Age hasn’t taken away his zest. As his wife, also called Dominique, looked on, Lapierre morphed into a feisty storyteller, leading a packed crowd of diplomats, writers and babus through the making of Freedom At Midnight, which he co-authored with Larry Collins.

“The story of this book began at the French embassy in London where Larry and I met Lord Louis Mountbatten, independent India’s first Governor-General, for lunch. We asked about his last days in India. Soon, we were driving down to his Broadlands estate in the south of England. The real value of the estate lay in the basement where Mountbatten maintained an archive that included innumerable letters as well as scraps of paper on which Gandhi wrote.”