In nine thorough chapters, page after page, Pierre Assouline tells the life, the work, the tastes and the ideas of the great author. The twentieth was the century of the image, and Cartier-Bresson was its eye. Across the decades his eclectic way of looking settled on the Africa of the twenties, on the Spanish civil war and the liberation of Paris; it told of Gandhi a few hours before his murder and of the victory of the Chinese communists. Artist and craftsman, he was one of the founders of Magnum Photos. It was he who fixed in our minds the characteristic traits of his most famous contemporaries, so that Giacometti and Sartre come back to us like the figures of their own works, and Faulkner, Matisse, Camus and countless others are caught at the perfect instant for eternity. A reserved man, he was long bound in great friendship to Assouline, with whom he discussed his youthful devotion to surrealism, his passion for drawing, his experience of the war, and the friends and the women of his life. The biographer gives back a sharp and perceptive portrait and lets us weigh again his contribution to the century.