His parents were Lucille Calogera, from Brazil, and her husband, Vicomte Bernard de Bretizel Rambures from Picardy, France.

He learned to speak English fluently; and also studied German literature at the university of Tübingen (in the province of Baden-Württemberg, Germany).

In 1958 he started writing for the monthly magazine "Réalités", portraying famous artists, as e.g. Herbert von Karajan, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luchino Visconti et al. From 1968 on he contributed to the art magazine Connaissances des Arts, to L'Express and the daily Le Monde, that was to print his articles for the following 25 years.

In the course of several years he contacted numerous contemporary writers, and many of them agreed to grant him an interview, Roland Barthes, Julien Gracq, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Hélène Cixous, Herta Müller, Ernst Jünger, Thomas Bernhard, Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll, among others.

These talks were printed in Le Monde and a selection was presented in his book Comment travaillent les écrivains (How writers work, Flammarion, Paris 1978), which was translated into Japanese and published in Tokyo (Chuokoron-sha, 1979).