Sagan, Paris 1954

by Anne Berest

  ‘Are you writing your next novel?’

  ‘No, I’m writing a book on Françoise Sagan.’

  There’s always the same reaction to the words ‘Françoise Sagan’. Julien’s face lights up. He smiles. He repeats it: ‘Ah, Françoise Sagan!’ It never fails. It’s like magic.

  I tell him about the incident with the clairvoyant, which makes him laugh. We leave the brasserie and go to La Hune, the bookshop where I have ordered books that were published in 1953 and 1954.

  The bookseller is very nice. We joke together and, since the books have not arrived, I ask him whether he can recommend something else instead. We get into conversation.

  ‘Where are you from?’ asks Julien.

  The bookseller doesn’t reply. He looks at Julien, expecting him to enlarge on his question.

  ‘The way you speak, your unusual accent, what is it?’ he insists. ‘It’s the same with her.’ Julien points at me. ‘Whenever she speaks, you know she comes from somewhere different. You can’t place it exactly, but it’s her own place, her own strange way of talking.’

  ‘I speak very quickly, it’s true,’ admits the bookseller. ‘I’ll tell you something. In the past, on certain evenings, a small woman would come into the shop here. And because of the way her hair fell over her face, I recognised her immediately, not because of her face, which had changed a lot, but because of her hair. It was Françoise Sagan. She used to come to the shop to buy books. And whenever she found that it was me at the cash desk, we used to lay bets as to which one of us could talk faster. And we would begin to talk at top speed. It was so funny. We laughed a lot.’

  Coming out of La Hune, I bellow at Julien, ‘Aha, you see! I didn’t lie to you about the clairvoyant! Why does the man in the shop start talking about Sagan just like that, out of the blue, without our having said anything? We were just talking about this and that, and he comes out with Françoise Sagan. You see! She’s here, she’s everywhere.’

  3 February

  For the first time in your life to see your name on the cover of a book – a cover you have so often dreamt of and imagined and that is suddenly there before your very eyes – it is not just a figment! I do not believe there is a single writer who, on seeing this, has not experienced strong, mixed feelings of aversion and fascination. For even though the cover is only an image, it is nonetheless an image that has all the potency of a deed. It is an image that says: ‘The person who wrote this is now a writer.’ Previously they were just writing, now they are a writer. They may be a good or a bad writer, that is not the issue. What does it matter? The cover of a first novel is a sacrament, the outward sign of a mysterious consecration having taken place, whereby the author now belongs to a community that he has dreamt of belonging to all his life, often since childhood.

  Françoise Sagan calls in at Rue de l’Université to see the mock-up of the cover of her book, which is going into production soon. As she parks her father’s Buick alongside René Julliard’s Cadillac, Françoise is happy. She is now beginning to live her life, having for so long dreamt of doing so – and there is no more intense pleasure to be had than that.

  The selfsame morning she has received a call from Éditions Plon. In fact Michel Déon, a reader for that publishing house and a journalist with Paris Match, thought her manuscript was terrific. But Charles Orengo, the managing director, had let three weeks go by before phoning the girl.31

  I can imagine Françoise accepting the compliments, then listening politely to the advice.

  ‘Of course … a lot of things would need to be revised … not just on the level of syntax, but also as regards the narrative structure of the book … your writing is still very immature and unsure of itself … that’s only to be expected … you’ll learn quickly … if you’re willing to do so, we’ll work on it together.’

  I am certain she takes great pleasure in letting him talk on, before admitting to him that, regrettably, she has agreed a deal elsewhere.

  When Françoise sees the mock-up of her cover with the name ‘Françoise Sagan’ on it, she smiles as she wonders: Who is this woman being credited with having written my book?

  But before long, and to the end of her life, it will be on seeing the name ‘Françoise Quoirez’ that she will experience the ‘strangest feeling of strangeness’.

  Of course, she would probably have preferred the solemn, cream-coloured style of cover favoured by Gallimard, with its red and black borders and the three letters NRF (for Nouvelle Revue Française) that seem to float like a ship on the vastness of literature, in a fount that is both exacting and sure of itself and that makes no concessions. But fate has decreed otherwise and she is going to enter in by a different door, belonging to a more recent, more business-oriented and less literary firm. Sure, it’s a lot less chic, that border in a pine-green that is only slightly fashionable, and the words ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ breaking out of the frame, as if determined to get through a window that is too small for them. The capital letters of the name JULLIARD seem to be a cheeky imitation of the capitals of GALLIMARD, like those counterfeited products that play on the resemblance between their name and the original in order to deceive the purchaser.

  But so what? thinks Françoise.

  So what?

  She is proud of herself and she knows that her book will be read.

  That’s what matters today.

  But it’s not the only thing that matters.

  What matters to her is to dash straight off to the Hôtel Rochester.

  ‘By this evening, or by tomorrow at the latest, we need five thousand blankets, three hundred large ex-American Army tents and two hundred catalytic stoves. Bring them as soon as possible to the Hôtel Rochester, 92 Rue La Boétie.’

  A baby of three months has died in the cold in Seine-Saint-Denis at the back of a disused bus where its parents spent the night. Then an old woman froze to death on the pavement of Boulevard Sébastopol. These two corpses are haunting Françoise, who wants to respond to the appeal by the abbé whom no one has ever heard of: she can at least bring pullovers and shoes that are mouldering in a cupboard in the Quoirez home.

  ‘You’ll have to wait for your mother’s permission. She’ll be back this evening,’ says Julia.

  ‘No, no, it can’t wait. I have to go now. Do you want other children to die overnight?’ retorts Françoise.

  Julia Lafon has devoted herself to the Quoirez family for twenty-three years. She is a young woman from Cajarc, the village where Françoise was born in the ancestral home at number 45 Boulevard du Tour-de-Ville.

  Cajarc and the limestone plateaux of the Lot are where it all began, an enchanting domain that must for ever remain inviolate,32 the only place where Sagan will find a little peace. But this is not something Françoise knows today. She is still too close to her childhood to cherish it; on the contrary, she wants to get away from the place at any price, not spend her holidays there any more – nowadays she finds them deadly boring. She prefers the Côte d’Azur and the joys of Hossegor. But one day soon she will realise that that land of childhood is sacred and immutable, and that nothing can substitute for games played in abandoned houses with children of her own age or tramping through fields accompanied by pets and imaginary friends.

  From the month of May, the meadows were already bowing under the weight of summer. The tall grass, limp from the heat, was leaning over, drying out and splitting right down to the earth. Further on, above the pond, hazy wisps of vapour trailed in the evening air. And the house itself, with its wrinkled pink façade – the house with its upstairs shutters closed on some secret and its downstairs French windows staring wide-eyed at some surprise – seemed like an old lady who had nodded off on the brink of succumbing to the pressure of uncertainties.33

  *

  Julia belongs to this magical land, which she left in 1931 to become cook and nanny in the Quoirez household. Her grandfather, Lucien Lafon, was a miller in one of the neighbouring villages. Julia was present at Françoise’s birth and virtua
lly raised her, reading her stories every evening, among them Monsieur Seguin’s Goat, that tale about the nanny-goat, so strong and brave, who chooses death in exchange for a day of freedom. But at the end of the story Françoise didn’t cry: she understood Monsieur Seguin’s little nanny-goat very well.

  ‘At last!’ said the poor creature, who was simply waiting for daybreak before she died. And she lay down on the ground with her beautiful white coat all stained with blood.

  Then the wolf leapt on the little goat and devoured her.

  Balancing precariously on stools and piles of books, Julia and Françoise, the one as short as the other, get up on tiptoe to slide a rectangular box down from the top of the wardrobe. It’s one of those big trunks, covered in treated black canvas and with brass studs, designed to fit on the back of cars. Françoise’s eyes open wide, as if it were the sea-chest from Treasure Island.

  But both women immediately catch their breath when they discover what is in the old trunk. Having lifted aside some pillowcases and inhaled the scent of dried-out lavender mixed with the smell of mothballs, they find a set of garments for a little child.

  It is a baby’s layette, carefully folded.

  There is an ivory rattle and a cradle medallion.

  There is a christening robe and a catalogue from the toyshop Au Nain Bleu.

  And a silver christening cup engraved with the name Maurice.

  Julia trembles from head to toe, for she knows that Françoise was never meant to see the contents of the trunk. No one has ever told her. No one has ever spoken to her of Maurice, the little boy, the baby, who died of dehydration in his cradle.

  Around Françoise everything in the room begins to spin, as she sees Julia, who is fighting back tears at the sight of the baby clothes, shut the trunk hastily and clumsily.

  For there are no real secrets in families. Secrets quietly bide their time before making themselves known. And while they patiently wait, they reveal their shapes in the silences.

  Topics that are categorically avoided, a name that everyone stumbles over, stories that are referred to in a single brisk sentence … all these conversational acrobatics result in a distorted perception of reality. The efforts of those close to us, our parents, our wife or husband, to make us blind to something that is actually there produce in our brains, through an association, not of ideas, but of silences, the outlines of a buried narrative that they are seeking to conceal. It’s the same as in that optical illusion called Kanizsa’s Triangle, where the brain produces the effect of contours that are purely subjective. In the ‘empty’ parts of the drawing, we perceive a triangular shape that is illusory but that we interpret and reconstitute in a way that renders it palpable and real. You can clearly see the triangle, even though it doesn’t exist.

  Thus Françoise was not surprised to discover a baby’s layette hidden in the trunk in her parents’ bedroom. In a sense, she had long been waiting for that moment; she had been waiting for them eventually to explain to her the reason for her night terrors and for those images that, at any moment of the day, would sometimes intrude upon her imagination. She had been waiting for the time when she would at last understand why dead children often came to haunt her and speak to her. Her discovery, instead of being painful, brought a sort of relief – how good it is to be able to put mute suffering into words, so that irrational fear may be turned into actual grief.

  Then Julia told her about the birth of Maurice, what a happy little boy he was, always smiling, and about his sudden death. They had found him lifeless in his cradle – he had stopped breathing. There was a heatwave that day. Julia wasn’t there. Who had found the child dead? Was it Marie or Suzanne? It was never very clear and no one had ever spoken of it again.

  The weeks and months following the accident had been terrible for the whole family. The Quoirez couple, normally such merry, fun-loving people who loved to organise fancy-dress dinners and play tricks on the neighbours, had opened the door of their home to despair. Life had come to a standstill, until the day that Marie had felt her breasts hard and swollen and had experienced a strong craving to eat crab and drink white wine. Those signs had always been unmistakable as far as she was concerned: she was pregnant again. She had looked at her husband and had asked him to drive her to Deauville in his Graham-Paige Sharknose convertible to eat seafood. Pierre had understood what that meant; he smiled and there were tears in his eyes.

  Marie had not envisaged having anything but another little boy, who would be in every particular like the child that had passed away, only more robust.

  She had been so sure of it that she was astonished to hear her mother exclaim, ‘It’s a girl!’ when the child was delivered, in the same room and even the same bed where she had given birth to her other three children. She turned the name she had chosen for her boy into its feminine equivalent and took the little girl in her arms. She was a tiny, sickly little thing; they would never be able to let this one out of their sight, and everybody loved her dearly, madly, excessively and they only had to approach the child for her, miraculously, to make them smile with happiness.

  And so, from her birth, it was enough for her parents to look at her living and breathing to start laughing the laughter of those who have emptied themselves of all their tears.

  Baby Françoise was allowed to do whatever she pleased. Everything was permitted. She was given every kind of gift.

  I had to teach her to type on my Remington. She was the boss’s daughter. The demands she made as a spoilt child annoyed me a bit. Seeing her at the wheel of her electric motor car or on her horse, you realised that she would always do things differently.34

  Françoise and Julia stood for a long time side by side without saying a word. Françoise was thinking of that little boy who, in a way, had accompanied her throughout her childhood like a ghostly Siamese twin. He was with her when she drove her first toy car, when she fell off her bicycle, climbed trees, played with the sheep and ran through the fields.

  Maurice had always been with her, since her birth.

  The two women tidied the things away as they had been and put the trunk back in its place. They did so in silence. Then Françoise took from her closet two warm sweaters that her mother had bought her for Christmas, the astrakhan coat that Suzanne no longer wore because it was too tight round the waist since the birth of her daughter, and two silk scarves, one of them an Hermès which her father had given her for her fifteenth birthday, a big square of material, olive-green on an off-white background, depicting four carriages designed by Hugo Grygkar. It was immaculate, no holes or tear stains and no smell about it. She had taken from her wardrobe all that was most expensive and precious and she packed it all up in a big suitcase and went off in search of a taxi.

  She said to the driver, ‘Hôtel Rochester, please.’

  ‘Well now,’ he said, ‘you’re the third person I’ve taken there since the start of my shift. If it’s still as chaotic as it was before, I’ll drop you at the corner of the Champs-Élysées.’

  And indeed, when they got to where Rue La Boétie begins, Françoise was struck by the sight of the crowd milling around and swelling that narrow street, making it like a blood-bloated limb. Some folk were laden with parcels, while others had got rid of theirs and were trying to extricate themselves from the throng; there were cars stuck in a jam, hooting their horns, there were society women whose fur coats concealed Bar suits and swirly skirts, there were nuns in their immense white wimples that were like sheets of drawing paper blowing up into the sky, department store employees who had come to drop off blankets and clothes, housewives carrying piles of sheets and workmen bringing tinned food. All these people were queuing in the cold, in front of the revolving doors of the Hôtel Rochester, over which three flags still flew.

  Suddenly Françoise hears a murmur run through the crowd, directed at a man with a beard. They are glimpsing for the first time that profile which, with its long, sparse, wispy beard, beret and pilgrim’s cape, makes him instantly recognisable
. It is Henri Grouès who, during the Resistance, took the name Pierre, and who has been nicknamed ‘Abbé’ ever since he began trying to recreate in the Paris suburbs a utopia where the weakest are helped by their fellow men. Abbé Pierre cannot get over the throng of people who have been arriving since he launched his appeal around midday.

  Very rapidly, in the hour that followed, nearly a dozen had turned up, then two dozen, and the two dozen had become hundreds; they thought it would stop at that, but in reality they were going to have to receive thousands of people and mountains of cardboard boxes in the hotel lobby, so many, in fact, that they would soon have to requisition the departure hall of the Gare d’Orsay to store it all.

  Breaking away from the crowd, a man goes up to the abbé and hands him an envelope containing a million francs in notes of ten thousand. ‘I’m ugly enough for you to recognise me again one day,’35 he says.

  But that’s not all. A few days later the young abbé is to receive an invitation to go to the Hôtel de Crillon, that old luxury hotel that looks like an office block. There, Abbé Pierre will meet a little man who is world-famous but whom he himself doesn’t know because he has never been to the cinema.

  ‘I owed you millions. I’m not donating them, I’m giving them back. They belong to the tramp I used to be and whom I have come to personify. It’s only right,’ he will explain, handing him a cheque for two million francs. It is Charlie Chaplin.

  When she gets back home late that afternoon, Françoise shuts herself in her room. She doesn’t want to see her parents, or her brother or sister, all of whom are bound together by the life they had before she was born and by a secret they have been sharing for eighteen years. How could they have convinced her that they loved her more than anything, that she was their favourite child and adored sister, and have lied like that? Françoise is breathing the air of her new life and, to prove it, she lights up a Chesterfield – it’s the first time she has smoked alone. The gestures involved are strange, almost unreal, but the smoke she exhales as she looks at herself in the mirror in her childhood bedroom is like theatrical fog, a prop that emphasises her new richer life and self. Françoise Quoirez observes the gestures Françoise Sagan makes as she smokes: she notes the femininity in the turn of the wrist and her manner of tilting her chin to bring the end of the filter to her lips, lowering her eyelids a little while doing so, just like those baby dolls with their plastic eyelashes which blink when you lay them down.