Radio House. Tuesday, June 27, 2023. It’s 7:38 p.m. and the emotion is palpable in studio 611 where Laure Adler is recording what will be her last “Blue Hour”, the interview program she has been leading since 2016 on France Inter. Tonight, no “known” guest. No doubt because, as her program manager, Céline Villegas, confided to us, “she’s like that, she has flashes, intuitions”, Laure Adler chose to interview a child. A boy of “10 years soon”, met at the bookstore Colette Kerber, in Paris, one evening “when it was raining a lot”.

This did not prevent us from asking some of the “women of [his] life” to mention the one who has officiated at Radio France for “forty-nine and a half years”. And first to Michelle Perrot who was part of her thesis jury (At the dawn of feminism. The first journalists, ed. Payot, 1979). For the historian, “Laure is a fire, not a will-o’-the-wisp but a burning, dazzling fire: she is an ardent woman. A woman who is both loyal to her friends and to her convictions, which does not mean that she is not open and tolerant”.

For Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize for Literature 2022, whose Laure Adler accompanies the release of each of the books since this first time, in 1988 for the publication of Une femme (Gallimard), “Laure is a feminist voice that never lets go”. And a unique interviewer: “I’m coming out of a year of interviews and if I’m over my head, it’s because I’m always being asked the same things. Laura, I never know what questions she’s going to ask me. She’s direct, she doesn’t leave you alone, and I love that as an interviewee and as a listener. »

“Devastating Humor”

“We often say: ‘it will make you 100 euros per session’ to the guest because there is a psychoanalytical side”, underlines Céline Villegas. Moreover, the first questions are always incredible, disconcerting, in media res. We remember, for example, his recent “Who is Marcel for you?” to Proust’s biographer, Jean-Yves Tadié.

For Charline Vanhoenacker, producer of “It’s still us” on France Inter, “Laure is my idol, my role model. For me, the word that defines it is excellence. She’s a character too, Laure: an always smiling, elegant figure, a touch of madness with her heart-shaped glasses: they’re Marie-Anne Chazel’s glasses in Les Bronzés! She has a devastating sense of humor and a lot of wit.”

Elodie Royer, production assistant for “L’Heure Bleue”, admires “her inexhaustible curiosity and her commitment to public service. She conducts her interviews without notes, lets herself be carried away by the guests, the energy of the moment, which really creates radio moments.

But it is precisely time. The time of the last “Blue Hour”. The light turns red. Veridis quo by Daft Punk, the historical credits, resounds in the studio. Laure Adler then pronounces the first name of this child prodigy whose phrasing is so reminiscent of that of her dear Marguerite Duras: “His name is Shai. We then say to ourselves that the meaning of this Hebrew first name (gift, offering), which we find rather in the most poetic passages of the Old Testament of which Laure Adler is an assiduous reader, will undoubtedly not have escaped her. .