"Gérard Depardieu is doing well. His operation was foreseen for a longtime. He will resume his normal activities very quickly." Guillaume de Vergès, general director attached to T.f.l [major French TV channel], and Jean-Pierre Guérin, producer of "Les Miserables", want to be reassuring. This morning of Wednesday July 12, before about fifty journalists, the private company organizes the showing of the first two episodes of the adaptation by Josée Dayan of the novel by Victor Hugo ["Les Miserables"] that it will air beginning September 4. In the room, Claude Davy, journalist and confidant of Depardieu, and Richard Melloul, his personal photographer, begin the same chorus: "All is going well..."   

Yet, this heavy fatigue has all the symptoms of a hot cardiac alert. For several weeks, Gérard felt tired. His entourage advised him to take some days of rest, or even to get a medical exam. He, to dismiss them, asserted a loaded schedule. Euphemism. The whole first half of the year, the actor exhausted himself literally to the task. As soon as the filming of "Les Miserables" finished, in March, he flew off for the United States, where he was the partner of Glenn Close in "102 Dalmatians". In May, he attended the promotion at Cannes of "Vatel", the movie by Roland Joffé. Then he did a fast round-trip in Italy, this time to appear in the next movie of Scola Ettore. Finally, just before his operation, he had just finished the filming of "Vidocq", with  Guillaume Canet. He doesn't take care of himself, it is necessary that he dons the skin of another. Already, he had packed his suitcase to join Daniel Auteuil, Thierry Lhermitte and Michèle Laroque on the set of the new comedy by Francis Veber, "Le Placard". And at the end of the summer, the superman of the French movies was to begin all over again playing Obélix under the direction of Alain Chabat, in the second of the film adventures of Astérix... However prodigious his hardiness can seem, such activity was inevitably ominous, in the long run, for the giant's health.