Jean-Paul Belmondo at a photo shoot in a Parisian studio in September 1977. The actor, aged 44, had already worked with the best in the business: Verneuil, Malle, Truffaut, Melville, Resnais, Clément, Godard, and Becker, among others. With the photographer Benjamin Auger, “Bebel” was celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his cinema career and the imminent release, a few days later, of his fortieth film, Claude Zidi’s ‘Animal’.