Dominique Leverd

Les Cent Livres des Hommes (ORTF, 1969-1973) was a series of literary programs created by Claude Santelli and Françoise Verny, and produced notably by Santelli, Jean Archimbaud, and Serge Moati. Planned for one hundred episodes but completed at thirty-nine, the series aimed to introduce great literary works, 'chefs-d’œuvre', to a younger audience through a mix of dramatization, reading, and documentary techniques. It marked a transfer of cultural legitimacy from writers and critics to a generation of television producers, offering a new model of educational and creative literary broadcasting - 'télévision d’auteur'.

Paris, 1925. Bénédict Masson, bookbinder and poet, is secretly in love with his neighbor, Christine. Christine works at the strange Coulteray mansion where the marquise accuses her husband of being a vampire. But Bénédict has other preoccupations: six of his apprentices have disappeared without a trace.

Olivier, a young man, falls in love with Marion Renoir, theatre and screen star, to the despair of his fiancée Antonia. The latter goes to find the actress and asks her to invent a ploy to help her win back her lover's heart. The actress gets caught up in the game and ventures into an intrigue where simulation and sincerity are dangerously confused.

Rome, November 1941. In a pneumology clinic, Ion Bucur, a young Romanian poet, is dying. His friend and compatriot, artist Eugen Dragutesco, faithfully sits at his bedside, drawing pictures of him, thirty pictures in total, which will finally constitute the poignant diary of a pathetic agony.