The great aggiornamento of the sixties affected every field, including that of literary criticism. Separated from life, confined to enclosed and dusty spaces, airless, it had been living symbiotically with works whose interest lay practically only in being the object of exams or academic contests at the end of the year. Not a word, or if that then a demeaning or evasive one, about the mildly recent texts which, in a confused way, were managing to speak to the adolescents we then were, about the writers who were alive and breathing. And then we came across the first works of Jean-Pierre Richard, who was living apart from the French academic world, abroad – who was living. Forty-five years later I can remember how fresh, bright, tasty the pages he was giving us felt.