Sagan, Paris 1954

by Anne Berest

  ‘Have you seen the time?’ asks Marie Quoirez.

  ‘I’ve found a publisher for my book!’ exclaims Françoise, by way of excuse.

  ‘Wonderful, but go and give your hair a quick comb and then come to the table.’25

  31 January

  It is Sunday again.

  Two weeks have gone by. Marie, Françoise’s mother, has invited some friends round for the afternoon. Françoise makes herself scarce – not for fear of being bored, since Marie and her friends are somewhat outrageous types. There is Marie Faucheran, who on one occasion had to be rolled up in a Persian carpet from the drawing room to prevent her shooting Pierre Quoirez dead with a revolver. There is also Odette, known as ‘Lady Scott’, one of the few women to have joined the parachute commandos during the Second World War. At least, so she says. And there is Claude Pompidou, who is not yet a president’s wife but whose husband swears that, at the Quoirez establishment, you are dining ‘at the best table in Paris’.26

  Françoise knows that all her mother’s friends are going to grill her about the forthcoming book and that is the last thing she wants. So she decides to take herself off in her father’s Buick – she has suggested to Véronique that she will come and collect her and that they will go for a spin along the Seine.

  In the days immediately following the meeting with René Julliard, the level of excitement had been high, the very air that Françoise breathed seemed different to her: she was going to be published. Everything around her, objects, times of day, passers-by, her parents … everything seemed to be part of a new universe – a universe in which she was going to be published.

  But gradually the initial excitement had faded, just as the flavour of an infusion gets weaker the more water you add to the pot. And this was quite simply because the position in which she found herself felt, in fact, so right; it felt so normal that Françoise should be published, it wasn’t some life-changing event, no, her life was simply going according to plan. So there you have it; ultimately that Sunday, 31 January, was like all the Sundays that had ever been and like all those that were still to come, no more, no less.

  Her parents had read the book.

  Marie had made no comment, other than to point out a few errors, expressing surprise that her daughter should want to be a writer and yet still have a poor grasp of French grammar and syntax.

  Pierre had congratulated Françoise, merely remarking in his cheerful way, ‘It’s very good!’

  That was all. There was nothing more to be said. Life went on as it always had done in the Quoirez family. What they really thought of the book, deep down, in their heart of hearts, is their business. And to tell the truth, my daughter is not yet old enough for me to be able to imagine how it must feel to read a book your child has written. It must be one of the most disturbing experiences a parent can have. Of course, I could always ask my own parents, two of whose daughters are writers. But I won’t.

  Driving through Paris, Françoise reflects that it is the last day for sending seasonal greetings, according to the rules of etiquette as prescribed by Gisèle d’Assailly, her publisher’s wife. Françoise thinks of that advertisement for Perrier sparkling mineral water which ‘wishes you health, wealth and happiness in 1954’. Just then Françoise realises that she is passing a bridge, the Pont des Arts, at the very spot where she made her vow on the morning of 1 January with Florence.

  Further on, she sees staff in the windows of Galeries La Fayette dismantling the Christmas displays, which this year have been on the theme of Peter Pan. In front of Place de l’Opéra, an elderly nursemaid is pushing a navy-blue pram. To Françoise it looks like a little coffin mounted on wheels. She tries to banish that thought because, if she doesn’t, the dead children who sometimes haunt her will come back.

  The Seine has frozen over. Françoise has never seen such a thing and neither have her parents. The lock-keepers have the job of breaking up the ice to safeguard the working of the locks. Big lumps like icebergs come away and float off. Françoise, at the wheel of the Buick, watches the chestnut sellers – the scent of the chestnuts mingles with the charcoal and the smell of horse dung.

  A lorry is parked in Rue Saint-Martin. It’s loaded with worn canvas sacks. The delivery man wears a peaked cap, like a ticket collector’s on a train. He is whistling Cora Vaucaire’s ‘La grosse dame chante’ and he gives Françoise a nod. Smiling, he thinks to himself that you don’t often see such a young girl at the wheel of a black Buick.

  This is Paris in an era when cars park beneath the Eiffel Tower, there being as yet no underground parking areas nor any ring road. There’s no Montparnasse Tower or Pompidou Centre either; instead there is a hosiery manufacturer’s and a shop selling slippers. The city is like a huge building site, though Paris at night in 1954 is still spangled with stars and planets.

  It is so cold that the market traders in Les Halles have lit a brazier on Place Sainte-Opportune to keep warm. It is so cold that at night the temperature is set to drop to minus fifteen degrees. It is so cold that an unknown individual called Abbé Pierre will broadcast the following appeal on Radio Luxembourg: ‘My friends, we need your help! Last night at 3 a.m. a woman froze to death on the pavement of Boulevard Sébastopol, clutching the document that, two days ago, had authorised her eviction …’

  In her car, Françoise is pondering.

  At 3 p.m. she is due to speak to her publisher on the telephone. They have both decided that it would be preferable for her to use a pseudonym. But she still hasn’t come up with one. And the fact is that she’ll have to do so quickly now, as the mock-ups of the book have got to be designed.

  Françoise really likes the idea of having a pseudonym, firstly because almost all the writers she admires have one: Stendhal, George Sand, Gérard de Nerval, Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Éluard, from whose work she took the title Bonjour Tristesse.

  Bonjour tristesse.

  Amour des corps aimables.

  Puissance de l’amour

  Dont l’amabilité surgit

  Comme un monstre sans corps.

  And, there again, taking another name is like getting married, not to a man, but to a woman, for that is what she feels she is doing in espousing the muse of literature. Far from being a disguise, this name to be worn like a made-to-measure garment fills her with a desire, not to become someone else, but to become fully herself.

  She has been mulling it over for several days but she has still not the slightest idea.

  By the time she gets back home, Françoise has only half an hour to think of a new name – it’s always the same with her, she does everything at the last minute, once it has become urgent, when she’s really up against it.

  René Julliard has made it clear to her: the later the mock-up is started, the later the book can go into production and, as a consequence, the later it will be published. Now, that is something that Françoise certainly does not want: mid-March already seems to her to be light years away.

  ‘I just can’t think of a name,’ sighs Françoise. Julia is making an anguille (a so-called ‘eel’), a dessert typical of Cajarc, the pastry coiling round and round until it resembles a huge snail.

  ‘Look in the directory,’ she replies, without glancing up from her baking implements.

  Of course! Why has she not thought of that before? Now, the directory with the sweetest names, the most beautiful, unexpected, enchanting names, whether of places or people, is Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, whose parts Françoise has devoured in the wrong order of course, beginning with Albertine Gone. To have read Proust when she was fifteen, to have taken him to her heart, was to have embarked on an education in two spheres, life and literature – the latter of which has no rules.

  In reading Proust, in discovering the magnificent obsession, the uncontrollable yet controlled passion that writing was, I also discovered that ‘writing’ was not an empty word, that to write was not an easy thing …27

  Minutes before the phone is due to ring, Françoise dives
into the volumes of In Search of Lost Time and leafs through the thousands of pages, one after the other, turning them as feverishly as if they were the pages of a catalogue from which she was choosing her wedding dress.

  The names flit past before her eyes, quiver on the lines, the Vicomtesse de Vélude and the Princesse Sherbatoff, Madame de Varambon and the very loquacious Duc de Sidonia; there are also the Demoiselles d’Ambresac, so very wealthy, on holiday in Balbec with their parents; all these names are making her dizzy for, come what may, Françoise has to choose one of them. Yes, a name will come up as surely as a number on the roulette wheel in a casino – but, for the moment, the white ivory ball is spinning round the track.

  The names that appeal to her, because of their strange sonorousness, are those of Mademoiselle de Stermaria and Zélia de Cambremer, the Princesse de Caprarola and the Prince d’Agrigente … But the music of the name is not the only thing that counts, the character’s role in the book has to be of significance, as in the obvious case of Bergotte, the writer, admired and envied, inspired and ailing, who keeps company with the Duchesse de Guermantes – before dropping dead in front of a painting by Vermeer.

  Yes, Bergotte is a good idea, thinks Françoise, even if it sounds rather too feminine for her taste.

  ‘Julia, what do you think of Françoise Bergotte?’

  ‘Oh no, that sounds dreadful, it’s like “idiot”.’

  So Françoise dives back into In Search of Lost Time and her gaze comes to rest on a sentence from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower:

  Odette, Sagan qui vous dit bonjour.

  It’s not the word ‘Sagan’ that first catches her eye.

  It’s the word ‘bonjour’.

  Seeing it written there in Proust’s book, in black and white, that simple word ‘bonjour’ that she has borrowed from Paul Éluard’s poem, it is as if all those instances of ‘bonjour’ were joining hands and leaping from book to book to reach her, the little girl writer. ‘Bonjour’ forms a genealogical connection, a secret link between those great men and herself. So she reads the paragraph in its entirety.

  ‘Odette, Sagan is bidding you good day,’ observed Swann to his wife. And, in fact, the prince, turning his horse to face forward with a magnificent flourish, as if in a grand finale at the theatre, or circus, or in an old kind of tableau, was directing towards Odette a grandiose, theatrical salute …

  The Prince de Sagan, who had existed in real life, appeals to her because of all that is whimsical and ostentatious about him and because he is always dressed in the latest elegant style. Part dandy, part cavalry officer, ‘in Paris he held sway over a crowd from fashionable society, as well as over people of a more dubious sort’.28

  Françoise stores that name up in her head, then continues with her search, pausing over Borange – gosh, it would be funny to take the name of a grocer-cum-bookseller from Combray.

  And while we’re about it, why not Combray? ‘Françoise Combray’ has rather a nice ring to it, nicer than Françoise Borange. Françoise imagines how these names would look on her, just as, when faced with a rail of clothes, in your mind’s eye you immediately picture the dresses superimposed on your body. So there’s also Elstir, the painter and Odette’s lover, with his sweet-sounding name. And why not Vinteuil? It’s rather pretentious, rather obvious. There’s also the Marquise de la Pommelière, nicknamed ‘la Pomme’, and Monsieur de Schlegel, who knows the language of flowers by heart.

  Then Françoise’s gaze alights on this sentence:

  It is true that those great men saw, at the Guermantes’, the Princesse de Parme and the Princesse de Sagan (whom Françoise, hearing her always spoken of, and believing there to be a grammatical requirement for the feminine, ended up by calling ‘la Sagante’).29

  The first thing that stops her in her tracks is the presence of her first name, ‘Françoise’, just as the presence of the word ‘bonjour’ had done a little while before. Françoise and Sagan are brought together in this way by the grammar of the Proustian sentence acting as a mirror that inverts the normal order of things. But here it’s no longer a question of the prince, rather, of the princess.

  Françoise is enraptured with this dual identity, half man, half woman. It encompasses both the decadent dandy and the grand society lady, who was received wherever she went as if mistress of all, encircled by princesses of her own rank and by the strings of pearls round her neck. The image that will cling to her legend is already contained in her name, for it is a name that says one may drive sports cars in bare feet with painted toenails, that one may lose at the casino and cadge money from the doorman to get home with, a name that says one will love both men and women, because what counts is the fact of loving – not wisely perhaps, but well. In choosing this name, she is choosing everything that is coming her way, that is approaching with giant steps, just as, in children’s stories, the shadow of the ogre looms ever larger on the wall.

  At that very moment the telephone rang. Françoise Quoirez had found her name. Henceforth and for ever she would be called Françoise Sagan. And seeing the words written on my page, I realise for the first time that Sagan is an anagram of à sang – it speaks of blood.

  2 February

  For ten days now I have not been living in my own flat at all.

  My daughter is away on holiday and a friend who has gone abroad to work has lent me her little doll’s house of a place in the Paris suburbs. The walls resonate with the sounds of the neighbours going about their lives as if we shared the same space, which I find pleasant and reassuring.

  Leaving aside the phantom neighbours that I live with, I am beholden to no one, or virtually no one.

  I am there only for Françoise.

  I think of her constantly.

  I speak just of her, constantly.

  This very day I am struck when reading the following sentence of Sagan’s: ‘I saw a beach, with myself on the beach and a little boy beside me.’ I believe that every young woman creates for herself an ideal photograph within her heart. This secret photograph of hers guides her every step. In the past, one image gave me courage whenever something hurt: ‘one day I shall have a family’ and in the photograph there were children, the father of the children – and me.

  That particular photograph is no longer possible. It’s existence turns out to have been fleeting. I must accept the situation. But I am not able to.

  A memory comes back to me. When I was pregnant, we had wanted to call our daughter Françoise, but in the meantime Rebecca and Emmanuel had found a cat in Brittany and had brought her back to Paris and given her that name. So we abandoned the idea.

  I am thinking back to those happy times. I am thinking back to 1 January 2010. We are waking up after spending the first night in our new flat and I am saying to myself: All your life you must remember this day. This first of January, when happiness has put its arms around you and placed on your lips a stinging kiss whose sweetness you must always remember.

  Yes, all my life I shall think back to 1 January 2010. But I know today that, if that love did not endure, it is quite simply because there is no such thing as love.

  … you are becoming cerebral and sad. That’s just not you.30

  So, following this advice from Françoise, one evening I accept an invitation to dinner.

  Julien has heard the news; regarding our separation, he says that he is very sad for us; he appears to hope that things are sorting themselves out, and I believe they are.

  He offers to take my mind off things.

  I accept by asking him to take me to Brasserie Lipp, since, as I tell him, that would make me very happy; it’s a place I like a lot. In reality it’s because I am planning soon to write a scene set in that restaurant: I would like to write about Françoise and Florence going out for dinner together with the money Pierre Quoirez had given them in a roll of banknotes.

  *

  When I enter the restaurant, it is not my friend Julien but my characters I look for in the sea-green colour of the ti
les with their motifs of exotic plants, beneath the dazzling chandeliers.

  And I try to glimpse the faces of two little thirteen-year-old gamines – for that would be today’s equivalent of the age they were then – dining together on their own among all those well-off, established people the same age as their grandparents. I am ‘under the spell’ of Françoise, as so many others have been before me. Nothing but her is of any interest to me, I am entirely under her influence. What’s more, I am dressed this evening à la Peggy Roche, red dress, red tights, leather boots and red lipstick – the only things missing are the spectacles. You might say that I stride into this famous brasserie honking my horn.

  In the end we don’t talk about my separation at all, but about the book that Julien should be writing: for fifteen years he has been jotting down on scraps of paper, two inches by two inches, all the expressions that he wants to remember in life, snatches of conversations overheard, phrases that sound just right to him, passing thoughts of his.

  He shows me photographs of his cellar: the floor is littered with hundreds of thousands of notes, which together seem to form a huge sea of foam.

  ‘I’ve set about classifying them,’ he tells me, before going on to say, ‘Talking to you, one always has the feeling that a part of you isn’t there.’

  ‘Yes, I know. The father of my daughter used to accuse me of that all the time. He used to say that I didn’t listen to him. It’s true that, when he asked me a question, I often didn’t reply. But I don’t do it on purpose.’

  ‘Is it because you’re not interested?’

  ‘No, it’s because my mind is always on my books, all the time. I think that, initially, I appealed to him because I wrote. But later that began to be a hindrance – I mean, how it affects everyday life. It’s always the same, you see. You leave people for the very reasons that attracted you to them in the first place.’