Former French ambassador to Malta, Daniel Rondeau, was elected a lifelong member of the Académie française in 2019 and officially received in the academy during an opulent ceremony held under the famous dome of the Institut de France in Paris earlier this month, thus becoming, as tradition holds, a French ‘immortal author’.

Accompanied by a detachment of soldiers in regal uniform, to the roll of drums and wearing the ceremonial sword of honour, he proceeded to the Coupole to take seat number eight, left vacant following the death of another academy member, Michel Déon (1919-2016).

Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII of France founded the Académie française in 1635. With membership limited to 40 members, the academy upholds quality French literature and is the official authority on the language.

Its founder had set up the first fleet of France with the assistance of the Knights of Malta. Richelieu’s fame soared through Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 novel The Three Musketeers.

Members of the Académie and Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, led a distinguished 300-strong audience, including former prime minister of France, Dominique de Villepin, and former minister of Foreign and European affairs, Bernard Kouchner.

Former prime minister of France, Dominique de Villepin (third from left), and former minister of foreign and European affairs, Bernard Kouchner, were among the distinguished guests.

Leading the author’s family was his wife Noëlle. UNESCO general director Audrey Azouly, Bishop of Mosul Najib Mikhael Moussa and Laeticia, widow of the French singer Johnny Hallyday, were among the guests. In the assemblage were also two Maltese, namely Dominic Micallef from the Malta Tourism Office in Paris and family friend Charles Xuereb. Adhering to a custom of the academy, Rondeau delivered an appreciative eulogy outlining Déon’s literary achievements. The president of the Académie, French novelist and journalist Danièle Sallenave, highlighted Rondeau’s literary, social and diplomatic achievements. She dedicated a portion of her delivery to the new adherent’s time on Malta as ambassador of France.

“In 2008, you became our ambassador to Malta. Your book, Malta Ħanina remains a valid testimony of how you embraced this old Mediterranean civilisation. Malta is the warmest, most welcoming island of all the lands of the Mediterranean. Malta is a piece of Africa and it is in Europe; Malta the generous (ħanina), Catholic, Semitic, navel of the sea between Sicily and Libya, between East and West.”

She mused that once settling in Malta, Rondeau felt like he had hauled up almost all the nets he had thrown in the Mediterranean from book to book – including travel memories of Tangiers, Alexandria, Carthage, Istanbul – for nearly 25 years. Until then a bird of passage, Rondeau for a period was “hanging on the Maltese rock”.

Sallenave remarked that during Rondeau’s spell on the island, Malta was also witness to the scene of a tragedy: “You were able to combine your passion in Malta for the East and the defence of a cause: that of migrants.”

Ambassador Rondeau, honoured as officer of the Maltese National Order of Merit, had succeeded in enabling scores of refugee migrants to settle in France.