Sagan, Paris 1954

by Anne Berest

  ‘Yes, I can see that you are writing a book on someone’s life. It’s the life of a woman who lived as a man would. She was very masculine. But she was benevolent towards people. She was a woman who had experienced everything. She did whatever she wanted to do. But she did it alone. She experienced everything on her own.

  ‘She was a woman who felt misunderstood. She had stepped aside from time. For her there was no longer any such thing as a calendar, only a life lived in the present moment.

  ‘Françoise Sagan.

  ‘I am seeing Françoise Sagan – that’s correct, isn’t it?

  ‘From beyond the grave, she is wondering why society wished to destroy her. She is asking herself that question, she is asking you that question. Just like a tsunami, just as when the sea comes up and lays waste to everything, so society took everything back from her. Why?

  ‘It was not she who self-destructed. They truly wished to kill her.

  ‘She is trying to understand why she went from being an idol to a woman who was hated.

  ‘It wasn’t the writer they resented, but the person she was. They claimed back everything they had given her.

  ‘Society took back from her what she had received. She wonders why. She is saying that perhaps it is because she herself repudiated what she symbolised in society.

  ‘She repudiated her origins, the kind of world she came from. With the result that that world itself – those who had lauded her to the skies – repudiated her.

  ‘She is asking you whether it was because it never occurred to her to say thank you. But as far as she was concerned, things were just “normal”. Everything that happened to her was normal; she didn’t understand that there was a payback involved.

  ‘Now, we live in a society where you’re not supposed to find it “normal” to receive so much money. You have to constantly say thank you and justify yourself and show gratitude.

  ‘It didn’t occur to her to say thank you, nor to tell anyone that she loved them.

  ‘She could say to someone she met in the street, “Do you need a car? Here, take mine.” But, in truth, she was not someone who gave. People believed that she felt nothing towards anyone and perhaps that was true. Perhaps she was fundamentally incapable of loving. Everything she was disintegrated.

  ‘The reason lies in the soul of the person.

  ‘She says, “Brigitte Bardot also lived a selfish life. But then she decided to speak up for animals, so people are touched by that. They recognise that she is doing something for others.”

  ‘She herself had no wish to pursue that kind of thing. Her view was that she had a right to do what she wanted with her own money.

  ‘She is saying, “Maybe it’s to do with my origins, right at the beginning.” She hopes you will find the answer.

  ‘She always thought she wasn’t the person she was meant to be. She had to play a role.’

  (Suddenly the clairvoyant looks at me, and speaks to me as if she were a doctor giving me a prescription at the end of the consultation.)

  ‘You are sometimes going to want to do certain things that you are not used to doing. You will want to drink – go ahead. Drink alcohol.

  ‘You have nothing to fear, she is watching over you and will know how to protect you. She is full of benevolence towards you. But be careful. You will want to smoke. Don’t go in too much for cigarettes. She smoked to the point of suffocation. She virtually asphyxiated herself. On the other hand, you can drink, and may your drinking make her tipsy. Let yourself go. Let yourself be guided by her, guided towards liberty. You will have no regrets and you will never feel ashamed.

  ‘She will help you grow. She will make a free woman of you.

  ‘She will teach you. Let her enjoy some final moments through you.’

  I reread these lines; they may seem grotesque.

  I have nothing further to add to this episode. Miracles are not things you believe in: they are things you register when they happen. I can simply state that, before we met, the woman who spoke those words had read neither Bonjour Tristesse nor any biography of Françoise Sagan. And even if she had done extensive searches on the internet, she had no way of knowing that I was in the process of writing this book.

  But let’s move on, let’s forget about that strange episode and return to the exceptionally cold weather of 16 January 1954, for the publisher René Julliard is dining in town at the home of Émile Roche, the President of the Economic Council.

  Tall, elegant, his deep-set eyes accentuated by thick glasses with tortoiseshell frames, Julliard is a man in a hurry who has bagged three Goncourt prizes since the end of the war. His colleague, Robert Laffont, says of him, ‘He adores receptions, he loves mixing with the glitterati and dining out, and this natural gregariousness of his is a great asset in terms of business, because on the one hand it gives him access to a huge array of works-in-progress while on the other hand providing him with tactical openings in his dealings with the press and literary panels. He created his publishing house in his own image: it is flexible, it is nimble and it sees itself as being up with the latest fashion.’20

  The subject of conversation round the table this evening is the ceremony of the transfer of powers between Vincent Auriol and the new French President, René Coty, which has just taken place this very day at the Élysée Palace.

  Naturally, any talk of the new President focuses above all on the topic of his wife. Michelle Auriol, the previous First Lady of France, had style and posed for Paris Match in designer outfits. She was the kind of president’s wife that the French go mad for: she was the daughter of working-class parents and had been in the Resistance during the war so, as well as having proletarian credentials, she had given proof of courage and, at the same time, with her elegance and her outfits, she had what it took to delight foreign heads of state. How important it is to French men and women for our First Lady to be attractive: we appreciate that quality far more highly than all the others put together, even more highly than moral qualities.

  The problem as the press sees it in January 1954 is that Germaine Coty, the wife of the new President, in comparison with her predecessor, is like a Normandy cow.21 It was in the coarse garb of convent schools that her body developed, hence she is mannish and seemingly untouched since birth by any trace of femininity.

  On this, 16 January, the day on which power has been transferred to the incoming President, the French are furious that the new First Lady of France looks as if she’s at some family bash, receiving journalists in the flour-bespattered clothes she has been cooking in. But, fortunately, the French do so love to love those they formerly hated (and vice versa) that they will very soon end up adoring this nice, fat lady and they will love her like one of those big chocolate logs you get at Christmas, for her genuine kindness and her generosity.

  After that topic has been well and truly chewed over, along with the quenelles de brochet sauce financière, the guests will most likely have discussed what had happened the day before at the Marigny Theatre. Everyone who was anyone in Paris had descended on it to discover for themselves the sound of ‘avant-garde music’ – Cocteau had even had to sit on the floor in front of the first row to hear Bach, Nono, Stockhausen, Webern and Stravinsky – as featured on the programme of a concert given by the young Pierre Boulez.

  It is also likely, very likely even, that, between the canetons façon Tour d’Argent and the pommes soufflées, there will have been a quivering of moustaches at René Julliard’s mention of a study by Dr Kinsey, just published within the previous few days, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, an exploration of the female body that brings in ‘the notion of pleasure’. And it is all based on ‘practical observation’. No doubt there is some choking over the salade mimosa when René Julliard adds that he has been working with the writer Daniel Guérin on a book entitled Le Rapport Kinsey, a French analysis of this new approach to female sexuality.

  And, again, it is likely that conversation will have dwelt for a time on the winner of the top awa
rd in French cinema, Claude Autant-Lara, for his adaptation of Colette’s novel The Ripening Seed.

  In Paris a coalition for the defence of moral and social values has written an open letter to the director, cautioning him thus: ‘We disliked your plan for a film based on Colette’s work because of the damaging moral repercussions such a film would inevitably have on the young people of our country as a whole.’

  Did these shades, reunited here around the dinner table, make mention of the violent demonstrations taking place against the Syrian regime? Or of the clashes between the Muslim Brotherhood and militants of the Liberation Rally founded by Nasser in Egypt? Or did they speak of that resolution of the United Nations Security Council, the aim of which was ‘to achieve progress towards lasting peace in Palestine: it is essential that the parties abide strictly by their obligations under the General Armistice Agreement of 20 July 1949 between Syria and Israel’.

  That is less likely. But, really, what does it matter? What matters for us is that, this evening, René Julliard is in a state of exhilaration, having been intoxicated by the Grands-Échezeaux 1938 served at table, and that the sparkling conversation has so sharpened his senses that, on returning home, the words ‘Colette’, ‘sexual behaviour of women’ and ‘avant-garde music’ are ringing in his ears and putting him in a particular mood. In just the same way, certain beliefs maintain that the position of the planets in the sky determines the character of a baby at the moment of its birth.

  17 January

  The moment the twelve strokes of midnight ring out from the gilded brass pendulum enclosed in its glass case, René Julliard decides not to go to bed straight away but to stay up and read for a while.

  As if removing it from its corolla of petals, he takes the manuscript that François Le Grix and Pierre Javet have recommended out of its daffodil-yellow folder.

  ‘Françoise Quoirez, 167 Boulevard Malesherbes. Carnot 59-61. Date of birth: 21 June 1935.’

  René Julliard does some rapid mental arithmetic: the little girl is still a minor, so it will be all raindrops on roses, nothing that will require too much effort on his part, he hopes, after a dinner at which the wine has flowed so copiously.

  His mind automatically goes to one of his favourite books, The Girls, by Henry de Montherlant. It brings a smile to his lips and he gets out of his armchair to fetch from the bookcase that delightfully misogynistic work – he rejoices at every reading of it.

  Young girls are like stray dogs. If you look on them with the slightest hint of benevolence they think you are calling them and that you are going to rescue them, and they paw friskily at your trousers.22

  Would his evening not be better spent reading Montherlant rather than the scribblings of some little poppet?

  René Julliard lays the manuscript at his feet and searches his shelves for The Girls, but in vain. For some reason they have disappeared, so our publisher is obliged to take up the first page of the manuscript with that peculiar title: Bonjour Tristesse.

  To this strange feeling of mine, obsessing me with its sweet languor, I hesitate to apply the fine, solemn name of sadness.

  It takes René Julliard several attempts to read the first sentence because mentally he is not quite prepared, his thoughts still quite distracted by the dinner he has been at. In an effort to concentrate, to focus, he blows his nose, then clears his throat. Openings are so difficult to get right, he muses, especially when it’s a first novel. They can often be over-egged or consciously understated, like girls wearing too much make-up who aim at an immediately pleasing effect, unaware that the most charming thing of all is to be attractive without trying.

  To this strange feeling of mine, obsessing me with its sweet languor, I hesitate to apply the fine, solemn name of sadness.

  The intoxication from the meal has affected René Julliard’s vision, so the lines are running into one another before his very eyes. Reading the first sentence again one last time, he all of a sudden sees the beauty in it, with the result that he immediately sobers up.

  To this strange feeling of mine, obsessing me with its sweet languor, I hesitate to apply the fine, solemn name of sadness.

  Straight away his heart is trapped between the lines of the book – he cannot say whether it is beating faster or whether it has stopped beating. Before he knows what has happened, he has devoured the first half of the novel, dumbfounded by this young girl – she talks like an old man who has seen all there is to see, has read all there is to read, has experienced everything, and she is able to write, ‘I did not like young people,’ while even depicting her father as if he were a lover. ‘I cannot imagine a better or more amusing friend … I knew his need for women.’

  What René Julliard feels is like a surge of electricity in his blood radiating through his entire body, the feeling you have when you launch yourself forward on a swing with your head thrown back.

  All this time, within his own head, several different men have been summoned, for each in turn to read the words of the book through a single pair of eyes. Within one man, several are assembled. First of all there is ‘the reader’, the man who can appreciate how a sentence is created through the life breathed into it by lines constructed round a ternary rhythm which, as in music, is a strong rhythm yet one that the author can interrupt without warning, with the precision of a great conductor, one of those truly gifted conductors who can render all trace of effort invisible. ‘I was greatly attracted to the concept of love affairs that were rapidly embarked upon, intensely experienced and quickly over. At the age I was, fidelity held no attraction. I knew little of love, apart from its trysts, its kisses and its lethargies.’ Next comes ‘the publisher’ to supplant ‘the reader’: it is he now who begins to read these lines, all of a sudden wondering what the author of these pages might be like in the flesh, and anxious to know if the story is wholly autobiographical or if, on the contrary, it is fictionalised: ‘My father, whether from inclination or habit, liked to dress me up as a “femme fatale”.’ At times the publisher loses his way, he forgets his role, and then it is simply ‘the man’ who takes his place and begins to read through eyes that are popping out, so affected is he by those words, which can only have been written by either a virgin or a very experienced woman – here the two seem to have miraculously melded, like some Frankenstein’s monster made up of different sorts of women, the resulting creation capable of saying, without naivety or dissimulation, ‘You are the most handsome man I know.’

  On reading these words, Julliard straightens up from the waist, a considerable length, and rises, like a stork abruptly unfolding its long, black wings before it flaps off. Impatiently he pushes back his tartan rug, gets a foot tangled up in it, shakes off his shoe to free himself, then rushes over to his desk, one of those substantial English desks in solid wood overlaid with dark mahogany and leather-topped. René Julliard pulls open every one of its drawers and, in so doing, causes his forelock to flop down over his tortoiseshell glasses but he does not even pause to push it back, so intent is he on finding a pencil to use for annotating the manuscript. All of a sudden he takes on the boyish look of a student just out of bed, tousle-headed and having to put on his spectacles before he can see properly.

  In vain René searches for a charcoal pencil so that he can begin noting in places the comments he will need to share with Javet, Le Grix and the author; for it’s settled, there will be no procrastinating, the book will be published as quickly as possible; ringing in his ears are the words: ‘His kissing became serious. It quickly became urgent and skilful, too skilful … It was dawning on me that I was better suited to kissing a boy in the sun than to studying for a degree.’ René Julliard curses the tiny pair of bird-shaped scissors that have just pricked his finger at the bottom of the drawer, but eventually he finds a pencil. Just as it is inconceivable that you would tear yourself away from the embrace of a woman whom you are covering from head to toe in kisses, so it is equally inconceivable that he would put a book down in order to perform some extraneous t
ask. René Julliard rushes back to the manuscript in a panic, as if the words he has just read could have been effaced by a magic sponge, and here he is at last, bundled up in the tartan rug and holding the pages of the manuscript. The words are still there, they send a warm glow through his whole body; in the end they will become completely intoxicating: ‘I had always heard love being spoken of as something quite straightforward. I had myself spoken of it crudely, with the ignorance of youth, but it seemed to me now that I would never again be able to speak of it in that way, in that detached and coarse manner.’

  At daybreak, Gisèle d’Assailly, a descendant of General La Fayette, found her husband asleep in an armchair with a hundred pages scattered around him.

  Gisèle stooped to bring some order to all those loose sheets, causing her husband to wake with a sudden start.

  ‘But it doesn’t add up!’ he exclaimed.

  It was Gisèle’s turn to be startled.

  Overnight the alcoholic haze in René Julliard’s head had dispersed and all had again become clear: it was impossible for a child of eighteen to have written those lines. Viewed as a mathematical equation, it didn’t add up, for a girl capable of handling the language so perfectly and depicting so accurately the habits of the bourgeoisie could not but belong to that same class herself.

  Now, what bourgeois family would allow a slip of a girl to have the following exchange with her father?

  ‘Sleep well, did you?’ my father asked.

  ‘So-so,’ I replied. ‘I drank too much whisky last night.’

  What kind of parents could give their offspring an upbringing that, from a cultural standpoint, was beyond reproach, while at the same time encouraging her to lose her virginity, like some slut, on the beach?

  No, it simply didn’t stand up.