The Black Notebook

by Patrick Modiano

  Behind me, in the main room and outdoors, were tourists and students. At the nearest table, a group whose conversation I was distractedly following was composed of students from the engineering school. They were celebrating something, no doubt the beginning of the summer holidays. They photographed each other with their iPhones in the dull, neutral light of the present. A banal afternoon. And yet, it was there, in that same spot, in the middle of the night, that the fluorescent lights had made me squint and we could barely hear ourselves talk, Dannie and I, because of the hubbub and the voices, now forever lost, of Willy of Les Gobelins and all those shadows surrounding us.

  As I recall, there wasn’t really much difference between the 66 and the Unic Hôtel, or any of the other places in Paris I used to frequent at the time. A menace hovered over everything, giving life a peculiar coloration. Even when I was away from Paris. One day, Dannie asked me to go with her to a house in the country. On one page of my black notebook I had written: “Country house with Dannie.” Nothing more. On the preceding page, I read: “Dannie, Avenue Victor-Hugo, building with two exits. Meet 7 p.m. at rear entrance on Rue Léonard-de-Vinci.”

  I had waited there for her several times, always at the same hour, in front of the same entry porch. At the time, I had drawn a connection between the person to whom she “paid frequent visits”—an old-fashioned phrase I’d been surprised to hear her use—and the country house. Yes, if my memory serves, she had told me that the “country house” belonged to “the person” on Avenue Victor-Hugo.

  “Country house with Dannie.” I hadn’t recorded the name of the village. Leafing through the black notebook, I experience two contradictory feelings. If these pages are lacking in precise details, I tell myself it’s because nothing surprised me back then. Youthful unconcern? But I read certain phrases, certain names, certain indications, and it seems to me I was sending out coded signals to the future. Yes, it’s as if I wanted to leave clues, in black and white, that would help me clarify at some later date what I’d been living through at the time without really understanding it. Signals keyed blindly, in total confusion. And I’d have to wait years and years before I could decipher them.

  On the page of the notebook where it says “Country house with Dannie” in black ink, there is also a list of villages that I added in blue ballpoint about ten years ago, when I got it into my head to find that country house. Was it in the Paris region or farther out, near Sologne? I’ve forgotten why I chose those particular villages rather than others. I believe the sound of their names reminded me of one where we’d stopped for gas. Saint-Léger-des-Aubées. Dormelles-sur-l’Orvanne. Vaucourtois. Ormoy-la-Rivière. Lorrez-le-Bocage. Chevry-en-Sereine. Boisemont. Achères-la-Forêt. La Selle-en-Hermoy. Saint-Vincent-des-Bois.

  I had bought a Michelin road map that I’ve kept and that bears this designation: “Paris, 150-kilometer radius. North-South.” And also a Geological Survey map of the Sologne region. I spent several afternoons poring over them, trying to retrace the route we’d followed in a car that Paul Chastagnier had lent us—not his red Lancia, but a more discreet vehicle, gray in color. We left Paris via the Porte de Saint-Cloud, the tunnel, and the highway. Why this westbound road when the country house was somewhere to the south, toward Sologne?

  A little later, at the bottom of a page in the notebook where I had made some jottings about the poet Tristan Corbière, I discovered in tiny letters the word “Feuilleuse,” followed by a telephone number. The name of that village could easily have remained lost among the densely written notes about Corbière. “Feuilleuse. 437-41-10.” But of course: on one occasion I had gone to join Dannie at the country house and she’d given me the phone number. I had taken the bus at Porte de Saint-Cloud. The bus had stopped in a small town. I had phoned Dannie from a café, and she had come to pick me up in a car—the gray car that Paul Chastagnier had lent us. The country house was about a dozen miles from there. I looked up where Feuilleuse was: not in Sologne, but in the Eure-et-Loir.

  Four-three-seven, four-one, one-zero. The phone rings and rings with no answer, and I was surprised that after all these years the number was still in service. One evening, when I’d again dialed 437-41-10, I heard static and muffled voices. Perhaps it was one of those lines that had long been abandoned. The numbers were known only by the select few who used them to communicate in secret. I ended up making out a woman’s voice, which kept repeating a phrase that I couldn’t understand—a monotonous statement, like on a broken record. The voice of the talking clock? Or Dannie’s voice, calling to me from another time and from that lost country house?

  I consulted an old phone book from the Eure-et-Loir, which I had found at the Saint-Ouen flea market, dumped among hundreds of others. There were only about ten listings for Feuilleuse, and that number was indeed among them, a secret cipher that would open the “Gateway to the Past.” That was the title of a detective novel I’d taken from the library in the country house and that Dannie and I had read. Feuilleuse (Eure-et-Loir). Canton of Senonches. Mme Dorme. La Barberie. 437-41-10. Who was this Mme Dorme? Had Dannie ever mentioned her to me? Perhaps she was still alive. I needed only to get in touch with her. She would know what had happened to Dannie.

  I called information. I asked for the new number of La Barberie, in Feuilleuse, Eure-et-Loir. And, as on the day when I’d spoken with the bartender in the Café Luxembourg, my voice was sepulchral. “Is that ‘Feuilleuse’ with two l’s, sir?” I hung up. What was the use? After all this time, the name Mme Dorme had surely disappeared from the directory. The house must have known a succession of occupants, who would have remodeled it so drastically that I would never have recognized it. I spread the map of the Paris region over the table, sorry to set aside the map of Sologne, which had occupied me for an entire afternoon. The caressing sound of the word “Sologne” had led me astray. And I also remembered the ponds, not far from the house, that reminded me of that region. But it doesn’t matter what the Michelin map says: for me, that house would always remain located in an imaginary enclave in Sologne.

  Last night, I traced on the map, with my index finger, the route from Paris to Feuilleuse. I traveled back in time. The present no longer counted, with its indistinguishable days in their doleful light, which must be the light of old age, when you feel as if you’re merely living on. I told myself I was going to rediscover the row of trees, the white fences. The dog would come up to me slowly along the path. I often thought that, apart from us, he was the house’s only inhabitant, even its owner. Each time we returned to Paris, I would say to Dannie, “We should bring the dog with us.” He stationed himself in front of the gray car to witness our departure. And then, when we were in the car and the doors had shut, he headed back toward the hut that served as a woodshed, where he slept when we were away. And, each time, I was sorry to return to Paris. I had asked Dannie if we could stay longer in that house. We could, she said, but not right away. I had been mistaken or had misunderstood: there was no connection between the “person” on Avenue Victor-Hugo to whom she paid frequent visits and this house. The owner—it was a woman—was abroad for the time being. She explained that she’d met her the year before when she was looking for work. But she didn’t say what kind of work. Neither Aghamouri nor any of those I referred to as the “Montparnasse gang”—Paul Chastagnier, Duwelz, Gérard Marciano, and other silhouettes whom I often saw in the lobby of the Unic Hôtel—knew about this house. “So much the better,” I said. She smiled. Apparently, she felt the same way. One evening, we lit a fire and sat on the large couch in front of the fireplace, the dog at our feet, and she told me she was sorry she’d borrowed the gray car from Paul Chastagnier. And she added that she wanted nothing more to do with those “losers.” I was amazed to hear her use that term, as she normally chose her words so carefully and kept her opinions to herself. Once again, I didn’t have the curiosity to ask what her exact relation was with those “losers” and why she had taken a room at the Unic Hôtel on Aghamouri’s say-so. To tell the truth
, in the calm of that house, protected by its curtain of trees and white fences, I no longer felt like asking any questions.

  Still, one afternoon, we were coming back from a walk on the road to Moulin d’Etrelles—the names we think we’ve forgotten, or that we never speak for fear of becoming too emotional, suddenly resurface, and they aren’t so painful after all—with the dog trotting on ahead, beneath the autumn sun. No sooner had we shut the front door behind us than we heard the sound of an approaching car. Dannie grabbed my hand and pulled me upstairs. In the bedroom, she signaled for me to sit and she took up position by the window. The engine shut off. A door slammed. The sound of footsteps from the graveled part of the path. “Who is it?” I asked. She didn’t answer. I slid over to another window. A large black car of American make. It looked as if someone was still behind the wheel. The doorbell buzzed. Twice. Three times. Downstairs, the dog was barking. Dannie was frozen, gripping the curtain with one hand. A man’s voice: “Is anyone there? Is anyone there? Can you hear me?” A loud voice with a slight Belgian or Swiss accent, or else that international accent of people whose native language you never know, and who don’t know it themselves. “Is anyone there?”

  The dog barked all the harder. It had remained in the hallway, and if we hadn’t shut the door properly, it could open it with its paw. I whispered, “You don’t think that guy can get inside, do you?” She shook her head. She sat on the edge of the bed, arms folded. Her face expressed boredom more than fear; she was there, motionless, head lowered. And I kept thinking this fellow would wait in the living room and it would be hard to slip out of the house without him seeing us. But I kept my wits about me. I had often found myself in this kind of situation, avoiding people I knew because I no longer felt like talking to them. I would cross the street when I saw them coming, or duck into a doorway and wait for them to pass by. Once I even crawled out of a window to escape from someone who had shown up unexpectedly. I knew many buildings with double exits, a list of which figured in my black notebook.

  The buzzing at the door ceased. The dog stopped barking. From the window, I saw the man head back to the car parked next to the front steps. A tallish, dark-haired man wearing a fur-lined coat. He leaned toward the lowered window and spoke with the person behind the wheel, whose face I couldn’t see. Then he climbed into the car, and it rolled away down the path.

  When evening fell, she told me it would be better not to turn on the lights. She drew the curtains in the living room and the room where we took our meals. We lit our way by candlelight. “Do you think they’ll be back?” I asked. She shrugged. She told me they were surely friends of the owner’s. She preferred not to see them, otherwise she’d have them “on her back.” Now and then, that sort of colloquialism intruded on her refined speech. There in the twilight, with the curtains drawn, it occurred to me that we were guilty of breaking and entering. And it seemed almost normal, so accustomed was I to living without the slightest sense of legitimacy, a sense reserved for those who have had good, honest parents and belong to a well-defined social milieu. In the candlelight, we spoke in whispers so as not to be heard from outside, and she saw nothing odd about our situation, either. Without knowing much about her, I was sure we were from the same world and had things in common. But I would have been hard-pressed to say what things.

  For two or three nights, we didn’t use the electricity. Without exactly saying so, she made me understand that she wasn’t really “supposed” to be in that house. She had simply kept a key from the previous year. And she hadn’t notified the owner that she planned to spend time here. She would have to arrange it with the caretaker, who tended the grounds and whom we would surely run into any day now. No, the house wasn’t abandoned, as I had assumed. The days went by. The caretaker came one morning, and our presence didn’t seem to surprise him. A short, gray-haired man who wore corduroy trousers and a hunting jacket. She offered no explanations and he asked no questions. He even told us that if we needed anything, he could go get it for us. Several times he took us, with the dog, to do the shopping in Châteauneuf-en-Thymerais. Or else, closer to home, in Maillebois and Dampierre-sur-Blévy. Those names lay dormant in my memory, but they hadn’t been erased. And last night, a buried memory resurfaced. A few days before we left for Feuilleuse, I had accompanied her to the building on Avenue Victor-Hugo. This time she asked me not to wait for her behind the building, opposite the entrance on Rue Léonard-de-Vinci, but in a café a bit farther down the street, on the square. She didn’t know what time she would be out. I waited for her for about an hour. When she joined me, she was very pale. She ordered a Cointreau and downed it in one gulp, to give herself what she called a “shot in the arm.” And she paid for our drinks with a 500-franc note that she pulled from a wad of cash secured by a red paper strip. She hadn’t had that wad when we came by metro, because that afternoon we had had just enough to buy two second-class tickets.

  La Barberie. Le Moulin d’Etrelles. La Framboisière. The words reemerge intact, like the bodies of those two fiancés found in the mountains, encased in ice, who hadn’t aged in hundreds of years. La Barberie. That was the name of the house, and I can still see its white, symmetrical façade between rows of trees. Three years ago, traveling by train, I was distractedly perusing the classifieds in a newspaper, noticing that there were far fewer than back when I used to copy them into my black notebook. No more help wanted or offered. No more lost dogs. No more psychics. None of those messages strangers would send each other: “Martine. Call us. Yvon, Juanita, and I are very concerned.” But one ad had caught my eye: “For sale. Vintage home. Eure-et-Loir. In hamlet between Châteauneuf and Brezolles. Park. Ponds. Stables. Call Paccardy Agency (02-07) 33-71-22.” I thought I recognized the house. I copied the ad at the bottom of the last page of my old black notebook, as a sort of conclusion. Still, those stables didn’t ring a bell. There were indeed ponds—or rather, pools in which the dog used to splash about during our walks. La Barberie was the name not only of the house but also of the hamlet, of which the house must once have been the chateau. All around were sections of half-crumbled walls beneath the vegetation, no doubt the ruins of a manor house and a chapel, and even, why not, of a stable. One afternoon when we were walking with the dog—it was thanks to him we discovered those ruins; he guided us toward them gradually, like a truffle hound—we were talking about all the repairs we would make, as if we owned the place. Perhaps Dannie didn’t dare tell me that, centuries before, the house had actually belonged to her ancestors, the lords of La Barberie. And she had long wanted to come back to visit it in secret. At least, that’s what I liked to imagine.

  At La Barberie, I forgot around a hundred pages of a manuscript I was writing from the notes in my black book. Or rather, I had left the manuscript in the living room where I worked, thinking we’d be back the following week. But we were never able to return, and we abandoned the dog and the manuscript there forever.

  Now and then over the years, I have thought about retrieving that manuscript, the way you recover a souvenir—one of those objects connected with a moment in your life, like a dried flower or four-leaf clover. But I no longer knew where the country house was. And I was overcome by lethargy and a vague apprehension when leafing through my old black notebook; moreover, it took me a long while to discover the name of the village and the phone number, written as they were in such tiny script.

  Today I’m no longer afraid of that notebook. It helps me to “scan my past,” and that expression makes me smile. It was from the title of a novel, A Man Scans His Past, that I’d come across in the library of the house—several shelves of books next to one of the windows in the living room. The past? No, it’s not about the past, but about episodes in a timeless, idealized life, which I wrest page by page from my drab current existence to give it some light and shadow. This afternoon, we are in the here and now, it’s raining, people and things are plunged in gray, and I’m impatiently waiting for night, when everything will stand out more sharply, thanks to t
hose same contrasts of shadow and light.

  The other night, driving through Paris, I was moved by those lights and shadows, by the different varieties of streetlights and lampposts, which I felt were sending me signals from the avenues or street corners. It was the same feeling you get from staring at a lit window: a feeling of both presence and absence. Behind the glass pane the room is empty, but someone has left the light on. For me, there has never been a present or a past. Everything blends together, as in that empty room where, every night, a light shines. I often dream that I’ve found my manuscript. I walk into the living room with its black-and-white-tiled floor and rummage through the drawers under the bookshelves. Or else a mysterious correspondent, whose name I can’t quite make out on the envelope next to the word “sender,” mails it to me. And the postmark shows the year when we used to go to that house in the country, Dannie and I. But I’m not surprised that the package took so long to arrive—for indeed there is no past or present. Thanks to my jottings in the black notebook, I can recall several chapters of that manuscript: one devoted to Baroness Blanche; another to Marie-Anne Leroy, guillotined on July 26, 1794, aged twenty-one; still others to the Hôtel Radziwill during the Revolution, to Jeanne Duval, to Tristan Corbière and his friends Rodolphe de Battine and Herminie Cucchiani . . . None of those pages concerned the twentieth century, in which I was living. And yet, if I could read them again, the exact colors and smells of the nights and days when I wrote them would come back to me. Judging from what is in the black notebook, the Hôtel Radziwill in 1791 was not so different from the Unic Hôtel on Rue du Montparnasse: the same dodgy atmosphere. And now that I think of it, didn’t Dannie have something in common with Baroness Blanche? I had a very hard time retracing that woman’s steps. One often loses sight of her, even though she appears in Casanova’s Memoirs, which I was reading at the time, and in several police reports under Louis XV. Have police inspectors really changed since the eighteenth century? One day, Duwelz and Gérard Marciano confided to me under their breath that the Unic Hôtel was both kept under surveillance and protected by an inspector from the vice squad. He, too, surely wrote reports. And, more than twenty years later, among the documents in the file that Langlais gave me—I was genuinely surprised that he hadn’t forgotten me in all those years; “not at all,” he said with a smile, “I’ve been keeping an eye on you from a distance”—figured a report about Dannie, written up with the same precision as the ones from two centuries earlier concerning Baroness Blanche.