Sagan, Paris 1954

by Anne Berest

  Françoise has not forgotten those entire families that had disappeared. Even if she never referred to them, some things may be heard very clearly in the silence of their not being spoken about.

  Comfortably ensconced in one of the deep red-velvet armchairs, sipping a cocktail, and paying no heed to the shrieks of laughter that pierce her heart like shards of glass, Françoise is not listening to her brother’s friends, who are already drunk.

  At that moment she is immersing herself in her memories.

  The sharp, crystalline music of the tinkling ice cubes is taking her back to the war years.

  She is seven.

  Seven is old, so old that it is called ‘the age of reason’.

  She is living in the Isère, in Saint-Marcellin, at the foot of the mountains of the Vercors. The whole family has left Paris because of the war; on the day of their departure they had to turn round and come back because Marie, the mother, had forgotten to collect her hats from the famous milliner’s, Paulette’s.11

  Some weeks later, soldiers of the Wehrmacht come to search the house, which has the misfortune to be called ‘The Gunnery’; they are looking for arms. They know that a van belonging to members of the Resistance has been spotted in the area. They get all the Quoirez family to line up and face the wall while they carry out the search. The story has a happy ending, as the Germans don’t find anything.12 But Françoise can remember the sound of her own breathing as, hands clasped on her head, she heard orders being given in a foreign tongue and the dogs barking. And she also remembers not being afraid.

  I get the impression that for many French children of that generation, that is to say, those who were children during the war, their memories are not painful. Fear is not their abiding memory and the expression ‘a long holiday’ often crops up. Two things are mentioned: the women whose hair was shorn for having fraternised with the enemy and the revelation of images from the death camps. When you come to think of it, it is rather strange that an awareness of the war should be defined by those two things, both of which date from the period after the war, and yet they are cited in answer to the question ‘What do you remember about the war?’

  This is what Françoise remembers: she was eleven when she went to the cinema in Saint-Marcellin to see In Old Chicago, an American film starring Tyrone Power. It was 1946 and newsreels were shown before the film started. Suddenly there appeared on the screen those images of Buchenwald and Auschwitz in which you see snow ploughs clearing away heaps of corpses. It took Françoise some time, a few seconds at least, to realise what she was seeing.13

  A friend of mine, Gérard Rambert, once told me that when he discovered some photographs under his parents’ radiator cover, all he could see in them were hills. He could not understand why his parents would hide ‘photographs of hills’ in their radiators. It had taken him several days to realise what it was all about. Just as the faces in the paintings of Arcimboldo are made up of vegetables or fruit, so the hills in the photographs belonging to Gérard’s parents were made up of bones and decomposed corpses.

  In Un Pedigree, Patrick Modiano would write, ‘At the age of thirteen I discovered the images of the death camps. Something changed for me that day.’

  Those two sentences say it all.

  ‘Something changed for me that day’ is an experience that we have all had, every one of us, whatever our age or culture and whatever generation we belong to.

  I remember the day when something changed for me.

  I must have been six or seven.

  My mother placed a big history book on the baize surface of her writing desk. We pored over its pages. I don’t think I realised at first what I was seeing – I’m not talking about its meaning or import, I am merely saying that it was difficult to work out what the photographs were of.

  My mother explained to me that we belonged to that family of bodies, that we were ‘Jews’.

  ‘Something changed for me that day.’

  If I mention all these things, in a digression that is taking me further than I intended, it is because I see in Françoise Sagan’s levity, in her irreverence and offhandedness, not an elegant front concealing despair, but a sign of her secret awareness of human suffering. She had no legitimate right to speak of suffering, for she belonged neither with the victims nor indeed with the executioners. Françoise Sagan was never to tire of exploring forms of distress that may be regarded as merely trivial but I sense that there was a deeply embedded seriousness in Françoise Quoirez that she respected too much to make it her own. And I know that the sight of a shaven-headed woman paraded through the streets of the village where she, Françoise, lived as a child was to haunt her for the rest of her days.14

  ‘So, what’s this about you waiting to hear back from publishers?’

  Françoise, put on the spot by a friend who is flirting with her brother Jacques, comes out of her daydream.

  ‘Yes, well, we’ll see,’ she replies, pushing back a lock of hair that has fallen forward.

  ‘So,’ insists someone else, ‘have you heard back?’

  Few things make Françoise feel more ill at ease. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She is furious with her brother and his big mouth.

  ‘No, not yet. I only dropped the manuscript off last week … it can take several months.’

  This is the cue for people to give their opinions, to come up with an anecdote about someone who had been read by Gide for Gallimard, or someone else who received a letter with a positive reply, or Proust who paid to have his work published, and so on and so on. Françoise has had enough. She doesn’t want to have to listen to them any more; she feels dizzy.

  It’s at this point that her friend Véronique whispers to her, ‘Come with me, I’ll take you to the carnival. We’ll have our fortunes told.’

  The two girls grab their coats, then hail a beetle-black Citroën taxi on Boulevard Raspail.

  ‘We’re going to Pigalle,’ says Véronique, in the serious voice she reserves for special occasions.

  So here are the girls, speeding through the night towards their future. It’s not the first time that Françoise has met a fortune-teller. The previous year, in Rue l’Abbé-Groult, a blonde woman with an enormous bosom had announced to her, ‘You will write a book that will cross the oceans’15 and that had encouraged her to take from her drawer the few pages that had been lying there abandoned.

  So it all stemmed from the woman who had predicted that Françoise would write books and that they would be very successful.

  I can’t see into the future, but I do have one extraordinary power, the power to transport Françoise back to that night in Pigalle.

  Up there on the heights, from mid-December until mid-January, a carnival with dozens of strange booths sets up along Boulevard Rochechouart, stretching from Place Blanche to the Anvers Métro station. There you can find women who will tell your fortune with playing cards, as well as shooting galleries, bearded ladies and fishing for prizes.

  I quote here from the photographer Christer Strömholm, who photographed these carnivals in the late fifties:16

  You could get to see wrestling matches … Dwarves with beards would invite you to performances that lasted an hour.

  The female snake charmer in her glass case would allow big, lazy snakes to coil languorously round her body. You had to pay to see her. We would watch in fascination for a good quarter of an hour.

  Her working day was long and whenever she took a break she would leave her glass case but she never parted from her snakes. They stayed tightly coiled round her half-naked body. There was always a packed house for the ‘leopard woman’. She would let us stroke her hairy patches.

  I can imagine Françoise and Véronique wandering among the stalls and the roundabouts. I can see them laughing at the dodgems, sinking their teeth into round, sweet toffee-apples and getting candyfloss moustaches as they stood guffawing in front of the booth of the crocodile woman – half woman, half crocodile.

  I like to picture them, complet
e with the leather handbags that mark them out as well-brought-up young ladies, entering the fortune-teller’s booth.

  There are some grey and orange stones on the fortune-teller’s table; light from the candles throws into relief the wrinkles on her face – she could be one hundred years old – she wears jewellery, lots of jewellery. She asks Françoise to choose some cards and place them on the table, then she stands up, takes a pendulum and, looking Françoise straight in the eye, says to her in a gravelly voice that conjures up some never-never land, ‘I see someone who is coming to live with you, someone who will be arriving in the near future.

  ‘It’s someone you will get to know very well indeed, someone you will love and who will love you straight away, for you are very lovable. But, beware, the relationship between you will be one of extremes for she is haughty and capricious. She will love you as children love, unreasonably. She will love you as women love: if you neglect them, they do not easily forgive.

  ‘This is someone you will know for the rest of your life, who will at times desert you and then you will suffer greatly. As she brushes past, you will always call her name. You must honour and cherish her, for you are one of those who know how to make her happy. You know how to make her laugh and to entertain her. She is on her way towards you. And when you open the door to her, you must look her straight in the face.’

  ‘Who is this person?’

  ‘It is Lady Luck.’17

  13 January

  My first paid job was as a reader for a publishing house. So I know all about manuscripts and what peculiar, repugnant, necessary, exciting things they are, inviting contempt and consideration in equal measure. I know the mystique surrounding those pages, those accumulating piles. I am familiar with the disillusionment and sadness that come from reading words that are just not right, that are as indigestible as food which doesn’t taste as it should. But sometimes, too, you feel your temples begin to throb and walls come tumbling down, when you read words that make a deep impression on you and help you to go on living.

  Readers in publishing houses are a strange breed, somewhat wan, somewhat apart, somewhat feared; because the talent they have, their possessing ‘a good eye’ (in the same way as a person is said to ‘have a nose’ for things) is a gift: it’s a type of expertise that cannot be either passed on or explained – it’s as scary as witchcraft.

  These are creatures wreathed in a slightly malodorous aura who loiter alone in the corridors with sheets of paper and folders under their arm, and such a one was François Le Grix, the reader at the publishing house of René Julliard in 1954.

  He was nicknamed ‘Grixe’ or ‘the Grey Lady’ and, on account of that ridiculous moniker, I imagine him to be a tall, slender, colourless individual, made fun of by the others for wearing ‘a toupee which only he thought was undetectable’.18

  François Le Grix is the first reader of Bonjour Tristesse on that thirteenth of January 1954.

  Conscientious as ever, before he finishes his work for the day, in his fine hand – the handwriting of a schoolboy brought up under the Third Republic, who knows all his sous-préfectures by heart and can solve problems involving trains that pass one another – he writes this:

  What Mademoiselle Quoirez has penned bowls along nicely without faltering. Hence we are prevented from noticing the numerous barbarisms that it would be appropriate to eradicate from such a pleasing text. In the very first line, I light upon the following: ‘To this strange feeling … I hesitate to apply the fine name of sadness.’ Not only does it lack euphony but the syntax also offends … At one point the author writes of ‘the hearing of that exaggerated laughter’ instead of ‘hearing that laughter’. I have underlined many of these infelicities, which the exercise of a little care would suffice to correct. The charm of the work, the rather particular spell it casts, produced by its mix of perversion and innocence, stems also from a complacent attitude to life being coupled with bitterness towards it, and from gentleness being coupled with cruelty. In places it is a poem as much as a novel, but without there being any break in tone or any false note sounded. Above all, it is a novel where life is depicted authentically and where the psychology, for all that it is daring, cannot be faulted, since its five characters, Raymond, Cécile, Anne, Elsa and Cyril, are boldly drawn and not to be forgotten in a hurry. The style of writing is in essence so classical that in quite a few instances the imperfect subjunctive would flow more naturally than the present subjunctive, which is rarely the case. But Mademoiselle Quoirez persists in not using it. Another example of a barbarism, and a rather curious one, concerns the book’s actual title, inspired by its final lines, where the author tells us that, with the advent of evening, a strange face appears to her which she greets with the words ‘Bonjour tristesse’. In that it is evening, would it not be better to say ‘Bonsoir tristesse’ and, furthermore, would not the title gain thereby?19

  As if clinging to a talisman, I have retained all the reports I wrote when I was a reader. They are in a big grey box file which I keep archived in the bedroom I had as a child in my parents’ house. I would like to reread them all, one day. In amongst them is a report on a first novel that went on to be a great success. It had been written by a girl of my own age – twenty at the time – and I had been greatly struck when reading it. It was the first time I had read a manuscript that seemed to me to be undeniably both well written and likely to sell. So I had spoken up for it to the publisher, for whom I was working as an intern.

  Some years later, at a dimly lit Parisian party, I ran across that same girl, who was now famous on account of her book. I was then working in a theatre on the Champs-Élysées. Needless to say, we were still both the same age as each other. But the success of her book had catapulted her into what seemed to me to be life as it was meant to be lived, whereas I was vegetating in the limbo of my own mere existence. I asked her for a light, and she obliged, but in an offhand way, without even bothering to look at me, so as not to lose the thread of the animated discourse with which she was regaling her male audience.

  I said to myself, ‘You’re not looking at me and you don’t know who I am. Yet I was one of the fairies present round your cradle.’

  I often think of that incident.

  In doing so, I wonder which of the people who cross my path, their faces unknown to me, have nonetheless played a part in my life without my being the slightest bit aware of it.

  What I find striking in the story of Françoise Sagan is that the fairies who were present round that little girl’s cradle, all those capricious fairy godmothers – toutes les capricieuses mères du destin – in whose hands her destiny lay and who played their part in the making of her fame, were all very elderly gentlemen.

  First there was François Le Grix, then Pierre Javet and René Julliard, the publishing house trio. Next up were Mauriac, Blanchot, Paulhan, Bataille and then many others, a whole Senate’s worth of wonderful old men who covered their faces in dainty veils to grant the wish of a girl-child newly born.

  But we are not yet at that point. We are still just at the point where the reader’s report from François Le Grix lands on the desk of Pierre Javet, editorial director at the publishing house of René Julliard, who, in turn, is shortly to be overcome with stupefaction (in the etymological sense of the word).

  16 January

  Before I recount what happened on the night of 16–17 January 1954, the night René Julliard read the manuscript of Bonjour Tristesse for the first time and wanted to publish it before he had even reached the last page, I must describe something that happened to me yesterday. It was such a strange thing that I wonder if I really did experience it, so strange that I could not say exactly what was going on.

  I had decided to make an appointment with a clairvoyant, because, after I had written the episode with the fortune-teller, I reckoned that for me to meet a ‘real’ clairvoyant would be useful for the book and would make my description a bit less kitsch.

  There are two sorts of writers. There ar
e those who plumb their own depths to extract all the black gold they can find there and who, for that reason, are forced to live a life of asceticism. And there are those who need to experience things in order to write about them and who lose their way as they journey through life on the edge of a fantasy world, obliged to lead a kind of existence that sometimes proves fatal to them, as the wild ass’s skin does to the hero in Balzac’s story.

  Be that as it may, I had made an appointment with the clairvoyant using the book as a pretext even though, probably, at an unconscious level, I wanted just as much to hear things about my personal life: my separation from the father of my daughter was looking as if it might be permanent and never in my life had I felt quite as lost as I did then. But instead of speaking to her about that, I put the following question: ‘I am writing a book at the moment. Can you see it?’ This is what I asked the clairvoyant when I met her in her studio near the Anvers Métro station, which in the fifties was the exact location – and I am not making this up – of the Pigalle carnival.

  (What I am going to write next is the exact transcription of the notes I scribbled down in the course of our conversation. I am reproducing the words just as they were said to me, without any attempt to dress them up stylistically or to impose any kind of coherence on them after the event.

  I know that most readers will not for one moment accept the veracity of what I am going to report. Yet it is all true and I leave it to each individual to interpret as they wish, and as best they can, the remarkable occurrence that I was party to and that I restrict myself here to conveying as faithfully as possible.)