In January 1962, a letter from my mother that, luckily, did not fall into the hands of Father Janin: “I didn’t call you this week, I wasn’t home. Friday night I was at a cocktail party that Litvak threw on the set of his film. I was also at the premiere of Truffaut’s film Jules and Jim, and this evening I’m going to see the Calderón play at TNP…. I’m thinking of you and know how hard you work. Be brave, my dearest boy. I’m still not sorry I turned down the play with Bourvil. I’d have been too miserable playing such a vulgar role. I hope to find something else. My son, don’t think I’ve forgotten you but I have so little time to send care packages.”
In February 1962, I took advantage of the Shrove Tuesday break and hopped the crowded train to Paris, running a high fever. I was hoping my parents, seeing me so ill, would let me stay in Paris for a while. My mother had moved into the third-floor apartment, where the only remaining furniture was a sagging couch. My father was living on the fourth floor with the ersatz Mylène Demongeot. At my mother’s, I saw the journalist Jean Cau, who had a bodyguard because of the OAS assassination plots. Sartre’s former secretary was an odd duck, with his lynxlike face and his obsession with bullfighters. When I was fourteen, I’d convinced him that the son of Alexandre Stavisky, under a false name, was at school with me and had told me his father was still alive somewhere in South America. Cau had arrived at my school in his 4 CV, desperate to meet “Stavisky’s son” and come away with a scoop. That winter, I also saw Jean Normand (alias Jean Duval), a friend of my mother’s who had recommended pulp novels to me when I was eleven. At the time, 1956, I couldn’t have known that he’d just got out of prison. There was also Mireille Ourousov. She slept in the living room on the old couch. A brunette of twenty-eight or thirty. My mother had met her in Andalusia. She was married to a Russian, Eddy Ourousov, nicknamed “the Consul” because he drank as much as the hero of Malcolm Lowry’s novel—cuba libres. The two of them ran a small hotel-bar in Torremolinos. She was French. She told me that when she was seventeen, on the morning she was scheduled to take the baccalaureate exams, her alarm didn’t go off and she slept until noon. It was somewhere around the Landes. At night my mother would be out, and I stayed home with Mireille Ourousov. She couldn’t sleep on that small, sagging couch. And I had a large bed … One morning, I was with her in Place de l’Odéon. A gypsy read our palms, under the arcades of the Cour du Commerce Saint-André. Mireille Ourousov said she’d be curious to know me in ten years.
Return to Thônes in drab March. The bishop of Annecy paid a formal visit to the school. We kissed his ring. Speeches. Mass. And I received a letter from my father that the canon Janin never opened and that, if it had had any basis in reality, would have been the letter of a model father to his model son: “May 2, 1962. My dear Patrick, We should tell each other everything with complete honesty; it’s the one and only way to keep from becoming strangers, as sadly happens in too many families. I’m glad you’ve confided in me about the problem now facing you: what you’ll do later on, what direction to take in life. You’ve explained to me, on the one hand, that you understand diplomas are necessary to obtain a good position, and on the other, that you need to express yourself by writing books or plays and would like to devote yourself fully to this. Most of the men who have enjoyed the greatest literary success, apart from a few rare exceptions, had been brilliant students. You can cite as many examples as I can: Sartre would probably never have written some of his books if he hadn’t pursued his studies through an advanced degree in philosophy. Claudel wrote The Satin Slipper when he was a young embassy attaché in Japan, after graduating with top honors from ‘Sciences Po.’ Romain Gary, who won the Prix Goncourt, is another alumnus of ‘Sciences Po,’ and a consul in the United States.” He wanted me to become an agricultural engineer. He considered it an up-and-coming profession. If he attached so much importance to schooling, it’s because he himself hadn’t had any and was a little like those mobsters who send their daughters off to be educated by the “sisters.” He spoke with a slight Paris accent—the accent of Cité d’Hauteville and Rue des Petits-Hôtels and also the Cité Trévise, where you can hear the fountain murmuring in the silence beneath the trees. Once in a while he used slang. But he could inspire trust in potential investors, for he looked like a pleasant, reserved fellow, tall and soberly dressed.
I took my baccalaureate exam in Annecy. This would be my only diploma. Paris in July. My father. My mother. She was in a revival of Les Portes claquent at the Daunou. The ersatz Mylène Demongeot. The Parc Monceau, where I read newspaper articles about the end of the Algerian War. The Bois de Boulogne. I discovered Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. I was happy when I walked the streets of Paris by myself. One Sunday in August, in the southeastern part of town—Boulevard Jourdan and Boulevard Kellerman, a neighborhood I’d later come to know so well—I learned from a news dealer’s display about Marilyn Monroe’s suicide.
The month of August in Annecy. Claude. She turned twenty that summer of 1962. She worked for a dressmaker in Lyon. Then she became a “temp” model. Then, in Paris, a full-time model. Then she married a Sicilian prince and went to live in Rome, where time stops forever. Robert. He scandalized Annecy by loudly proclaiming himself a “queen.” He was a pariah in that provincial town. That same summer of 1962, he was twenty-six. He reminded me of Divine in Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. When very young, Robert had been the boyfriend of the Belgian baron Jean L. during the latter’s stay at the Hôtel Impérial Palace in Annecy—the same baron whose shill my mother had known in Antwerp in 1939. I saw Robert again in 1973. One Sunday evening, in Geneva, we were driving in his car across the Pont des Bergues, and he was so drunk that we nearly toppled into the Rhone. He died in 1980. His face bore the marks of a beating and the police arrested a friend of his. I read about it in the papers: “The real death of a larger than life character.”
A girl, Marie. In the summer, she took the bus in Annecy, as did I, on Place de la Gare, at seven in the evening after work. She was going home to Veyrier-du-Lac. I met her on that bus. She was barely older than I and already working as a typist. On her days off, we would rendezvous at the small beach in Veyrier-du-Lac. She read Maurois’s A History of England. And photo comics that I’d buy for her before joining her on the beach.
The kids my age who spent time at the Sporting or the Taverne, and who are now gone with the wind: Jacques L., called “the Marquis,” the son of a milicien who’d been shot for treason in August 1944 at Grand-Bornand. Pierre Fournier, who carried a knobbed walking stick. And those who belonged to the generation of the Algerian War: Claude Brun, Zazie, Paulo Hervieu, Rosy, La Yeyette, who had been Pierre Brasseur’s mistress. Dominique the brunette with her black leather jacket passed beneath the arcades, and they said she lived “off her charms” in Geneva … Claude Brun and friends. A gang of vitelloni. Their cult film was The American Beauty. Returning from the Algerian War, they had bought secondhand MGs. They took me to a “floodlit” football match. One of them had bet he could seduce the prefect’s wife inside of two weeks and take her to the Grand Hôtel in Verdun, and he’d won; another was the lover of a rich and very pretty woman, the widow of a local notable, who in winter frequented the bridge club on the first floor of the Casino.
I used to take the bus to Geneva, where sometimes I saw my father. We had lunch in an Italian restaurant with a man called Picard. In the afternoons, he held appointments. Curious Geneva of the very early sixties. Algerians spoke in low voices in the lobby of the Hôtel du Rhône. I would walk around the historic part of town. They said that Dominique the brunette, on whom I had a crush, was working in a nightclub at 58 Rue Glacis-de-Rive. On the way back, the bus crossed the border at sunset, without stopping for customs.
In the summer of 1962, my mother came through Annecy on tour, playing in Sacha Guitry’s Ecoutez bien, messieurs at the Casino, with Jean Marchat and Michel Flamme, a typical blond “good-looking boy” who wore leopard-print bathing briefs. He took us for refreshments at
the bar of the Sporting. A Sunday walk along the Pâquier gardens with Claude when the holidays were over. Autumn already. We walked past the prefecture, where a girlfriend of hers worked. Annecy turned back into a provincial town. In the Pâquier, we came across an old Armenian, always on his own; according to Claude, he was a wealthy businessman who gave lots of money to girls and paupers. And Jacky Gérin’s gray automobile, with body by Allemano, circled slowly around the lake for all eternity. I will keep on reciting these moments, without nostalgia but in a rush. It’s not my fault if the words jumble together. I have to move quickly, before I lose heart.
That September, in Paris, I started at the Lycée Henri-IV, in the preparatory classe de philosophie, as a full boarder, even though my parents’ apartment was only a few hundred yards from the school. I’d been living in dormitories for the past six years. I had known harsher discipline in my other schools, but I had never been as miserable as I was at Henri-IV. Especially at the hour when I watched the day students leave by the main porch and fan out into the streets.
I don’t remember my fellow boarders very well. I seem to recall three boys from Sarreguemines who were prepping for the Ecole Normale Supérieure. A Martinican in my class was usually with them. There was another student who always smoked a pipe, and constantly wore a gray smock and carpet slippers. They said he hadn’t been outside the school walls in three years. I also vaguely recall my bunkmate, a small red-haired kid, whom I spotted from afar two or three years later, on Boulevard Saint-Michel, in a private’s uniform in the rain … After lights out, a watchman came through the dormitories, lantern in hand, to make sure every bed was occupied. It was the fall of 1962, but also the nineteenth century and, perhaps, a time still farther in the past as well.
My father came only once to visit me in that institution. The headmaster gave me permission to wait for him on the entrance porch. That headmaster had a lovely name: Adonis Delfosse. The silhouette of my father, there, on the porch—but I can’t make out his face, as if his presence in those medieval monastic surroundings seemed unreal. The silhouette of a tall man with no head. I don’t remember if there was a parlor. I think we spoke in a room on the first floor, the library or perhaps the social hall. We were alone, sitting at a table, opposite each other. I accompanied him back down to the porch. He walked away across Place du Panthéon. He’d once told me that he, too, had hung around that part of town when he was eighteen. He had just enough money to buy himself a café au lait and a couple of croissants at the Dupont-Latin, in lieu of a proper meal. In those days, he had a shadow on his lung. I close my eyes and imagine him walking up Boulevard Saint-Michel, among the well-behaved lycée pupils and the students belonging to Action Française. His Latin Quarter was the one of Violette Nozière. He must have run across her many times on the boulevard. Violette, “the pretty schoolgirl from the Lycée Fénelon who raised bats in her desk.”
My father married the ersatz Mylène Demongeot. They lived on the fourth floor, right above my mother. The two floors formed a single apartment, from the time when my parents lived together. In 1962, the two apartments hadn’t yet been separated. Behind a boarded-up doorway, there was still the interior staircase that my father had built in 1947, when he’d begun renting the third floor. The ersatz Mylène Demongeot was not keen on me being a day pupil or continuing to see my father. After I’d spent two months as a boarder, he sent me this letter: “ALBERT RODOLPHE MODIANO 15 QUAI DE CONTI Paris VI. You came up this morning at 9:15 to inform me that you had decided not to return to school as long as I did not reverse my decision to keep you there as a boarder. At around 12:30, you again confirmed the above. Your behavior is beyond disgraceful. If you think that such pathetic attempts at blackmail will win me over, you’ve got another think coming. Therefore I strongly advise you, for your own sake, to go back to school tomorrow morning, with a note for your headmaster excusing your absence due to a cold. I must warn you in no uncertain terms that if you do not, you will regret it. You are seventeen, you are still a minor, I am your father, and I’m responsible for your education. I intend to have a word with your headmaster. Albert Modiano.”
My mother had no money and no theatrical engagements that October of 1962. And my father was threatening to discontinue my child support unless I moved back into the dormitory. Thinking about it today, I can’t imagine I cost him very much: just modest room and board. But I remember seeing him in the late 1950s, so utterly “broke” that he had to borrow the few francs my grandfather sometimes sent me from Belgium out of his retirement pension. I felt closer to him than to my own parents.
I continued to be “on strike” from the boarding school. One afternoon, my mother and I were walking in the Tuileries; we didn’t have a cent. As a last resort, she decided to ask her friend Suzanne Flon for help. We went to Suzanne Flon’s on foot, having not even enough change for two metro tickets. Suzanne Flon welcomed us into her apartment on Avenue George-V with its superposed balconies. It was like being on a cruise ship. We stayed for dinner. In melodramatic tones, my mother laid out our “misfortunes,” her feet planted firmly, with theatrical and peremptory gestures. Suzanne Flon listened indulgently, deploring our situation. She offered to write my father a letter. She gave my mother some money.
Over the following months, my father had to resign himself to my finally leaving the dormitories where I’d lived since age eleven. He made appointments to see me in cafés. And he trotted out his standard grievances against my mother and against me. I could never establish a bond between us. At each meeting, I was reduced to begging him for a fifty-franc bill, which he would give me very grudgingly and which I’d bring home to my mother. On certain days, I brought nothing home, which provoked furious outbursts from her. Soon—around the time I turned eighteen and in the years following—I started trying to find her, on my own, some of those miserable fifty-franc bills bearing the likeness of Jean Racine. But nothing softened the coldness and hostility she had always shown me. I was never able to confide in her or ask her for help of any kind. Sometimes, like a mutt with no pedigree that has too often been left on its own, I feel the childish urge to set down in black and white just what she put me through, with her insensitivity and heartlessness. I keep it to myself. And I forgive her. It’s all so distant now … I remember copying out these words by Léon Bloy at school: “Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence.” But in this case it was suffering for nothing, the kind from which you can’t even fashion a poem.
Our poverty should have brought us closer. One year—1963—they had to “reconnect” the gas mains in the apartment. Work needed to be done, and my mother didn’t have the money to pay for it. Neither did I. We cooked our meals on an alcohol burner. We never put on the heat in the winter. That lack of money would haunt us for a long time. One afternoon in January 1970, we were so hard up that she dragged me to the pawnbroker’s on Rue Pierre-Charron, where I hocked a fountain pen “made of gold with a diamond nib” that Maurice Chevalier had presented to me at a literary awards ceremony. They gave me only two hundred francs for it, which my mother pocketed, steely-eyed.
During all those years, we dreaded due dates. Rents on those old apartments, dilapidated since before the war, weren’t very high at first. Then they started rising around 1966 as the neighborhood changed, along with its shops and residents. Please don’t hold such details against me: they caused me some anxiety at the time. But it soon evaporated, as I believed in miracles and would lose myself in Balzacian dreams of wealth.
After those dismal meetings with my father, we never entered the building together. He would go in first, and I, per his instructions, would have to cool my heels for a while, pacing around the block. He concealed our meetings from the ersatz Mylène Demongeot. Usually I saw him alone. One time, we had lunch with the marquis Philippe de D. and the meal was split between two restaurants, one on the Quai du Louvre and the other on the Quai des Grands-Augustins. My father t
old me that Philippe de D. was in the habit of lunching at several restaurants at a time, where he kept appointments with different people … He ordered his appetizer in one, his main course in another, and changed restaurants yet again for dessert.
The day when we followed Philippe de D. from the Quai du Louvre to the Quai des Grands-Augustins, he was wearing a kind of military tunic. He claimed to have been a member of the Normandie-Niémen escadrille during the war. My father often spent the weekend at D.’s chateau in the Loire-Atlantique. He even went on duckshoots there, which wasn’t exactly his style. I remember the few days in 1959 that we spent in Sologne, at the home of Paul Bertholle, his wife, and the comte de Nalèche, where I’d been afraid my father would abandon me and those killers would drag me into their blood sport. Just as he’d been “in business” with Paul Bertholle, he was now “in business” with Philippe de D. According to my father, D., in his youth, had been a juvenile delinquent and had even spent time in jail. He later showed me a photo clipped from a back issue of Détective that pictured D. in handcuffs. But D. had recently come into a large inheritance from his grandmother (née de W.) and I imagine my father needed him as an investor. Since the end of the 1950s, he had been pursuing a dream: to buy up shares in a business concern in Colombia. And he was surely counting on Philippe de D. to help him achieve his goal.
D. would marry a female racing driver and end his days ruined: as manager of a nightclub in Hammamet, then as garage owner in Bordeaux. For his part, my father would stay true to his Colombian dream for a few more years. In 1976, a friend sent me a document bearing this information: “Compagnie Financière Mocupia. Head office: 22 Rue Bergère, Paris 9. Tel. 770-76-94. French corporation. Board of Directors: President: Albert Rodolphe Modiano. Board: Charles Ruschewey, Léon-Michel Tesson … Kaffir Trust (Raoul Melenotte).”
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