The artist Christo Vladimirov Javacheff’s life ended on 31 May with an air so romantic as to seem unreal. He was born on 13 June 1935, the same day as his wife, Jeanne-Claude Denat. She was born in Casablanca, and he in Gabrovo (Bulgaria). How did their paths cross? Christo, born into the Bulgarian intellectual elite, had wanted to go to the theater first and art later, in Sofia, but the study program, controlled by the communist state, was disappointing, and he escaped hidden in a truck. He arrived in Paris and devoted himself to painting portraits. Ladies’ hairdressers were among the places where he found the most clients, such as Jeanne-Claude’s mother, who one day in 1959 commissioned a canvas. The young artist began to frequent the Denats in Guillebon. He was supposed to be courting the sister of Jeanne-Claude, who was married to another man. But the script went awry at some point, Jeanne-Claude became pregnant with Christo, and nothing in the world, not even the foreseeable hostility of her family, separated them from then on, until her death in 2009... [+]