Henri-Pierre Roché

French writer, art dealer, collector, critic and, intermittently, journalist. François Truffaut's film adaptations of his two novels, Jules and Jim, published in 1953, and Deux Anglaises et la maine, published in 1956, both written as autobiographical digests, give him a posthumous celebrity.

A painter by training, Henri-Pierre Roché was for most of his life an art collector. As a commercial agent or adviser to great collectors, sometimes simply by his interpersonal skills, always in the background, he played a central role in the development of modern art, helping Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Constantin Brancuşi and Marie Laurencin, then Man Ray and Jean Dubuffet, among others, to make themselves known.

He was the lover of Helen Hessel, wife of his friend Franz Hessel. He wrote of their triangular relationship in Jules et Jim, his semi-autobiographical novel.

He died on 8 April 1959 at the age of 79 in his house in Sèvres.