Later Years
Guimard was in charge of a mission for the French President François Mitterrand from Mitterrand's election in 1981 until August 1982. "My only regret is not to have obtained at the time of my passage to the Elysium the creation of an academy of the Sea", Guimard said, affirming that this experiment "was not directed, but only one long accident".
Guimard was a member of the audio-visual communication authority from 1982 to 1986. He then returned to literature after a decade. He published a short story on Giraudoux, Giraudoux? Hello!... (1988) and novels such as A Combination of Circumstances (1990), The Stone Age (1992), and First Comers (1997).
In 1993 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Foundation of Prince Pierre of Monaco.
Paul Guimard died in Hyères (Var). He was married to French feminist and optimistic writer Benoîte Groult, who shared his love of navigation. The style of both writers slightly converged in that respect; Groult's latest works (Les Vaisseaux du coeur) are more nostalgic, and Guimard's "brother" novel, also about human destiny and sea (Le Mauvais temps), is more sensible to the role of human will as opposed to fate.
Read more about this topic: Paul Guimard
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“Wondrous hole! Magical hole! Dazzlingly influential hole! Noble and effulgent hole! From this hole everything follows logically: first the baby, then the placenta, then, for years and years and years until death, a way of life. It is all logic, and she who lives by the hole will live also by its logic. It is, appropriately, logic with a hole in it.”
—Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)
“[F]rom Saratoga [N.Y.] till we got back to Northampton [Mass.], was then mostly desert. Now it is what 34. years of free and good government have made it. It shews how soon the labor of man would make a paradise of the whole earth, were it not for misgovernment, and a diversion of all his energies from their proper object, the happiness of man, to the selfish interests of kings, nobles and priests.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)