Sagan, Paris 1954

by Anne Berest

  Sagan, Paris 1954

  Anne Berest

  Translated from the French by Heather Lloyd

  To my parents

  To Martine Saada

  Without Sagan, life would be deadly boring.

  Bernard Frank

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1 January 1954

  4 January

  6 January

  11 January

  13 January

  16 January

  17 January

  17 January

  31 January

  2 February

  3 February

  15 February

  17 February

  21 February

  1 March

  5 March

  7 March

  15 March

  24 March

  1 April

  24 May

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1 January 1954

  I see a man of sixty-five leaving the New Year’s Eve party that has been organised in his honour, like someone walking out of their bedroom leaving the bed unmade. In any case, wherever he is going, the party’s over. Once, he made the heart of Paris beat faster, but today there is no one left for him to dance with: those he can truly converse with are dead – or have not yet been born.

  I imagine a car in Rue de Montpensier dropping him off in the half-light of a day that is still hovering between the old year and the new. A young couple are just passing the impressive entrance to his home, whispering to each other.

  The man watches the two figures as they scuttle through the cold of that early morning. He notices the way they pull each other along by the arm, like two crabs heading in the direction of the Seine. The young boy is not bad-looking, with his Joan of Arc haircut – like a page boy who has been lifted straight out of an illuminated manuscript.

  It seems to me that these two characters, shining through the dawn, pass Cocteau without recognising him. I can hear the two teenagers break into ripples of laughter as they run off towards the Palais-Royal.

  If you look more closely and if you listen to their high-pitched peals of mirth, you realise that they are both girls. One is called Françoise and the other Florence. Whenever they race each other through the streets of Paris, neither one wins. In the end Françoise always holds out her hand to Florence and draws her along at her own swift pace.

  *

  Over the coming months I am going to be writing a book about Françoise Sagan and it is with that scene, featuring Cocteau and the daybreak, that I would like to begin it.

  My book is to be a journal of the year 1954, telling the story of the few months leading up to publication of Bonjour Tristesse.

  A few months is not a very long time.

  But I am going through one of the most painful periods of my life. Since the summer, I have been separated from the father of my daughter. I am weighed down by misery and I feel like a suitcase without a handle.

  I am going to put an end to my grief through work. Night and day I am going to think about Sagan; day and night she will be my companion.

  This will give me the best excuse for not seeing anyone: I have to read all the biographies, all the novels and all the interviews. Sagan gives me the courage to do this; she is the best possible source of comfort.

  In my notebook with its brown paper cover I jot down phrases that I’ve gleaned here and there. I collect them, as I would the wise counsels of an older friend, a woman who has seen it all and who knows, therefore, that there is no advice to be given, that experience cannot be passed on and that the only thing we are able to bequeath to others is the testimony of our own existence, that is to say, the mere fact of it, which is the proof that people can come through every sort of situation and that happiness can sometimes return.

  I make myself at home with her, just as I make myself at home in the various flats that people lend me these days. I borrow my friend Catherine’s shoes. I spray myself with Esther’s perfume, in her bathroom. I slip into the mindset of Françoise Sagan as if I were slipping on a pair of silk stockings – I inhabit her life in order to forget my own.

  Here she is again with her friend Florence Malraux on the Pont des Arts, just as the new year makes its appearance in the sky above Paris between the Institut de France and the Eiffel Tower.

  Ahead of them, the grimy façades of the Parisian buildings look like a huge accordion spilling out along the banks of the Seine. A sense of peace reigns, a thin film of frost covers the preceding years, like those white dust sheets that you throw over the furniture in country houses before you leave.

  Thus each new year Paris draws away from the Occupation, transforming events into memories. And in the end, memories are always forgotten.

  Florence and Françoise are children of wartime; in other words, strange creatures who began life at the end: they know the real God is Chance. And they know everything can go wrong. With that as your starting point, you’ve got to make the best of what you have.

  They had been in the same class in the Cours Hattemer, a lycée in Rue de Londres, in the district round the Gare Saint-Lazare. It was a private school for children who were ‘special cases’.

  Owing to a long illness, Florence had had to give up normal state school for a while.

  As for Françoise, she had been expelled from every conceivable type of establishment, first from a convent school (le Couvent des Oiseaux) for her ‘failure to be deeply spiritual’, then from the Louise-de-Bettignies School for having ‘hanged a bust of Molière with a piece of string’1 – though would Molière not have appreciated being hanged in the form of this dreary, scholastic representation?

  It was during this period that, as a little girl on her way to morning mass, she would pass the revellers in their dinner jackets, clutching champagne bottles, issuing from the nightclubs on Rue de Ponthieu.2 She was a child who believed adults had much more fun than children.

  (I discover that a convent called ‘the Convent of the Birds’ really did exist. I used to believe that it was something made up by my mother who, when I was small, used to say about any little girl whom she thought rather silly, ‘She comes from the Convent of the Little Birds.’)

  Françoise had been expelled from several religious establishments, but she did have to pass her baccalauréat. Fortunately, in 1885, a Mademoiselle Rose Hattemer had invented a method of learning that stimulated the intelligence rather than the memory. It was thanks to Rose that the two teenage girls met in the little playground of the experimental school.

  Françoise was impressed by Florence, for Florence had been in the Resistance with her mother. And Florence was Jewish. (Yet France was not too keen on Jews after the war – they brought back bad memories.)

  Florence was fascinated by Françoise because she asked questions that nobody asked. And because her mind worked in unexpected ways. And because she was never mawkish, as girls can be.

  The two teenagers were going to become the very best of friends.

  They shared a love of literature and they both subscribed to the same principle, namely, that you should treat great matters as if they were of little account and small matters as if they were great ones.

  It was something that Françoise had come to understand as a result of the carefree life she had led and that Florence had come to understand as a result of her sombre life.

  What they didn’t know was that they were going to spend the next fifty years of their lives hand in hand and that it was all going to go by in a flash.

  Françoise had read Proust, and Florence, Dostoyevsky.3 Between them they had the century wrapped up and they swopped books as
others swopped taffeta frocks.

  But on that first of January 1954, as day breaks over the Pont des Arts, they still barely know each other.

  ‘We must make a vow,’ says Françoise.

  ‘Fine,’ replies Florence.

  And the vow the two girls make is one and the same: they vow that Françoise will find a publisher.

  Meanwhile, in Rue de Montpensier, Cocteau, who is ill, falls asleep, as he does every night, thinking of the young man he has loved so much. He is thinking of Radiguet. He thinks of him every second of every hour. Radiguet goes on living in him. And goes on dying too.

  4 January

  For the second scene in this book, I would like to describe Françoise waking up in her childhood bedroom at her parents’ home in the elegant Monceau Plain district, at 167 Boulevard Malesherbes.

  There, in a vast apartment from the Haussmann era, Pierre and Marie Quoirez, originally from the provinces, have installed their three children. As members of the bourgeoisie, they ‘both loved partying and had a liking for Bugattis. They drove round the roads at breakneck speed. My parents were youthful and up-to-the-minute.’4

  Marie, the mother, is perfect. She is like a brown butterfly with blue wings and always impeccably turned out. She loves to laugh, loves going out, loves to make the most of everything the capital has to offer. Much later, Françoise will say of her that she did not live in the real world, that she was always somewhere else as she rummaged among her hats. But, for the moment, Françoise does not pay much attention to her mother. She has eyes only for her father, her ideal – Pierre. It was for him and by his side that she wrote her manuscript the previous summer, in just six weeks.

  Françoise, of course, went to bed late the night before. She had been living it up with her brother Jacques. They had drunk whisky because, with whisky, you sink into a respectable melancholy that does not involve self-loathing – but, even so, this morning her eyelids seem full of grit.

  Since daybreak, several people have gone into Françoise’s room. The first had been Julia Lafon, the girl from the plains of Cajarc, the limestone plateaux in the Lot. She is the family’s housekeeper and she comes in to gather up some blouses from Weill’s ready-to-wear collection. Next comes Marie Quoirez to encourage her younger daughter to get up at a suitable hour for a young lady of her age. But, oh well … she’s got the rest of her life to get up early.

  Pierre, who is an engineer and the technical director of a factory, merely opens the door to look at his big girl sleeping. He remembers stroking her head when she sat on his lap in the Jaguar as a tiny child, her little hands on the wheel.

  A yellow pillow lies on the ground, like a block of fresh butter. It’s the biggest pillow in the house and Françoise makes sure she has it so that she can read late into the night, comfortably propped up against the wall. The bedside table has a glass top, strewn with magazines and piles of books.

  At the foot of the bed, on a fringed rug, an enormous record player is positioned at just the right distance so that Françoise only has to stretch out her arm, without getting out of bed, to turn her records over. On it I picture the Billie Holiday sleeve where you see that wonderful face, with a large flower behind the ear and pearls round her neck, just like Frida Kahlo.

  The teenage girl, asleep on this morning of 4 January 1954, whose parents still call her by the pet name of ‘Kiki’, is far from imagining that in the not too distant future Lady Day will sing for her, in her presence, and will hug her and talk to her as a friend.

  In order to put the finishing touches to this tableau – this imaginary representation of Françoise waking up – I have to decide what books will be lying on the bedside table.

  Because this is the room of a girl who has set her sights on becoming a writer, I choose A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.

  I search for the book on my shelves in order to reread certain passages that I would like to quote here.

  I study Woolf’s words, wondering what Françoise Sagan would have made of them. It’s like rediscovering a book you have just given as a present: putting yourself in your loved one’s shoes, you wonder what their feelings will be when they read it.

  Yes, it’s clear that Françoise Sagan loved this book. I have to select two or three sentences from it, although I would like to include them all.

  ‘Why did men drink wine and women water?’

  ‘Of the two – the vote and the money – the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.’

  ‘Intellectual freedom depends upon material things’ or, again, ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’5

  The pages of A Room of One’s Own bring a lump to my throat because I am reminded that when last I read the book I had dreams of becoming a writer and I wondered if one day I would have the necessary strength and courage.

  Then my eyes light upon the very first page:

  A Room of One’s Own

  Virginia Woolf

  Translated by Clara Malraux

  Reading these words, I feel the veins in my neck throb, just as they do when you find something by chance that you hadn’t been looking for: a hidden love letter not intended for you; a 500-euro note just when you are short of money; or the offer of a trip when you want to get away from someone.

  Clara had translated Virginia Woolf. That is, Clara Malraux, the mother of Sagan’s best friend.

  So I was fully justified, justified at least in placing that book on Françoise’s bedside table. And why not even a copy with a dedication from the translator? ‘To Françoise, who will one day be a writer.’ For that is what her daughter had told her a few weeks previously, having just read her friend’s manuscript at a single sitting: ‘Françoise is a writer.’

  Now that I have set the scene, with the books, the music and the blouses, I can wake Françoise up. I can get her to rub her eyes like a child, as she does in a photograph taken in Saint-Tropez in which she is wearing a checked nightdress. Then, in the corridors of her parents’ apartment, she goes in search of her brother, who is her best friend as far as boys are concerned. Jacques Quoirez is twenty-seven. He has gone off to London to ‘get experience’ in a business there but he comes back to Paris for the end-of-year festivities. I am struck by the photographs of him that I have found in trawling through archives on the internet. He looks nothing like Françoise – you wouldn’t think they came from the same family.

  Jacques has read his little sister’s manuscript.

  Jacques has been impressed by what he has read.

  Yet he is not a man to set aside his usual cynical attitude. With his stripy blazers, his threadbare Charvet shirts and his hide moccasins, he is the darling of the circles he moves in. He is blithe and devil-may-care and he possesses what is known as charm, which, in a man of leisure, is a terrible defect.

  Not wishing either to flatter her or to fill her with false hope, Jacques has told her that the book she has written is a nice little composition,6 not at all bad for a first novel. He agrees to help his little sister parcel up the manuscripts, while at the same time giving her a warning: you have to be patient, and very patient at that, if you want to get yourself published. He has friends, some decidedly more gifted than she is and others with better contacts in the publishing world, who are still waiting for replies. Françoise, he muses, will soon discover that life isn’t as cushy everywhere as it is in Boulevard Malesherbes. Little Kiki has been so spoilt and pampered by their parents, Pierre and Marie, that one day she is going to have to be surprised by the real world. But the later the better, he thinks, for at the end of the day he loves his kid sister more than he loves any other woman.

  All the same, Jacques has been impressed by ‘Franquette’. No one really believed that she would write that mysterious book of hers so quickly. In places he has recognised literary influences: the ‘warm, pink’ shell like the ham in Rimbaud’s ‘At the Green Inn’; the words of Cécile, with their echoes of Musset’s character Perdican; the quotatio
ns from Oscar Wilde and the influence of Choderlos de Laclos. But he has no wish to discourage her; there is nothing more tiresome than critics. We shall see – after all, this is a child who has always got what she wanted, from no matter who.

  After much debate, they settle on three publishers, Gallimard, Plon and Julliard. They put the typed manuscripts in big yellow folders and Françoise asks her brother if he will write her address on them. She feels sure that confident masculine handwriting will put the publishers’ readers in a positive frame of mind.

  Françoise Quoirez,

  167 Boulevard Malesherbes.

  When he has written the addresses, Jacques has a thought.

  Françoise really must put her date of birth on the manuscripts. His hope is that the idea of a little eighteen-year-old will touch the hearts of the readers and that when they return the manuscripts they will perhaps be less nasty in their accompanying letters.

  ‘What if we added the phone number too?’ suggests Françoise.

  ‘What for?’ asks Jacques.

  ‘In case they want to take me on immediately! In case they really, really like the book!’

  ‘No, Françoise, no. That would look silly. Publishers don’t phone you. They send a letter.’

  But Françoise is insistent. She agrees to include her date of birth as long as they add the phone number. So, on all three copies, Jacques writes:

  Françoise Quoirez,

  167 Boulevard Malesherbes.

  Carnot 59-61. Date of birth: 21 June 1935.

  He suddenly feels very afraid for his little sister.

  ‘Whatever happens, if this one doesn’t get published, you will write another, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course. It won’t be the end of the world.’

  ‘Not even a little bit, OK?’

  ‘I don’t write in order to get published, you know. I write because, first and foremost, it’s something I enjoy doing.’