The Second Breath

Philippe Pozzo di Borgo was born into two great French families and became a quadriplegic in 1993 after a paragliding accident, which utterly changed his life as vice president of Champagne Pommery under the LVMH group. Under the title The Second Breath he wrote about his days after suddenly losing the use of his body: physical pain, the sense of being "abandoned" by society, the upheavals in his marriage and family, and how through long rehabilitation he relearned how to breathe and how to live with life again. Among the many applicants for the caregiver position, Abdel, a young man from a North African immigrant family in the Paris suburbs, was finally the one who stayed. Two people utterly different in background, upbringing, and temperament collided and supported each other day after day: Abdel, crude, blunt, and sharp-tongued, dragged the patient out of his "gilded prison" with almost instinctive candor, and Pozzo di Borgo came to understand dignity, dependence, and other people anew. This edition comprises Volume One, The Second Breath, and its sequel, Volume Two, The Guardian Devil, continuing the daily life of the two men over nearly a decade and serving as the source material for Jean-Pierre Devillers' documentary and the French film The Intouchables (also rendered in Chinese as The Untouchables and Untouchable). It is both a memoir of the body and of fate and a sober record of the situation of people with disabilities and of social prejudice.