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.
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“In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn’t yet appeared, he should begin to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, prepare for it. To achieve this, he has to see and know more than did his grandfather and father.”
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