Following one of the guests’ reaction, I realized that the latter had ingenuously understood that Johnny Hallyday and Eddy Mitchell (two French Pop and Rock Stars with a huge local following) were giving a joint concert entitled "Johnny / Mitchell" … Disabusing the guest, I could check that Joni Mitchell’s name was totally foreign to him. And that person claimed to be interested in music!… Authentic and truthful. This context highlights how precious the writings of someone like Jacques Vassal were, in a French context largely impervious to Joni Mitchell’s art. When he called, the journalist told me as a preamble that he had heard through the grapevine (probably via CBS, but I can’t be sure) that Joni Mitchell had granted me a meeting during her Paris stay. Jacques Vassal himself was very disheartened and upset because Joni Mitchell had refused all journalists’ requests for interviews, including his own -she had in fact chosen to meet no journalists at all. Thus, Lionel Rotcage's article for Libération (a famous hip French daily in those days) was quite succinct and more than choosy about Mitchell's performance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées : it had been written by someone who apparently had attended the concert but to whom, obviously, no interview had been granted either (this perhaps helped to explain the article’s condescending tone…). Jacques Vassal, as far as he was concerned, had difficulty to understand how an illustrious stranger -who was not even a journalist- had been able to succeed where he and his colleagues had failed. Having clarified the situation to him, he had asked me then to tell him each and every feature about my evening with Joni Mitchell. He had concluded his call by telling me that I had definitely been so very lucky, and I had felt his sincere regret at not being in my shoes. But my luck had only been the result of Joni Mitchell's consistency : an artist who was perfectly honest and sincere with her passions -painting, in this case. To some journalists with whom conversations would have unavoidably turned to music only, she had preferred an unknown young man with whom she could simply talk about painting.