Summer vacations in 1958 and 1959 in Mégève, where I was alone with a young girl, an art student who watched over me like a big sister. The Hôtel de la Résidence was closed and looked abandoned. We crossed through the unlit lobby to use the pool. After 5 P.M., an Italian orchestra played around that pool. A doctor and his wife had rented us two rooms in their house. Strange couple. The wife, a brunette, seemed crazy. They had adopted a girl my age, sweet like all unloved children, with whom I spent afternoons in the deserted classrooms of the nearby school. Beneath the summer sun, a smell of grass and asphalt.
Easter holidays, 1959, with a schoolmate who took me to Monte Carlo, so I wouldn’t be left alone at the boarding school; we stayed with his grandmother, the marquise de Polignac. She was American. I later found out that she was a cousin of Harry Crosby, the publisher of Lawrence and Joyce in Paris, who killed himself at age thirty. She owned a black car with front-wheel drive. Her husband dealt in champagne, and before the war they had socialized with Joachim von Ribbentrop, when he too was a champagne salesman. But my friend’s father was a former Resistance member and a Trotskyite. He wrote a book about Yugoslavian Communism with a preface by Sartre. I’d learn all this later. In Monte Carlo, I spent entire afternoons at the marquise’s, leafing through photo albums she’d put together, starting in the 1920s, illustrating the easy, carefree life she and her husband had led. She wanted to teach me how to drive and gave me the wheel of her 15 HP on a sharply twisting road. I missed a turn and we nearly went hurtling into the void. She brought us to Nice, her grandson and me, to see Luis Mariano at the Pinder Circus.
Stays in Bournemouth, England, in 1959 and 1960. Verlaine once lived in that area: scattered red cottages amid the foliage and white villas along the seafront … I don’t expect to return to France. I’ve had no word from my mother. And I think it suits my father for me to stay in England longer than planned. The family I’m lodging with can’t keep me any longer. So I show up at a hotel reception desk with the three thousand francs I possess, and they let me sleep free of charge in an unused sitting room on the ground floor. Then the headmaster of the school where I study English in the mornings puts me up in a kind of broom closet under the stairs. I run away to London. I arrive at Waterloo Station that evening. I cross Waterloo Bridge. I’m terrified at being alone in this city that seems so much bigger than Paris. From a red phone booth in Trafalgar Square, I call my father collect. I try to hide my panic. He doesn’t sound very surprised to learn I’m in London on my own. He wishes me good luck, in an indifferent voice. At a small hotel in Bloomsbury, they agree to give me a room, even though I’m a minor. But just for one night. And the next day, I try my luck at another hotel, near the Marble Arch. There, too, they look the other way at my being fifteen and give me a tiny room. This was still the England of the Teddy boys and the London where seventeen-year-old Christine Keeler had just arrived from the suburbs. Later, I learned that she worked, that same summer, as a waitress in a small Greek restaurant on Baker Street, right near the Turkish place where I used to eat in the evening before my anxious walks down Oxford Street. “And De Quincey sipping / Sweet opium chaste and poisonous / Brooded on his unhappy Anne …”
One night in September 1959, with my mother and one of her friends, in the Koutoubia, an Arab restaurant on Rue des Ecoles. It’s late. The restaurant is empty. It’s still summer. The weather is hot. The street door is wide open. In those strange years of my adolescence, Algiers was an extension of Paris, and Paris was washed by the waves and echoes of Algiers, as if the sirocco blew over the trees in the Tuileries, bringing sand from the desert and beaches … In Algiers as in Paris, the same Vespas, the same movie posters, the same songs in the café jukeboxes, the same Renault Dauphines in the streets. The same summer in Algiers as along the Champs-Elysées. That evening at the Koutoubia, which city were we in? Some time later, they bombed the Koutoubia. One evening in Saint-Germain-des-Prés—or was it Algiers?—they bombed the Jack Romoli menswear shop.
That autumn of 1959, my mother was in a play at the Théâtre Fontaine. On the Saturday evenings when we could leave school, I sometimes did my homework in the theater director’s office. And I walked around. I discovered the Pigalle neighborhood, less rustic than Saint-Germain-des-Prés, somewhat rougher than the Champs-Elysées. It was there, on Rue Fontaine, Place Blanche, Rue Frochot, that I first brushed against the mysteries of Paris and, without realizing it, began dreaming of a life for myself.
On the Quai de Conti, two newcomers were living in the apartment: Robert Fly, an old friend of my father’s, who served as his chauffeur and took him everywhere in a Citroën DS 19, and Robert Car, a costume designer my mother had gotten to know on the set of Max Pécas’s film Le Cercle vicieux, in which she played the part of a rich and disturbing foreigner, the mistress of a young painter.
In January 1960, I ran away from school because I was infatuated with a certain Kiki Daragane, whom I’d met at my mother’s. After walking to the hangars of the Villacoublay airfield, then reaching Saint-Germain-des-Prés by bus and metro, I happened to run into Kiki Daragane at the café Malafosse, where Rue Bonaparte meets the quay. She was with some art student friends. They advised me to go back home. I rang at my door, but there was no answer. My father must have been out with Robert Fly in the DS 19. My mother was away, as usual. I needed a place to sleep. I went back to the boarding school by metro and bus, after begging a little money off Kiki and her friends. The principal agreed to keep me until June. But at the end of the school year, I was to be expelled.
On my rare days out, my father and Robert Fly would sometimes take me along on their perambulations. They crisscrossed the Ile-de-France. They met with notaries and visited an array of properties. They stopped at rustic inns. Apparently my father, for some pressing reason, wanted to “get out of town.” In Paris, long confabulations between Robert Fly and my father, at the back of the office at 73 Boulevard Haussmann, where I would join them. Robert Fly sported a blond mustache. Apart from driving the DS 19, I have no idea what he did. Now and then, he told me, he took a “side trip” to Pigalle, and he would return home to the Quai de Conti at seven in the morning. Robert Car turned a bedroom of the apartment into a dressmaking studio. My father nicknamed him Truffaldino, after a character in the commedia dell’arte. In the 1940s, it had been Robert Car who dressed the first transvestites: La Zambella, Lucky Sarcel, Zizi Moustic.
I accompanied my father to Rue Christophe-Colomb, where he visited a new “crony,” a certain Morawski, in a small private hotel at number 12 or 14. I would wait for him, pacing back and forth under the leaves of the chestnut trees. It was early spring. My mother was in a play at the Théâtre des Arts, directed by a Mme Alexandra Roubé-Jansky. The play was called Women Want to Know. It was by a silk manufacturer from Lyon and his girlfriend and they’d underwritten the entire production, renting out the theater and paying the actors out of pocket. Every evening they played to an empty hall. The only spectators were a few friends of the silk manufacturer’s. The director wisely counseled the manufacturer not to invite the critics, on the pretext that they were “mean” …
On the last Sunday evening before summer holidays, Robert Fly and my father drove me to the Montcel school in the DS 19 and waited while I packed my suitcase. After stashing it in the trunk of the DS, I left Jouy-en-Josas for good via the westbound highway.
Apparently, they wanted to keep me away from Paris. In September 1960, I was enrolled in the Saint-Joseph de Thônes secondary school, in the mountains of the Haute-Savoie. A man called Jacques Gérin and his wife, Stella, my father’s sister, were my unofficial guardians. They lived in a rented white house with green shutters in Veyrier, on the edge of Lake Annecy. But apart from the rare Sundays when I was let out of school for a few hours, there wasn’t much they could do for me.
“Jacky” Gérin dabbled “in textiles.” He was originally from Lyon, a bohemian, fond of classical music, skiing, and expensive cars. Stella Gérin carried on a correspondence with
the Geneva lawyer Pierre Jaccoud, who had been convicted of murder and was then serving time. When Jaccoud was released, she went to see him in Geneva. I later met him with her, at the bar of the Mövenpick, around 1963. He spoke to me of literature, particularly Mallarmé.
In Paris, Jacky Gérin served as front man for Uncle Ralph, my father’s younger brother: the so-called Etablissements Gérin, 74 Rue d’Hauteville, was in fact run by Uncle Ralph. I was never able to clarify the exact nature of that Etablissements Gérin, a sort of warehouse where Uncle Ralph had an office and sold “equipment.” Several years later, I asked him why the business was named Gérin and not Modiano, after him. He answered in his Paris accent: “Gotta understand, kid, Italian-sounding names didn’t really cut it after the war …”
On my last holiday afternoons, I read The Devil in the Flesh and Witches’ Sabbath on the small beach at Veyrier-du-Lac. A few days before classes started, my father sent me a harsh letter, the type of letter that could easily dishearten a boy about to be locked away in boarding school. Was he trying to assuage his conscience by convincing himself he was rightly abandoning a delinquent to his fate? “ALBERT RODOLPHE MODIANO 15 QUAI DE CONTI Paris VI, September 8, 1960. I’m returning the letter you sent me from Saint-Lô. I must tell you that, reading it, I did not believe for one second that your desire to return to Paris had anything to do with studying for entrance exams. That is why I decided you should leave the following morning, on the 9 o’clock train to Annecy. I expect a report about your conduct at this new school and I can only hope for your sake that it is exemplary. I had intended to come visit you in Geneva. Under the circumstances, this trip now seems pointless. ALBERT MODIANO.”
My mother blew through Annecy, just long enough to buy me two items for my school outfit: a gray smock and a used pair of shoes with crepe soles that would last me a good ten years and never leak. She left well before evening. It is always painful to see a child return to boarding school, knowing he’ll be a prisoner there. One would like to hold him back. Did that cross her mind? It seems I found no favor in her eyes. And besides, she was about to leave on a long trip to Spain.
Still September. New school year, Sunday evening. The first days at the Collège Saint-Joseph were hard for me. But I quickly got used to it. I had already spent four years in boarding schools. My schoolmates in Thônes were mainly of peasant origin, and I preferred them to the gilt-edged hooligans of Montcel.
Unfortunately, our reading was monitored. In 1962, I would be suspended for a few days for reading Ripening Seed by Colette. Thanks to my French teacher, Father Accambray, I would be granted “special” permission to read Madame Bovary, which was forbidden to the others. I’ve kept the copy of the book in which they wrote, “Approved—Junior year,” with the signature of Father Janin, the school principal. Father Accambray recommended one of Mauriac’s novels to me, The Unknown Sea, which I greatly enjoyed, especially the ending—so much so that I still remember the final phrase: “… as in the black dawns of yesteryear.” He also suggested Les Déracinés by Barrès. Had he sensed that what I was missing was a village in Sologne or the Valois, or rather, my dream version of them? My bedside books in the dormitory: Pavese’s This Business of Living, which they hadn’t thought to ban. Manon Lescaut. Les Filles du feu. Wuthering Heights. Diary of a Country Priest.
A few hours of liberty once a month, and then the Sunday evening bus would take me back to school. I waited for it at the foot of the large tree, near the town hall of Veyrier-du-Lac. I often had to make the trip standing, because of all the farmers returning home after a Sunday in town. Night was falling. We drove past the chateau of Menthon-Saint-Bernard, the small cemetery of Alex and the one where the Resistance heroes of the Glières Plateau were buried. Those Sunday evening buses and the trains between Annecy and Paris were as packed as during the Occupation. Moreover, they were basically the same buses and trains.
The Generals’ Putsch in Algiers, which I followed in the dorm on my little transistor radio, thinking I should take advantage of the widespread panic to break out of school. But order was restored in France by the following Sunday evening.
The nightlights in the dormitory. Returning to the dormitory after the holidays. The first night was the worst. You would wake up and not know where you were. The nightlights brought it all back brutally. Lights out at 9 P.M. The bed was too small. The sheets weren’t washed for months and smelled bad. So did our clothes. Up in the morning at 6:15. Cursory wash, in cold water, at sinks that were ten yards long: troughs topped with a row of spigots. Study. Breakfast. Unsweetened coffee in a metal bowl. No butter. During morning recess, in the covered playground, we huddled together to read a copy of the newspaper L’Echo Liberté. A slice of dry bread and a square of dark chocolate handed out at 4 P.M. Polenta for dinner. I was starving. I felt dizzy. One day, some schoolmates and I yelled at the bursar, Father Bron, telling him there wasn’t enough to eat. Class walks around Thônes on Thursday afternoons. I took the opportunity to buy Les Lettres françaises, Arts, and Les Nouvelles littéraires at the village newsstand. I read them cover to cover. All these weeklies piled up on my nightstand. Recess after lunch, when I listened to the radio. In the distance, behind the trees, the monotonous whine of the sawmill. Endless rainy days under the playground roof. The row of stand-up toilets with doors that didn’t stay shut. Evening Benediction in the chapel before returning to the dormitory, in line. Six months of snow. I’ve always felt there was something touching and benevolent about that snow. And a song that year, on the transistor radio: Non je ne me souviens plus du nom du bal perdu …
During the school year, I occasionally received a letter from my mother, from Andalusia. Most of her letters were sent care of the Gérins in Veyrier-du-Lac, except for two or three that went to my school. Letters sent and received had to be unsealed, and Janin, the canon, deemed it odd, this husbandless mother in Andalusia. She wrote to me from Seville: “You should start reading Montherlant. I think you could learn a lot from him. My boy, take this to heart. Please, do it, read Montherlant. You’ll find him full of good advice. How a young man should act around women, for instance. Really, you could learn a lot by reading Montherlant’s The Girls.” Her vehemence surprised me—my mother had never read a word of Montherlant in her life. It was a friend of hers, the journalist Jean Cau, who had prompted her to give me that advice, which I still find puzzling: did he really think Montherlant should be my guide in sexual matters? In any event, I innocently began reading The Girls. Personally, I prefer his Le Fichier parisien. In 1961, my mother inadvertently sent me another letter that raised the canon’s eyebrows. This one contained press clippings about a comedy, Le Signe de Kikota, in which she was touring with Fernand Gravey.
Christmas 1960, in Rome with my father and his new girlfriend, a high-strung Italian, twenty years his junior, hair the color of straw and face like a poor man’s Mylène Demongeot. A photo taken on New Year’s Eve in a nightclub near the Via Veneto perfectly captures the visit. I look pensive and, forty years later, I wonder what I was doing there. To cheer myself up, I pretend the photo is a composite. The ersatz Mylène Demongeot wanted to get a religious annulment of her first marriage. One afternoon, I accompanied her to the Vatican to see a Monsignor Pendola. Despite his cassock and the inscribed picture of the pope on his desk, he looked just like the hucksters my father used to meet at the Claridge. My father seemed startled, that Christmas, by the severe chilblains on my hands.
Back to boarding school, until summer vacation. At the beginning of July, my mother returned from Spain. I went to meet her at Geneva Airport. She had dyed her hair brown. She moved in with the Gérins in Veyrier-du-Lac. She didn’t have a cent. Barely a pair of shoes to her name. The stay in Spain had not been successful, and yet she had lost none of her arrogance. She told us, with chin raised, “sublime” stories of Andalusia and bullfighters. But beneath the theatricality and fantasy, she had a heart of stone.
My father came to spend a few days in the area, accompanied by th
e marquis Philippe de D., with whom he had business dealings. A large, blustery blond with a mustache, trailed by his brunette mistress. He borrowed my father’s passport to go to Switzerland. They were of similar build, with the same mustache and the same corpulence, and D. had lost his papers when he’d fled Tunisia following the military action in Bizerte. I can still see myself with my father, Philippe de D., and the brunette mistress at a sidewalk table at Père Bise in Talloires, and once again I wonder what I was doing there. In August, my mother and I left for Knokke-le-Zoute, where a family she’d been friends with before the war took us into their small villa. It was kind of them; otherwise we would have had to sleep under the stars or at the Salvation Army. Spoiled, boorish teenagers hung out at the go-kart track. Industrialists from Ghent with the casual manners of yachtsmen greeted each other in their deep voices, in a French to which they labored to give English inflections. A friend from my mother’s youth, who looked like an overripe delinquent, ran a nightclub behind the dunes, near Ostend. Then I returned alone to the Haute-Savoie. My mother went back to Paris. Another school year began for me at the Collège Saint-Joseph.
Break for All Saints’ Day, 1961. Rue Royale, Annecy, in the rain and melting snow. In the bookstore window, Moravia’s novel Boredom, with its belly band: “And Its Relief: Eros.” During those gray holidays, I read Crime and Punishment, and it was my sole comfort. I came down with scabies. I went to see a doctor, whose name I’d found in the Annecy phone book. She was shocked at my weakened state. She asked, “Don’t you have parents?” At her solicitude and maternal kindness, I had to force myself not to break down in sobs.
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