Did you think we were going to drink carrot juice sprinkled with chia seeds, zested with lime? That he was going to arrive wearing the sandals of Jesus? Lost. The apostle of eco-responsible participatory capitalism (with him, not being afraid of oxymorons) seems rather lost himself, this April day. Already, he didn’t really know where to meet. It was a friend who told him about this wine bar on rue Bachaumont, a stone’s throw from Les Halles, in the heart of Paris. Alain Cojean looks shy, younger than his age, 60 and a half, and quite anxious. No one would recognize this slender man in the street, walking briskly, a little jerkily.

Here, let’s start there. We ordered a coupette, just to relax, especially him. After a quarter of an hour, the computer-notebook breaks down. So we went to his place, somewhere at the end of rue Montorgueil. Short but instructive trip. First, he runs like a rabbit. Alain Cojean is this entrepreneur who in 2001 created a famous chain of “high-end fast food”, as we say in the economic world, and who, on the evening of his leaving party, January 21, 2019, s is stuck with his scooter in the concrete pads of a building site. Head trauma, broken nose, busted legs, left for dead. The helmet, which no longer closed properly, had collapsed away.

We knew it right away, in the service of the great reporters of the World, because his sister Annick was in a blood of ink. It was even there, during the almost miraculous convalescence, that the idea of ​​making a portrait germinated. Such a failed act, such resilience sign a character. ” Forget “, said his sister, he never talks to reporters. It was true. As a business manager, a thousand times solicited for his unusual success, he has always declined interviews. “There may have been three or four articles in twenty years. I was just doing my job, the com did not interest me “, he says today in an ingenuous tone.

Difficult decision

The staccato of his gait comes from there, he can no longer fully bend his knees. After long months of rehabilitation, in Roscoff, in his dear Brittany, he hardly seems there anymore. It is suspected that he never liked to kneel. Yet he says all the time ” sorry “ ; sorry for being ahead, sorry for walking too fast. Of the accident, which he compares to “a cold or a mosquito bite”, he doesn’t care much. Six months in the hospital and in a wheelchair. We must make a funny face, because he adds: “I promise you, psychologically, it didn’t do anything to me. And I did not suffer. »

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