They stayed up late drinking and talking before finally going to bed in their room overlooking the sea. Simone was "gay, alert, joking," he remembered. That night, however, her sister-in-law was there-and Cousteau.
Often alone, she left the radio and television turned on all the time to keep her company.
For most of the four months annually when she was not on the boat, she was in the Cousteaus' little apartment in Monaco.
#HARPOON UFO EXPLORER SKIN#
But in her seventy-first year she looked as if beneath her leather skin there were bones of excruciating fragility. "She is like a purser and a priest," Cousteau liked to say. She was known to the crew as "La Bergère," the shepherdess, and she devoted herself to the ship she called "my best friend," to its missions, its men and their Captain. "The night she died, we had a very joyful dinner." Simone was a tiny woman, tough and reserved, who had spent most of the last 40 years at sea on the research vessel Calypso. "For her the good thing was, I spent the last three days with her."įinishing the last of the Bordeaux, he went on. Flakes of dandruff speckled the eyeglasses he used to read the menu. At that moment he looked, uneasily, his 81 years. His face was flushed and the lower lids of his eyes were red. PARIS, May 27, 1993-After a long conversation about Antarctica, a continent he felt he had saved, and before the raspberries, which he anticipated with the greedy enthusiasm of a child, one summer Sunday afternoon in 1991 at the Brasserie Lorraine on the Place des Ternes, looking out on Paris streets that were warm and green and pulsing with life, Jacques-Yves Cousteau talked about the death of his wife Simone a few months before. Cousteau had many failings, but he changed the way we see the natural world, and, sadly, the world that he introduced us to is now in terrible danger.
But at a time when deniers of science and of common sense are out to destroy the last best chance we have to slow climate change, it seemed an appropriate moment for this article to see the light of day. I wrote this long, intimate profile of Jacques-Yves Cousteau in the spring of 1993 and, for personal reasons, never published it.
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