On the benches of the Paris school where I wore out my first pair of jeans I made friends with a skinny red-faced boy named Olivier, whose runaway mythomania made his company irresistible. With him around, there was no need to go to the movies. Olivier’s friends had the best seats in the house, and the film was a miracle of invention. On Monday he would amaze us with a weekend saga straight out of the Thousand and One Nights. If he had not spent Sunday with Johnny Hallyday it was because he had gone to London to see the new James Bond, unless he had been driving the latest Honda. (Japanese motorbikes, just then arriving in France, were all the rage in schoolyard discussions.) From morning to night our friend fed us small lies and gross fabrications, brazenly inventing new stories even when they contradicted preceding ones. An orphan at 10 a.m., an only son at noon, he could dig up four sisters by mid-afternoon, one of them a figure-skating champion. As for his father - in reality a sober civil servant - he became, depending on the day, the inventor of the atom bomb, the Beatles’ manager, or General de Gaulle’s unacknowledged son. Since Olivier himself neglected to give coherence to the dishes he served up, we would have been the last to expect consistency of him. When he came out with some utterly outlandish fable we would voice tentative doubts, but he defended his good faith with such indignant protest of ‘I swear!’ that we would swiftly back down.
When I last checked, Olivier was neither a fighter pilot nor a secret agent nor adviser to an Emir (careers he once considered). Fairly predictably, it is in the advertising world that he wields his inexhaustible faculty for gilding every lily.
