Flamant admits to being a rather “piggish character”, but he’s proven that his heart is in the right place. In fact, long before his brush with death, he would greet Aucant outside his establishment every morning and treat him to a cup of coffee and a croissant.
And his kindness eventually paid off on that fateful day in December when he nearly died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
“If Jerome wasn’t around that day, I would have been a goner,” said Flamant, 62, recalling that a defective oven had started leaking carbon monoxide that morning.
He was asphyxiating from the odorless fumes when Aucant noticed Flamant staggering around the bakery and immediately called emergency services. It took 12 days in the hospital for Flamant to recover from the ordeal, but he survived.