The funeral of the French writer Dominique Lapierre, passionate about India and author of the bestseller
La Cité de la joie
, will take place Friday in Ramatuelle, on the Côte d'Azur, we learned Monday from the parish and funeral directors.
Aged 91, Dominique Lapierre, who has sold millions of books around the world and has been translated into thirty languages, died of old age on Friday (December 2), his widow announced on Sunday to the regional daily
Var- Morning
.
"The funeral will take place in Ramatuelle, Friday at 2:30 p.m., in the Notre-Dame de l'Assomption church
," the parish of Ramatuelle-La Croix-Valmer told AFP.
The funeral will take place "in the strictest privacy", but the body is "visible at the funeral home of Cogolin (near Saint-Tropez and Ramatuelle) until Friday noon", for their part specified the funeral directors Var Azur Funéraire as well than the town hall of Ramatuelle where Dominique Lapierre had lived for a long time.
In India, a country where Dominique Lapierre also carried out numerous humanitarian actions, his death was experienced as a "heartbreak" by his friends.
"We have been in shock since the news of Dominique Lapierre's death,"
Abdul Wohab, director of the Indian charity Southern Health Improvement Society near Calcutta, told AFP by telephone.
"It's heartbreaking,"
he added.
According to him, the writer had traveled more than “35 times to the islands of the Sunderbans, in the Indian state of West Bengal (east), and worked in silence and with great humility for millions of people of the region since 1986.
The novel
The City of Joy,
written with the American Larry Collins, published in 1985 sold millions of copies and was the subject of a film, directed by Roland Joffé, in 1992.
Another of his bestsellers,
Is Paris Burning?
about the liberation of the French capital during the Second World War, was adapted for the screen by René Clément, with a host of stars, such as the Frenchman Jean-Paul Belmondo or the American Kirk Douglas.
Americans Francis Ford Coppola and Gore Vidal co-wrote the screenplay.
