Jean-Dominique Bauby

Jean-Dominique Bauby was born on April 23, 1952, in the 14th arrondissement of Paris and grew up on the rue du Mont-Thabor, behind the Tuileries Garden, in the building where Alfred de Musset had once lived. He went into journalism at Combat and then Le Quotidien de Paris, where his first signed piece appeared on the day Georges Pompidou died in 1974. He ran the cultural pages of Paris Match, became editor-in-chief of the daily Le Matin de Paris at twenty-eight, published a book on the film producer Raoul Lévy in 1994, and from 1991 was editor-in-chief of the women's magazine Elle. He had a son and a daughter with Sylvie de la Rochefoucauld, and later lived with Florence Ben Sadoun, a film critic at Elle. He had already signed a contract for a book, a modern version of The Count of Monte Cristo. On December 8, 1995, aged forty-three, he suffered a massive stroke while driving his son to the theatre. He woke from a coma some twenty days later with locked-in syndrome: his mind was whole, but he could move nothing except his left eyelid. Moved to the naval hospital at Berck-sur-Mer on the Channel coast, he first sent, by blinking, a letter to some sixty friends, and their response persuaded him to write a book about what had happened to him instead. His speech therapist, Sandrine Fichou, arranged the alphabet by how often each letter is used, and over two months Claude Mendibil, sent by his publisher Robert Laffont, recited it to him for hours a day, writing down each letter he chose with a blink. The result, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, a short book of memory, appetite, humour and the body he no longer had, was published in March 1997 and became a bestseller across Europe as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. He died on March 9, 1997, two days after it appeared, and in 2007 Julian Schnabel made it into a film with Mathieu Amalric as Bauby.

At the naval hospital in Berck, Bauby composed each passage in his head during the night and held it in memory until morning. Then Claude Mendibil, sent by his publisher, recited an alphabet arranged by how often each letter is used, and he blinked his left eyelid at the right one, letter by letter.