One might say Pierre Bergé was preordained for the extraordinary. Upon arrival in Paris from his hometown of La Rochelle in 1948, the 18-year-old was walking along the Champs Élysées when a man suddenly fell out of a window right in front of him. At the time, he had no idea that the man was Jacques Prévert, author of Paroles, the renowned 1945 book of poems. Six decades later, Bergé, whose innumerable belt notches included fashion oligarch, art patron, erudite collector, political activist and one-time president of the Paris Opera, revealed his somewhat grandiose sense of destiny: “I have always considered it an act of fate that on my very first day in Paris, a poet should fall on my head.”
Fate or not, the story of Bergé, who died…
