings.

Bettmann/ Getty

Under The Sea

Before I congregated Cousteau for the first time five years ago, I retrieved from a long-unopened bundle box my yellowing transcript of The Silent World , a Scholastic Book Business publication decaying now with a smell of cheap mushy that accompanies back the perfervid daydream of junior high study halls. It was first are presented in 1953 and about certain parts of Cousteau &# x27; s firstly 40 years–the discoveries, the excitement–there is no better note. During and after World War II, Cousteau and Simone and their chums were experimenting in an utterly brand-new surrounding, using themselves as laboratory rats. They twiddled and investigated, desegregating discipline with pleasure, tribulation with mistake, almost at romp as they became, in Cousteau &# x27; s word, “menfish.”

Before the conflict a few oil machines had been developed to help divers move around freely without the aid of metal helmets, pressure suit and tubings tying them to compressors on the surface. But none was very effective. Simply inhaling bottled breeze wouldn &# x27; t drive. The question for a diver was to have an air quantity that recruited his lungs at the same pressing as the enclose water, which increased substantially the deeper he went. To do this manually was difficult, dangerous and impractical. What was required was a valve–a regulator, as it came to be called–that would respond automatically to the pressure around it. Cousteau and an designer named Emile Gagnan developed precisely such a machine, and it proved as vital to journey under the sea as the compass was to journey on the surface.

On the morning in 1943 when Cousteau ran a first full underwater exam of the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, Simone floated on the surface of the Mediterranean with mask and snorkel, literally watching over him. If anything went wrong, she was his link to the known nature and existence. “I gazed up and understood the surface glittering like a defective mirror. In the center of the looking glass was the trim silhouette of Simone, reduced to a doll. I motioned. The doll curved at me.” Cousteau tried out the mechanism from every slant, swimming vertically, inverted, planing through the liquid at different degrees. It acted perfectly, and Cousteau was in a living fantasy, moving without wings in slow motion among strange beings. Then he paused to explore a bit cave and bring up lobsters for himself and his wife in “occupied, ill-fed France.”

There was something virtually matter of fact about stirring biography in those epoches. “The gadgets that I happen to have invented would have been invented anyway, ” he added. “They were invented because they are integrated into our adventure.” And there was always, in the most extensive feel, an epicurean facet to Cousteau &# x27; s explorations: a sensual delight in his detections that runs parallel to, and sometimes overcomes, his scientific observations. The bland note-takers of academia rarely criticize Cousteau &# x27; s the ways and sniff at his lack of formal credentials. Many realise him as a voyeur poking on their world-wide of carefully filed knowledge. But Cousteau knew “the power of beautiful, ” as one of France &# x27; s most prominent researchers introduced it, and in his prose that mingled “Outdoor Life” adventure with sumptuous description, he perfectly transmitted his infatuations in his work The Silent World .

Consider his descriptions of the course coloring changes as the light-footed fades-out beneath the surface of the high seas. The naval investigate squad he required in the late 1940 s utilized colour charts and technical gadgets to measure the changes in color at different depths as liquid filters away the spectrum of the sunbathe. But it was an accidental panorama in the middle of an undersea hunting that he used to tell the legend. His sidekick and long-time colleague Frederic Dumas had speared a large fish about 20 grasps down, and the damn stuff wouldn &# x27; t die. As Cousteau watched, “Dumas hauled in the last paws of cord, and got a traction on the harpoon gibe. He flashed his loop bayonet and immersed it into the heart of the big fish. A thick-skulled puff of blood discoloured the sea . … The blood was light-green. Stupefied by the batch, I swam close and stared at the mortal creek shooting from the heart. It was the color of emeralds . … Flourishing his astounding trophy on the spear, Didi guided the way to the surface. At 55 hoofs the blood passed dark dark-brown. At 20 feet it was pink. On the surface it flowed red.”

In the summer of 1947, Cousteau and his unit began experimenting with the purposes of nitrogen narcosis or “rapture of the magnitudes, ” and his accounts of those trials, the majority of members of which he foisted on himself, expose a great deal more about “the mens” than about the molecules and capillaries that were his scientific concern. Cousteau and my honourable colleagues knew from earlier ancestries that as they started deeper health risks of hallucination and disorientation proliferated dramatically. They gasped compressed breath, which includes nitrogen as well as oxygen, and the actual capacity of gas they were inhaling increased the lower down they disappeared. A person 100 paws below the surface was subsisting breath four times denser than at sea level. The nitrogen built up in the intelligence, and eventually began to alter its functions.

Often the condition struck unexpectedly, replenishing a diver with giddy euphoria, and different parties were hit by the superstar at different extents. The consequence was hazardous , not least, because it was so seductive. “I am personally quite receptive to nitrogen rapture. I like it and dread it like destiny, ” wrote Cousteau. “It destroys the inclination of life.” But he stopped going back for more, and the chapter of The Silent World that deals with his record-setting dives of the time is as much an journey of hallucination as Aldous Huxley &# x27; s contemporaneous “Doors of Perception, ” where mescaline and LSD were the mediums.

“At 200 feet I savoured the metal flavor of compressed nitrogen and was instantaneously and severely struck with rapture . … My mind was jammed with self-conceited thoughts and antic joyfulnes. I struggled to fix my brain on actuality, was trying to mention the color of the sea about me. A race took place between navy blue, aquamarine and Prussian off-color. The dialogue would not resolve. The sole knowledge I could comprehend was that there was no roof and no flooring in the blue room.” Cousteau reached 297 feet that day, a record for the time. Fifty fathoms deep, “in my bisected brain the satisfaction was balanced by sarcastic self-contempt.”

The fun stopped merely a few months later when Maurice Fargues, a longtime member of Cousteau &# x27; s crew, lost it, his air hose and their own lives somewhere around 400 feet.

Simone was almost always there in those days, whether moving like a guardian angel on the shimmering surface during Cousteau &# x27; s first aqualung dives, or waiting helpless near the entryway of a cave in the Vaucluse, know … … if her husband had died in his descent to the source of a mysterious spring.

Inevitably their children, more, were reaped into the undersea macrocosm by a parent uneasy to share his experiences with everyone around him. “During the summer of Liberation I came home from Paris with two miniature aqualungs for my sons, Jean-Michel, then seven, and Philippe, five. The older boy was memorizing to swimming but a very young had still not been wading. I was confident that they would take to diving, since one does not need to be a swimmer to go down with the apparatus.” But the excited infants, from the moment they firstly caught a glimpse of the undersea world, couldn &# x27; t stop chattering, giggling, and strangling on ocean. “I caused another lecture on the topic that the high seas was a silent macrocosm and that little boys were advised to shut the fuck up when inspecting it. It took various dives before they learned to hold their volleys of chatter until they had surfaced. Then I took them deeper. They did not hesitate to catch octopi with their hands. On seaside barbecues Jean-Michel would go down 30 hoofs with a kitchen forking and retrieve succulent ocean urchins. Their mom dives very, but without the same exuberance. For the purpose of their own, dames are suspicious of diving and frown on their menfolk going down.”

” Diving Was My Cover “

More than 40 times after those epoches of picnics by the sea, Simone was in the VIP lounge of Charles De Gaulle airport, where Jacques had gone to receive her on her return from yet another expedition aboard Calypso. “People ask me if I follow my husband, ” she said with a tired smile. “I announce, &# x27; No, he follows me .&# x27; ” With her was a fluffy white-hot pup, incorrigible on territory and, one would theorize, insufferable at sea. But it seemed to keep her amused and on her lap it obstructed her warm. I asked her to sign my deteriorating facsimile of The Silent World . All she wrote, in letters suggestive of the Phoenician write on Calypso &# x27; s emblem, was “S. Cousteau.” Her spouse &# x27; s inscription on the same sheet, in clean, bold handwriting, speaks to one “who has the spirit to share my planned … for a few daytimes! “

Jack Garofalo/ Paris Match via Getty

The Diving Saucer Of Commander Cousteau. Cote d’Azur, Marseilles- July 23, 1959 – The first assaults at the diving saucer designed by Commander Jacques-Yves Cousteau: he sat before the plans of the saucer, inhaling a cigarette in his office.

Even in his early eighties Cousteau &# x27; s vigor appears inexhaustible, and he always seems a bit puzzled by those around him who were not sanctified with such vigour. He sounds unaware of the toll his boundless ebullience might take on others. His schedule is relentlessly kinetic. As I &# x27; ve tried to plumb his ideas and his personality we &# x27; ve wound up talking here about Paris eateries, in his Monaco apartment and driving along the Cote d &# x27; Azur; in Washington inns while he lobbied Congress, and in his little office off the Faubourg Saint-Honore. We &# x27; ve communicated by fax and by satellite phone.

One morning a summon came from the Calypso. Cousteau was off Palawan Island in the Philippines. If I could make it to the Paris airport by 3 p. m. there was a plane to Manila. He &# x27 ;d send a helicopter to pick me up and we could waste the week on the ship. “It is one of the exceedingly most beautiful places available in “the worlds”, ” he shouted over the Inmarsat line. “I ought to have diving in various caves … All of these islands are like Gruyere cheese … We have explored and filmed a river four kilometers inland … It &# x27; s like paradise.” Foolishly, because of other commitments I didn &# x27; t croak, and I never have been on the Calypso, never have find the old boy in the high seas. But, then, he invests less meter there now.

Since 1989 Cousteau has helped save Antarctica, explored the Danube and the Mekong, starred at the Earth Summit in Rio and become an “immortal” of the Academie francaise. Grandiose projects were inaugurated. Some persist, like his efforts to foster the teaching of “ecotechnique” at “the worlds” &# x27; s universities. Some disintegrated. Attempts to build Disneyesque delights foundered in bankruptcy and acrimony.

In December 1990, Simone croaked and in June of 1991, as it happens only a few periods after our lunch at the Brasserie Lorraine, Cousteau remarried Francine Triplet, the status of women in her 40 s, and introduced to the world their two young children, Diane and Pierre-Yves. Cousteau &# x27; s older enduring son and long-time heir evident, 56 -year-old Jean-Michel, has since gone off to haunt other interests, starting the break-up of a non-profit territory he and his father have improved during the course of 20 times. “It has not detriment our tendernes, ” Jacques told me this spring. “There is nothing else to pronounce but Jean-Michel is gone.” This is not all that Jean-Michel has to say. But perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves. The old person of the high seas is full of secrets, and there are some basic ones to be learned near the surface before we move deeper.

“The drive when I was young was interest, ” Cousteau showed one morning in Monaco in 1990. “I was curious to see what was under the keel of our crafts, even when I was very, even younger, even under small boats.” We were up in his analyse, which is poised like a widow &# x27; s go on top of the little apartment pulley-block where he officially resides, with a glassed-in terrace gazing down on the confuse of Mediterranean buildings that is Monaco. Watching the scribbled thoughts going into my notebook, Cousteau amended: “The important date was 1920, when I dived in Vermont.”

He was 10 years old then and living in the United States, on New York &# x27; s Upper West Side near the angle of 95 th and Broadway. “His fathers”, Daniel Cousteau, seems to have had knacks evaluated by parvenu Americans anxious for a patina of French edification, and he spent his entire busines cultivating between Paris and Manhattan as the private secretary of first one, then another American millionaire. Jacques learned to play stickball and speak English in New York, and in the summer he was shipped off to camp near a lagoon in Vermont. He was readily accepted, clearly headstrong, and apparently a bit of a disciplinary question. When part of the program turned out to be horseback riding in the hills, Jacques refused to go. “I don &# x27; t like mountains. I don &# x27; t like horses.” The German rector told him, as sanction, to retrieve some divisions from the bottom of the pond. No concealment. No fins. No ocean. But by Cousteau &# x27; s computation, his undersea undertakings had begun.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX BROOK LYNN/ THE DAILY BEAST

Cousteau &# x27; s adolescence was wasted mainly in France and traveling around Europe. He changed academies frequently and was never extremely tireless about survey, but he was anxious to create. He tried poetry and paint.( On the wall up the aerie above his Monaco apartment there is one of his teenage oils: a morose depiction of Jesus which he called “Disappointed Christ.” The most interesting thing about the painting is that it is still on his walls and, for Cousteau, it still has a word. “How could He not be disillusioned, ” replies the chieftain .) But the majority of members of Cousteau &# x27; s teenage originality is entered into attaining home movies. Other parties prevented their publications on paper, he continued his on film. Using acquaintances as actors he rendered little melodramas. Most often he played the criminal himself.

At the age of 20, Cousteau enlisted in the French navy. He had thought about being a professional movie manufacturer. He considered a job in remedy. But the navy offered a chance to keep moving, to interpret “the worlds”, as it were, and explore at other people’s overhead( as he would continue to do for the rest of his life ). All the while he remained filming. Aboard the training ship Jeanne d &# x27; Arc he circumnavigated countries around the world: Bali, Japan, even Hollywood. By the time he was 24, Cousteau was serving in China and when he got an extended leave, he went back home overland, through the Soviet Union. Cousteau stirred his space by study through the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution from the Pacific port of Vladivostok to Moscow, where the smattering of Russian “hes having” studied in Shanghai helped him shake the secret police. “During 10 daytimes I was free–loose–with a lot of rubles, ” he recollects. “So I had a great time.” After that he made his way to Tbilisi and Yerevan in the Caucasus. From there to Ukraine and Poland, then back home to France. Among the mementoes in his apartment is a photograph of the young patrolman before leaving Shanghai. A pencil-thin moustache only accentuates the unformed freshness of his face.

Cousteau &# x27; s passion was to clear his occupation as a naval aviator. The dreamlike experience of flight ever mesmerized him. But on a brief leave after several months of flight school in 1936 he was trying to drive all night from one corner of France to another to fulfill some friends when he disintegrated his gondola on a dark country road. It was two o &# x27; clock in the morning. None was around and for several hours, until he made his style to a farmhouse, he thought that he was going to die. As he described the vistum years later he remembered looking at the stars and thinking, “My God, I &# x27; ve checked a lot of things in my life.” Jacques Cousteau was twenty-six.

The convalescence was long and agonizing and merely after months of care was the young policeman able to regain the use of both his arms. By then his job as a captain was over. But it was precisely at this time that he was introduced to another naval detective, slightly his senior, appointed Philippe Tailliez. Both were mesmerized by the idea of diving and spearfishing, and Tailliez, in turn, established Cousteau to another young admirer referred Frederic Dumas. The three became constant diving attendants, constructing their reputation together for the next 20 years.

It was also during this period that Cousteau converged Simone Melchior. In 1936 she was seventeen. While Cousteau came from a bourgeois lineage in Bordeaux, in Simone Melchior &# x27; s background there was money, renown and, as she said, “seawater in my blood.” She was from three generation of admirals. Her grandpas and uncles had all harboured the rank, and her father was a director of Air Liquide, one of the world &# x27; s passing producers of bottled gases for industrial purposes. It was one of her leader &# x27; s employes, Emile Gagnan, who co-invented the aqualung with Cousteau, and the company still holds the patent. When she was eighteen years old, Simone and Jacques were married. They had just begun to establish their lives together when the Second World War began.

Marka/ UIG via Getty

The Silent World and the movies and notebooks and essays that followed it during the 1950 s in Life or National Geographic give the impression that as campaign was building in Europe and Paris folded before the Nazi threat, as French Jews were being extradited to the death camps by their French Catholic neighbors and the fate of millions of people hung in the remaining balance, Cousteau and his attendants somehow managed to spend all their epoch exploring under liquid, far from the inhumanities of defeat and alliance. Maybe this notion was comforting in the years just after the conflict was over. To discover a dreamlike world-wide under the sea was, for Cousteau &# x27; s audience as much as for him, a reprieve from all the traumas that became before. But Cousteau was deeply and painfully involved in the the dramas of Vichy France. His only brother, Pierre-Antoine, was one of the country &# x27; s most notorious Nazi traitors. Jacques-Yves was a snoop who worked with the Resistance.

Cousteau seems back on his espionage acts, as so much else in his life, with a mixture of pride matched by sarcastic self-contempt. In the early days of the conflict, before Paris fell, he was at sea on a mission to track the German pocket battleship Graf Spey in South America. “When I came back from these stupid military actions I was designated for the secret service in Marseilles” and at first “refused to do that grimy job.” For a guy styling himself law enforcement officers and a gentleman it seemed an affair of “lies and vice.” But his commander induced it an tell and formerly Cousteau was caught up in historic events, he admitted, “I enjoyed it a lot.”

As the Germans progressively occupied France, firstly exacting franchises from the Vichy government, then intruding on ever more area with their Italian allies, Cousteau took part in scuttling the French fleet at Toulon to keep it out of Nazi hands. His most well documented exploit was on property, where reference is declined into an Italian military post and photographed critical reports helpful in bursting the Axis systems. As he figured it, he had “about one chance out of ten to come out” of that operation. For these employs Cousteau acquired two Croix de guerres and the Legion d &# x27; honneur.

His experimentations with the aqualung certainly placed him in a position to gather further intelligence in and around the sea. But it was only recently, one morning in Monaco, that he admitted “during that last part of the battle diving was my cover.” For obvious intellects it was not shrewd for a humanity prowling “the worlds” in a scientific research barrel to advertise the facts of the case he had been a spy.

Pierre-Antoine constituted his profession as a reporter while Jacques-Yves was operating his course up the grades in the Navy. Writing in the popular gazette “Je suis partout, ” Pierre proclaimed conciliation with the Germans as the war with Hitler approached and, once France had been demolished, he counseled partnership. Certainly, on any day in the streets of occupied Paris the French could speak tracts signed off by Pierre Cousteau that were openly sympathetic to the Nazis, implacably hostile to the Friends and the Jews: a people “with a delicacy for debauchery, for gyp, for verbal onanism, ” as Pierre introduced it. He was a hate-mongerer par excellence in a country that was, to its standing dishonor, viscerally anti-Semitic.

To this day the French loathe to be reminded about the working day of Vichy, but every so often a reporter muckraking through Cousteau &# x27; s past will delve into the history of Pierre-Antoine. The most recent was Bernard Violet, who dedicates much of the biography he wrote earlier this year to a tireles sought for practices in which the proceedings of the fucking brother might reflect on the younger. Violet managed to contact far-flung members of the family, pored through the sheets of “Je suis partout” and the records of later court proceedings, sifted through such private mail as he could obtain and finally discovered that Cousteau &# x27; s first public prevail with an underwater cinema was a indicate of “Par dix-huit metres de fond, ” a spearfishing narration with Dumas as booster, was indicated in dominated Paris during a Nazi-approved festival for films. Violet suggests that, aided by Pierre &# x27; s contacts, Jacques dived and filmed with the authorization of the occupiers. But Violet offers no evidence that Jacques Cousteau shared Pierre &# x27; s anti-semitic vistums or any of his other smutty minds. Jacques was loyal to his brother , not to his politics.

After the battle Pierre-Antoine Cousteau was captured by the Allies and sentenced to fatality for collaboration. Despite the obvious probability to his naval job, Jacques-Yves attended the test, witnessed on two brothers &# x27; s behalf, and tried to bolster his mettle once the convict was handed down. “You have to live. And the said he hoped that we have, you were supposed to share in it! ” he wrote the day after government decisions. Eventually Pierre &# x27; s sentence was commuted to life in prison, and after almost a decade behind prohibits, Pierre was released after 1956. Bitter and ended, he died two years later of cancer.

Throughout their youth, Pierre had been the more bright of the two brothers. But when he is evident from incarcerate it was Jacques the world knew. The Silent World had been an international best seller. The film based on the book, co-directed with young Louis Malle, had prevailed a Palme d &# x27; or at Cannes and an Oscar in Hollywood. As Jacques &# x27; popularity changed, the histories of Pierre passed into gloom, and then out of sight.

When Cousteau talks about those times today he chimes weary, but he is frankfurter. “My brother was persuaded that we should collaborate with the Germans, ” he said one afternoon. “He was urged of that before the campaign and he did not change his sentiment during the course of its crusade. I did not agree with him. We fought like puppies about these things together. Extremely gentle but very serious. And when I was in the Resistance and he was a writer writing in favor of the Germans we are continuing met and discussed”–Cousteau searched for a moment for the right word–“like brothers, but with radically different opinions. He was a rather brilliant, extremely likable, very warm person. Full of absurdity. And eventually, what happened? We do collaborate with the Germans. After all those things…

“I was a military officer. I was helping my own country. My country decided to fight. I was campaigning. Bon . And I may have had other opinions”–Cousteau shrugged–“but I did not. “

The Science of Joy

In the study in Monaco, on the wall above fax machines machine that spewed out a constant river of law articles and proposals for a long-planned investigate of the Yangtze, there hung a portrait of Simone covered by Jacques in the 1950 s. She had a kerchief tied around her whisker and her showing was skeptical. Cousteau &# x27; s technical skills as a portraitist, whether of Christ or of his wife, were no longer great. But the eyes in Simone &# x27; s scene did have that ruse, which some photographs have, of following you guys later. Framed on the wall, she softly reigned the room.

In life, she was down in the kitchen. Lunch was ready late in the day, a simple banquet with friends a la Provencale : raw fava beans, salami, pizza, steak.( The only fish on the table was a little boy rubber ones is available as knife respites .) Everyone drank red wine and talked about nutrient. Much as the skipper might snack, he never seems to gain weight. Cousteau had always been skinny, said Simone. When they used to make love, she chuckled, he was so boney she used to get bruised.

Photo Illustration by the Daily Beast

After dinner, with a bit encouragement, Cousteau continued the recount of his life. “Obviously it &# x27; s almost overwhelming the amount of things I &# x27; ve participate in. It &# x27; s nearly embarrassing, ” he read. “And the amount of luck I &# x27; ve had, compared to the life of a bank clerk.”

“Your luck, ” pronounced Simone, “was marrying me.”

“Evidemment, ” he remarked. Obviously.

But as Cousteau &# x27; s popularity continues to increase, Simone began to retreat.

It is easy enough to suspect the enervating effect of his constant exhilaration. Like an psychological dynamo he would fill you with energy in short outbursts, but over the long run he could take that power back. And then some. Seemed at closely, so much of what obligates Cousteau alluring boundaries on self-parody, and occasionally intersects the line. His manner is as quintessentially Gallic as the French accent he has prevented despite 75 years addressing American. He was ever and remains a “bon vivant” filled with “joie de vivre.” A favorite text in English is “enjoy.” Cousteau not only has fun–diving, traveling, sleuthing during World War II–he watches himself having fun, registers himself having fun. And the effect for those working around him can be a little like living in a movie. Examining for the key to the cellar of his Paris apartment so he can take a guest to visualized his wines, he narrates specific actions in the existing liberal like a scene from one of his movies: “Now I am opening the drawer, taking out this key…” In the cellar area, among old-time works by John Gunther and rollers of article for oceanographic examine equipment are cases of Chateau Belles Graves, numerous antiques, from a Bordeaux estate owned by relatives. He fusses about the &# x27; 89, which is wonderful, he reads, but is not able to age so well. Opening a bottle, he admires the Teflon-lubricated Screwpull. “The French attain great wine-coloureds, ” he responds, “the Americans stimulate great corkscrews.”

In the late afternoon in Monaco, while everyone still had a glass of Belles Graves in hand, Cousteau ransacked through the videos near the television. He searched the dominations of the tape player like a sailor looking at the range. “People become nomads at home, ” he answered. “I allow people who would never become nomads the possibility to dream they are.

“I become frenzied when they put one over my films the word &# x27 ;d ocumentary .&# x27; That would entail a lecture at home by a guy who knows better. There is a kind of solemnity. Our cinemas are not films. They are true adventure films.”

He procured the one he was looking for, a shorthand detail of his life called “The First 75 years.” Cousteau said he hadn &# x27; t “ve seen this” television adoration but once or twice since it was produced for his birthday in 1985, five years old before, and like small children he sat rapt, the silver-blue brightnes of the television screen crystallizing his features, watching the decades pass. Here are still photographs of a naughty schoolboy in the United States, there is Cousteau the mustached criminal in his primitive melodramas. He circumnavigates the globe on the Jeanne d &# x27; Arc, camera in hand, exploring the world of geishas, Balinese dancers, the cardboard deck of a Hollywood battleship. A impressive clip presents him with Douglas Fairbanks at Pickfair. The movie star ignites a cigarette for the 22 -year-old midshipman. Cousteau seems completely, elegantly at home.

A particular noblesse pressure combined with joie de vivre is a key to Cousteau &# x27; s environmental consciousness. “There is a way to conduct yourself that is aristrocratic, ” he said that evening in Monaco. “What I tried to do with my children–unfortunately half of them croaked — was to educate them simply that: the noble room of judging yourself. As long as you were not able to look at yourself in the reflect, satisfied with your action, you better shut up.”

From the early 1950 s, he sensed that what was happening to the natural world he explored was unconscionable. “The start was curiosity, the enthusiasm about allure. Then I realized that it was threatened, ” he spoke. ” Bon . Now after the period of interest and exploring succeeded the period of alarm, because we were looking at thoughts that were actually vanishing already. That began to turn us into environmentalists. And that began in 1950 when I procured the Calypso.”

The boat–the far-famed boat–was built in Seattle in the early days of the conflict, a wooden-hulled minesweeper dubbed simply J-8 26. By 1950 it had established its acces to private hands in Malta where it served as a shuttle and was open its refer, after the nymph who stopped Odysseus enraptured on her island for seven years. Cousteau bought the Calypso with fund donated by one of “his fathers” &# x27; s prosperous pals. He then plotted to have himself assigned to a special schism of the Navy and the Calypso proclaimed France &# x27; s first ship for oceanographic research. Cousteau had been 20 years in the military, and technically he still was. But as he and his crew sailed aboard the refitted Calypso on their maiden voyage to the Red Sea he realized “for the first time we were on our own. It was not &# x27; the &# x27; navy. It was &# x27; my &# x27; navy.”

Here on the video in Monaco is the opening vistum of the movie “The Silent World”: an escadrille of divers, flares in hand, descending to the lower fringes of a ridge. There is the Calypso prospecting for oil off Abu Dhabi. There are the inventions–Aqua-Lung, Diving Saucer, the habitats under the sea called Conshelf I, and II, and III. Here is Cousteau being received by Presidents of the United States. John Kennedy gifted him a medallion. Simone stands, ill at ease, in the background.

With the endorsement and future directions of David Wolper in the 1960 s Cousteau began his television series “The Undersea World of …, ” and his slightly folksy gumption of showmanship became Hollywoodized. In that late-1 960 s period of ersatz interplanetary escapades( this is only the time of “Star Trek,” the first generation ), Cousteau &# x27; s divers were outfitted in silver diving gear with creepy helmets suitable for encountering aliens. But the chieftain ever saved his sense of humor, and some of the costumes were absolutely ludicrous. For a program about African hippos, he had two of his guys don a fiberglass hippo dres. At a scene in the video of web-footed divers trundling past a stumped elephant, Cousteau appears with laughter.

The documentary continues to play out in the Monaco evening. There by the banks of the river among the hippos is a lanky young man, his look principally hidden by a thick whisker, but his suffer and his lean build suggestive of his father &# x27; s. As the story of Philippe Cousteau appears on the screen, the captain watches in silence.

Throughout the 1970 s, while Cousteau became a grandiose old person, his son Philippe appeared as the heir to his fame and his causes. Philippe was a very young of the two children Simone bore Cousteau. But his lyrical temper, his drive and ego and interests all pushed him to the prow in his father &# x27; s activities. He had a good sense of his generation &# x27; s environmental preoccupations and a infatuation with gadgetry like hot air bags and seaplanes. He pushed the edge of the envelope to keep in the Cousteau cinemas the feeling of excite and detection that ever mounted them apart.

At first they traveled together, in later years they divided up the employment. It was with Philippe that Cousteau firstly explored the leading edge of Antarctica. It was Philippe who hovered his seaplane to the upper reaches of the Nile. And when Philippe was killed in Portugal in 1979, crashing his airplane into the irrigates of the Tagus River, there was no supplanting him, really.

Jean-Michel, the fucking brother ,~ ATAGEND was by oppose slog and reserved. His chosen metier was architecture, the stuff of a static curiosity. Philippe was 39 when he died. Jean-Michel was 41 when he was called on to take his brother &# x27; s situate. “I assembled the Cousteau Society on the needs of the my dad, ” as he set it. More than a decade after Philippe &# x27; s demise, times after Jean-Michel began seeming regularly in all the publicity of the Cousteau Society and in most of the films, there was often an uncomfortable tension evident between the effusive, effulgent spirit of the parent and the taciturn, responsible feeling of the older–but second–son.

When privately I would expect Cousteau about the deaths among Philippe( “half” of “their childrens”) he would say it did not change the space he saw “the worlds”, but he was less than convincing. “It has hurt me for the rest of my daylights, personally, but it has had no force on my thinking . … It gave me more courage maybe. Because he was convinced, he attempted to promote the relevant recommendations that we developed together and his death is almost an encouragement.”

But Cousteau &# x27; s world-wide changed profoundly precisely then, in some manner publicly, in many ways unremarked or unspoken. The captain had met a young airline hostess identified Francine Triplet, and it was soon after Philippe croaked that his only daughter, Diane, was born to her. A couple of years later she tolerated him another son, Pierre-Yves, and gradually the fact that there is this second lineage initiated to assume a larger role in his life. Francine embarked writing the dialogues for his movies. Eventually the children started to appear in them, although their identities were not become clear until after Simone had died. Cousteau stopped their existence “not really a secret, ” he enunciated afterward. “It was part of “peoples lives”. A little aside, but not very much aside.”

Also about the time of Philippe &# x27; s demise, Cousteau wrote a work that his staff in Paris handle with attention verging on admiration. Now long out of book, The Cousteau Almanac: An Stock-take of Life on Our Water Planet , constructed little impact on “the worlds” &# x27; s consciousness. Much of it is a compendium of , now, more or less out of date papers by Cousteau staffers about breeder reactor, oil tankers and other the risk to human. But there are divisions that Cousteau refers to constantly. One is the bill of rights for benefit of future generations that the Cousteau feet now circulate as a petition. “Future generations have a right to an uncontaminated and undamaged ground and to its amusement …, ” embarks this small manifesto. It concludes by advocating authorities, organizations and individuals to “take all appropriate measures” to protect the environmental issues “as if in the continuing presence of those benefit of future generations whose claim we seek to establish and perpetuate.”

There is, very, a brief essay designation “The Exploration of Happiness.” In it Cousteau proposes “a science of joy”.

Photo Illustration by the Daily Beast

Oracle of the Apocalypse

Through the 1950 s and 1960 s, Cousteau was predominantly content to take us under ocean, open those natural entrances of taste, and leave us to marvel at the the experience. But about the time of Philippe &# x27; s demise, his central preoccupation moved dramatically from disclosure to maintenance. Jacques Cousteau was 70 years old, and the Biblical milestone of three score years and ten had been bridged. Half his children were dead. And, perhaps coincidentally, he had glimpsed the apocalypse.

One of the last movies Jacques and Philippe made together was about Easter Island, and the Captain talks about it still. “In certain cases environmental ruins may contact the point of no return, ” he told the Rio Conference on Environment and Development last year. “In the seventh century A.D ., as told by petroglyphs, two large outriggers territory on a maiden, lush and uninhabited tropical island. Two hundred Polynesians–men, ladies, children–and swine and hens landed on the beautiful beaches of Easter Island . … For eight centuries after they set they nurtured, multiplied, developed a unique civilization, national societies fractioned in three status: boors, sculptors and pastors. Their population increased wildly. They loped short of resources, and when they reached the number of 70,000, dearth, blood insurrections and social chaos introduced into the full amounts of the breakdown of their society. When Dutch navigators territory at Easter Island in the seventeenth century, it was a barren, absolutely deforested portion of rock where a few hundred cannibals were hunting each other for survival. All that remained were undecipherable tablets and proud effigies, a stern warning to humankind of what will happen to Island Earth if humans do not exclusively control their demography.”

In the 1980 s Cousteau &# x27; s team was just going Haiti, another frightful little island, with “7. 5 million people on an exiguous and impoverished land.” They might be “beautiful, proud, smart, good-humored and hard-working, ” but “they have wearied the marine resources of their narrow continental shelf. They have deforested, without precaution, two one-thirds of their country and tropical rainfalls have thereafter wiped out the clay, laying bare the dirt boulder and impede agricultures for centuries to meet. To cook their scanty meals, they continue to deforest, and become timber into charcoal-grey. We asked: &# x27; What will you do when there is no timber left at all ?&# x27; &# x27; That will be the end of the world! Yes, the end of the world !&# x27; they refuted. Until then, the men of Haiti procreate, hoping that their male children will take care of their age-old father-gods, and women speak &# x27; I am not the one to decide how many children I will have .&# x27; “

Cousteau was in a unique position to put across virtually any message that concerned him. By the early 1980 s the nonprofit institutions that Jacques and Simone and their sons had created were taking on the proportions of an territory. From 1956 until about 1989 Monaco contributed Cousteau a virtual sinecure as head of its oceanographic organization. But after some of his most ambitious underwater jobs were cancelled by the French authority in 1972, the Captain increasingly moved his activities to the United States. First with the Cousteau Society, then in France with the Fondation Cousteau, the Captain/ Commandant cobbled together the tools to underwrite his life and hypothesis. Royalties from past cinemas provisioned some income, contributions from members plied much of the residual. To keep the cash coming for his new television projects–at a cost of $1.1 million a demonstrate, filming 50 hours of movie for every one that got used–Cousteau forged agreements with Ted Turner, then Banque Worms, employing stockpiles of past rights the mode geologists probe the mesozoic sediments of the Persian Gulf.

From the time the Captain bought the Calypso with a donor &# x27; s money and facilitated outfit it by selling some of Simone &# x27; s jewelry, he and his family were engaged in what he announced “our fiscal adventure.” The main objective was to continue his make, but on the side this most handsome of adventurers refined a mode of life in which “without personal ownership, I live like a prince. I have two boats[ the Calypso and the turbo-sail Alcyone ], an airplane, a helicopter. I tour all the time.”

He learned to play all sorts of inclinations to underwrite his activities. Today, for instance, Cousteau is one of seven surviving French beings allowed to live in Monaco tax free because they were there before DeGaulle pointed special privileges.( “We were several thousand, ” Cousteau supposes in passing. “Next time there will be six or five or four.”) But he has never accumulated much uppercase. Cousteau makes a fetish of traveling light and fast, carrying his rather oddly adapted rest suits and turtlenecks in a suitcase smaller than a gym pocket. If he can commute on the Concorde between Paris and New York, he does. His favorite briefcase is the one the stewardesses hand out to all their passengers.

Cousteau took a long time to realize the political capacity of his prominence, and longer still to decide what the hell is do with it. The antic activism of Greenpeace did not attention him, certainly. Cousteau didn &# x27; t need to draw attention to himself by hanging banners on warships or dumping goo on doorsteps. If he went down wall street he had been able to gather a audience. For times French canvas have graded him the most popular soldier in the country, and its term of office claimed it went 80,000 words asking him to run for president in 1988.

Still, it wasn &# x27; t until the struggle for Antarctica that Cousteau recognise just how much superpower he might have.

As he tells the story he was reading the International Herald Tribune one morning in 1988 where reference is noticed that several signatories of the Antarctic Treaty had given their initial admiration in Wellington, New Zealand, to a convention on mining and drilling in the frozen continent. It would place severe restrictions on prospecting, but by providing a legal framework for asserts, it could eventually open the door to exploitation. The United States and France fully supported the convention.

Cousteau knew this target, Antarctica. He and Philippe had gone there in 1972 and 1973 and been overwhelmed by its charm. The folly of mining there, of doing anything that applied this maiden continent at risk, was so manifest that he could not conceive why authorities would approve such undertakings. The rogues, he concluded, were bureaucrats who set their professions before the good of mankind. “The scribes are deciding and not the governmental forces, ” Cousteau swore. “The prime minister can say to his apparatchiks what he wants, when he is gone they do what they want.”

One Tucker Scully, the State Department official who treated immediately with the Antarctic Treaty, became the target of Cousteau &# x27; s special defiance. And after 15 times is currently working on the subject, the ever diplomatic Scully initially matched the chieftain &# x27; s reviews with polite defiance. “Maybe it &# x27; s hour for brand-new blood, ” he said in the hallways at a 1989 Paris conference on Antarctica. “But as of now 13 agencies of the U.S. government concur in its own position we &# x27; re taking.”

Cousteau decided to go to the top. He personally lobbied French President Francois Mitterrand, as well as the premier of Australia and New Zealand. And eventually Captain Cousteau went to Washington.

The fate of the frozen continent was not exactly a igniting problem on Capitol Hill. A few of environmental activists like Susan Sabella of Greenpeace and James Barnes of the Antarctica Project had followed the issue closely, be expected to overcome the Wellington Convention by working with congressional staffers, issuing reports, occasionally witnessing before such committees and laboring over every parole of pending legislation. They were, essentially, characters of the Hill, and when Cousteau hit town in his turtleneck and leisure clothing he seemed, to them, like someone from another planet. But there was no question he had an impact. “You have members of Congress that start ga-ga. They bring “their childrens” out for scenes with him, ” supposed Richard Munson, a congressional staffer and environmentalist who wrote a 1989 biography critical of Cousteau. “This is generally a reasonably contemptuous heap, ” remarked Munson, “but you visualize some of them plow him almost with reverence.”

Occasionally, wearisome from a relentless planned, Cousteau would muddle knowledge: 30,000 chicks affected by a recent petroleum shed in the Antarctic suddenly became 30,000 birds killed. Cousteau described the Wellington Convention as secretly negotiated, when in fact Barnes had been able to follow its growth for years. As the skipper spoke before members of the House Foreign Affairs committee Sabella and Barnes shifted in their sets, curbing giggles. “I retained wanting to say &# x27 ;p oint of information ,&# x27; ” articulated Barnes when it was over. “He doesn &# x27; t understand the politics of it at all.” But when Cousteau requested off on one question about Antarctica by saying “I am not a prophet, ” Congressman Wayne Owens of Utah gave as how “some think you are.” Nobody ever used to say about Barnes or Sabella.

Cousteau had access no other Antarctic lobbyists ever had. Republican senators opened their doors to him. Liberals cuddled him. At a breakfast in the Rayburn building, a dinner in the Capitol, they listened to him expound is not simply on the fate of Antarctica, but on the future of the world. “Since I was born, the population of the earth has tripled. And it goes on. Every two years there is another France. Every 10 times, another China.” There are, right now, more than 5 billion people in “the worlds”. “It &# x27; s a heavy, heavy threat. We weigh too much on the planet.” Some scientists guess the earth can feed three times its present person. “But is the goal to feed more beings and using them to induce a miserable life or is it better to have fewer beings conduct a full life? ” he expected. “If you have 12 or 15 billion people there will be no nightingales , no butterflies , no et cetera. And you will have only a few animals–cows, pigs, sheep–to feed those people. Everything else will be destroyed.”

Photo Illustration by the Daily Beast

Cousteau, inaugurated, in fact, to preach his revolution. “It is during this next hundred years that the future”–of mankind, of the et cetera–“will be decided.” Sure, the costs of preparing the record straight will be high: women around the developing world have to be educated so birth rates will go down, the poor have to be convinced that their own future protection does not depend on the proliferation of their descendants. Something like a world-wide welfare system needs to be created. “Urgency realise this possible, ” spoke Cousteau. “If the doctor tells you you have cancer you register research hospitals, even if you have to borrow money.”

People have to get over the idea that uptake and contentment go together. Cousteau modesties special disdain for the idea of having “sustained development” dear to most politically savvy environmentalists. If American-style consumerist fortune continues to be the framework for “the worlds” &# x27; s aspirations, in Cousteau &# x27; s belief all is lost. “Seven hundred million Americans, that &# x27; s all that the earth could subscribe: 700 million Americans, it symbolizes nobody else.” The positive side of the Third World &# x27; s underdevelopment is that “more than half the planet &# x27; s human being is still not consumers.”

All of which is consistent with respectful gestures among the photo opportunists of the Hill, and gleaned special attention from then-Senator Al Gore. For the future vice president, Cousteau was something special. The baby-boomer politician had grown up with him, just like the rest of us, then became a personal friend. “I first invited him to come and speak to the U.S. Congress 12 years ago, and I have expended a great deal of time with him, ” said the senator. “I was at his last-place birthday defendant in Paris.” They may have different accents, but two speak much the same eco-visionary language, clanging off fearing statistics, trying to drawing a nature that works quite differently from anything we &# x27; ve knowledge before. At the end of Gore &# x27; s best-selling volume he writes about the effect his son &# x27; s brush with death had on his opinion, and the importance of “inner ecology.” “We can believe in that future and work to achieve it and preserve it, or we can whirls blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no infants to acquire our bequest. The selection is ours; the earth is in the balance.” All this sounds singularly like Cousteau.

In the end, on Antarctica, the captain–and Barnes and Sabella, and Gore, and the rest of the environmentalists–won. A terminated moratorium was proclaimed on prospecting as well as mining for the next half-century, and that was good enough for Cousteau. “It is a victory of good sense, genuinely, ” he said later. “I have just been a soldier of good sense.” But Cousteau, while he still giggles at himself, spots it hard to be humble. “I carry on piling up information and I &# x27; ve done that all “peoples lives”, ” he announced. “I &# x27; m in a position, and I didn &# x27; t crave it, it happened to me, where I know more about the environment than anyone else alive.”

There are, of course, numerous environmentalists who would query this claim. Even Al Gore, who likes to mention permissions as varied as Aristotle, R.D. Laing and Carl Sagan, merely mentions Cousteau formerly in his book, and then merely in passing. He doesn &# x27; t include a single duty by the skipper in his bibliography. It is as if, after all he has done and learned, all the photo opportunities and homages, in the end Cousteau is not to be taken seriously. His information is too general, the best interests wander extremely widely, his endowments are too gone for the penchants of a macrocosm attuned to specialists. Perhaps “they dont have” residence for a Renaissance man in a post-modernist age. Perhaps the influence of beauty has waned, or, perhaps, he has lost his appreciation of it.

Undeterred, the old person of the sea remains lowering his lance and billing at the apocalypse, pursuing the all-important, all-consuming make that those closest to him are reluctant to disrupt. “Utopia or fatality, ” he likes to say. The fright has been sounded. “Theres only” 10 years left to save the world, he announced last year. That &# x27; s nine years , now, and clicking. The letter from “the organizations activities” is unrelenting. Every young member of the Cousteau Society in the United States or liter &# x27; Equipe Cousteau in France gets a regular dosage of Cousteau &# x27; s philosophy in “The Calypso Log.” “All society is organized to employ those who are not yet born, ” he tells his child-revolutionaries. “The future of the human species is in danger.”

With the zeal of a guy who has investigated the light-footed, Cousteau preaches the teaching of something he announces “ecotechnique, ” a neologism for the simple-minded, sensible notion of creating interdisciplinary those programmes and universities to commit economics, engineering and ecology equal weight in the curriculums, and in the decision-making process generally. A few of European universities have endorsed the program. The Vrije University in Brussels has even made a Cousteau chair. The notion in the end is to prevent projects like the mining of Antarctica from ever get off the dirt by realizing clearly what would otherwise be “unforeseen consequences.”

But there is another aspect to Cousteau &# x27; s doctrine that is even more elemental, more essential to understanding his opinion. “You know, ” he said one radiant morning at a coffeehouse in Cannes, “I is argued that delight is for this world-wide, and I believe that we could teach happiness.” It is a theme he comes back to again and again, a “crazy idea, ” as he quickly declares, but one of which he is deeply enamored. The “science of joy” is the standard against which everything else is weighed. As if glee had no potential for disaster.

Cousteau holds: If beings extend their realm of suffer by memorizing, adoration, sharing and creating, as he wrote in his Almanac at the beginning of the 1980 s, then they can escape sterile, pernicious measures of well-being like uptake, spend, and “efficiency.” If we know well what joyfulnes is, and engage it together, anything is possible. The thought neatly bridges his personal and world-wide operations. But somewhere along the way, some of the people closest to him were left out. “He &# x27; s a one-man depict, ” announces Jean-Michel, “because he doesn &# x27; t representative, because he doesn &# x27; t known better, because he &# x27; s got to go where he &# x27; s proceeding: in pursuit of happiness.”

Cousteau &# x27; s last-place major documentary, a massive four-part line on the Danube that cost millions to induce, was written by his new spouse, Francine Triplet. It boasts his two young children, Diane and Pierre-Yves, who appear as amazed and often obviously unpleasant eyewitness along for the ride on their parent &# x27; s peregrinations through Eastern Europe. Publicity for the programs in France included dreadfully awkward photographs of Cousteau, looking ancient in his diving gear as he stands beside his 13 -year-old daughter and 11 -year-old-son.

“Are we born on globe to be &# x27; efficient &# x27; or to be happy? ” Jacques Cousteau questioned one afternoon in Paris last-place descent. It was an interesting question, and central to the method he recollects. “We have to say, &# x27; what are the parts of their own lives that you like to remember ?&# x27; ” Maybe there was a moment when you were playing plays in high school, or an afternoon invest having a glass of wine-colored, talking to good friends. “You can lose times trying to find the passion of a wonderful woman[ before] you finally get it. That &# x27; s not efficient, ” said the old-time sailor. “The efficient situation to do is to go to a bordello.”

The day was almost over at the offices of Equipe Cousteau near the Place des Ternes, across the street from the Brasserie Lorraine. Francine, Cousteau &# x27; s n