Sagan, Paris 1954

by Anne Berest

  That is how Françoise appears in my imagination – for I have never read anywhere that she went to the Hôtel Rochester in response to Abbé Pierre’s appeal. I have no evidence for it, but I cannot see how her generous heart could have done anything else or done it otherwise. As for the discovery concerning Maurice, I can only imagine how that too would have been, for she never referred to it in her books, still less in interviews, which she was adept at managing so that little was revealed.36

  ‘Did she talk to you about her dead brother?’

  ‘No, never,’ replies Florence.

  ‘But did you know about him?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I found out when I read a biography of her.’

  ‘I can understand that a family, especially of that era, might surround the death of a child with the deepest secrecy. But what I find strange, and what I cannot grasp, is that she, who always spoke so freely and had a love of truth, never shared that tragic story, not even with her closest friends.’

  ‘You have to understand that it was indeed a different era. And then, it’s Françoise we’re dealing with.’

  15 February

  I have written nothing for ten days. I just can’t progress. The springs are dry. Nothing flows from my fingers. It’s like when you are playing at dice and the numbers that come up drive you to despair.

  I was supposed to be writing a scene dated 15 February 1954 and set in the Café de Flore where, in a corner, while Françoise is getting tired of waiting for her book to appear, Boris Vian is writing a song, ‘The Deserter’. Pierre Herbart would be sitting beside him. But I haven’t the strength of mind for it, nor the inclination.

  How am I to make up for these lost hours? I won’t make up for them. Suddenly, and for the first time, I am struggling with this book. I am afraid that Françoise will abandon me if I don’t work hard enough. I must take fresh heart and reconnect with her.

  17 February

  At 170 Boulevard de Magenta, among the neo-Egyptian columns of the Louxor cinema, its cobalt-blue mosaics interspersed with gold scarabs, cobras and heads of pharaohs, I see Françoise at a showing of Si Versailles m’était Conté. She is sitting uncomfortably in her Girl Guide-style skirt, a skirt that she will never ever wear again.

  Sacha Guitry’s latest film has just come out in cinemas and it’s quite an event. Not only has there never been such an expensive film, but it has been shot at Versailles and it brings together all the best-known actors of the day, as well as a young starlet who plays Mademoiselle de Rosille, the mistress of Louis XV: Brigitte Bardot. Sacha Guitry wanted an actress who would ‘not cost much’ to play in a scene opposite Jean Marais. Brigitte is the same age as Françoise, just a few months older. Her face has appeared on the front cover of Elle. She is only eighteen but, already, her marriage to a Russian with an unpronounceable name has been reported in the papers – she too has had to ask her parents’ permission.

  Françoise Sagan looks at Brigitte Bardot’s huge bust on the screen for, in truth, that’s all you see when she appears in the film in her virginal white satin gown. Françoise thinks of her own breasts which are small, so very small. What must it feel like to have a big bust? That’s an important question, a nagging question, that generations of girls will carry on asking.

  I take pleasure in imagining the paths of these two girls crossing there: they have so much in common, being two girls from the bourgeoisie who will decide to enjoy the bodies that have been constructed for them, bodies schooled in classical dance, in riding and in the discipline that goes with wealthy neighbourhoods. Once launched on postwar French society, these two children will overturn all the rules, will fascinate men and seduce youth.

  But on that day, 17 February 1954, they are not yet of any consequence, or barely so.

  Brigitte Bardot is just another pin-up, whom Jean Gabin is shortly to refer to as ‘that thing that walks around stark naked’. In the same vein, one day not too far off, the critic Étiemble will write of ‘the twin evils of our time, Coca-Cola and Françoise Sagan’.37 Both girls are promises of things to come, from the same background, a French bourgeoisie that is traditional yet given to whimsy. Their mothers are alike, being women who love to be surrounded by company, who love to dress well, wear big hats, drink champagne, spend their holidays in the mountains and forget about wartime restrictions as quickly as they possibly can.

  Françoise and Brigitte are two distantly related cousins living in a France that is ready to pin a bad reputation on them, to reproach them for being what they are. They shall be called to account. For, whether they like it or not, the wheels of destiny have begun to turn. There is nothing they can do any more to stop them from turning. They will learn to their cost that it is never a good idea to be women by whom scandal comes.38

  For the girls of their generation, Françoise Sagan and Brigitte Bardot blaze the trail to freedom and sexual emancipation, but they are also, conversely, a weapon to be turned against their own side. They are two children who are used in order to terrorise women, French women, the women of the Resistance, those lone women who have had to take risks, who have had to work, who have been arrested – some of them – and tortured, while others among them have had their heads shaved to pay the price for France’s wrongdoing. Women, through force of circumstance, have become the foot-soldiers of everyday life and now it is really time for them to step back into line, to deal with children and household tasks. Those middle-aged women, their bodies worn out by pregnancies, who have had to assume power wherever there was a power vacuum, are today laying claim to their desires, not in the realm of sexuality, but in the realm of their own identity. An overwhelmingly masculine society is going to curb their aspirations by terrorising them with their own children, with girls who are incorrigible and free and whose bodies are unassailable.

  21 February

  I had lunch with Louis in the little Japanese restaurant on Rue Mazarine where he joins me, since I am working all day in the library of the Institute. He has grown a moustache for the part of Jacques de Bascher which he is to play in a film.

  I say to myself: Louis is immersed in the sixties and I’m immersed in the fifties, each of us in our own way acting out the life of someone else. All of a sudden I look at Louis and I realise that, because of that one thing, because of my unhappiness in love, I have completely forgotten, rejected and discarded the Louis who, in 1954, was dear to the heart of Françoise.

  At the time, Louis Neyton is her boyfriend. They write letters to each other because he is studying in Grenoble. He is one of her brother Jacques’s friends and eleven years her senior.

  The writer and biographer Jean-Claude Lamy, who was Françoise’s great friend, is kind enough to come and see me to talk about her. He refers to the love affair at length.

  ‘She liked tall men, the quite lanky sort.’

  ‘What did she think when she read your biography of her?’

  ‘She glanced through it, like this’ – he pretends to be someone flicking through a book absent-mindedly – ‘and then she said simply, “It’s funny, it’s as if it were the story of someone I don’t really know.”’

  I must, of course, immerse myself in the account of that love affair. I ought to find the letters that she wrote to him dejectedly: ‘I’m lonely, I’m far from you.’ I ought to reinstate Louis Neyton in my book. I believe that Françoise uses this idealised lover as a means of passing the time; wearing her jersey-wool dressing gown, she likes to nibble the croissants she has bought in Rue Jouffroy, all the while reflecting that she has a smitten lover somewhere who sends her love letters.39 The Françoise of 1954 is no rebel: she dreams of having a family, a girl and a boy, and a husband. On the other hand, she likes to flirt, to have fun and to make love freely, before the time comes for stepping back into line. In short, she asserts the right to enjoy the same kind of youth as a boy, which, for a girl, is indecorous. You might even say scandalous.

  What’s more, today Françoise has a date with Louis, who has come to spend
three days in Paris. But before they meet up, she must go to Bourdin the printer’s, to be there for the production of her book. Now there’s something to make her heart beat a bit faster. She knows that she will be bowled over when she sees her words typeset on the big Linotype machines in a noisy room filled with the acrid smell of ink, where dozens of women tap away on the keys of gigantic typewriters, just as in the scene from The Man Who Loved Women in which Charles Denner, noticing one of the typists wearing a blue dress, asks her, ‘Is it still possible to change something?’

  ‘Yes,’ the young woman replies.

  ‘Make the dress blue. I’d like it to be blue.’

  All those words written one after another, those hundreds of thousands of letters typed one after another, are making her giddy. What if she never managed to write again? wonders Françoise. And what if it were the only book she succeeded in seeing through to the end? It’s a question that all writers ask themselves: will they be able to start again? If not, it would be terrible, she’s well aware of that, for she will never be able to do anything else in life and, anyway, it’s all she has ever wanted to do since she could walk and hold a pen. She began by writing plays full of bloodied knights and captive queens that bored her mother to death, and then poems. Next, she wrote short stories, which she sent to the editor of France-Soir, but they were never accepted, never published. She also remembers that, when she was thirteen, one summer in Cajarc, she wrote a short novel that began with a dreadful car accident. She had called the heroine Lucile Saint-Léger, a name that she will later give to the heroine of La Chamade.

  The novel opened with a car going into a skid. Lucile Saint-Léger was in it. The car overturned on her and the radio went on playing. And that’s where it ended.40

  Written when she was young, it was a novel full of premonitions. That’s the problem with books, you must pay attention to what you put in them: they always catch up with you in the end. Don’t ever nurture that secret dream of living a storybook life. Your dream might come true and then you would discover how tragic it is to become a character in a story.

  This evening Françoise has a date with Louis Neyton. The young man rings the doorbell of the family apartment around 6.30 p.m., as decorum requires.

  Pierre Quoirez opens the door.

  ‘May I spirit your daughter away to dinner, Monsieur?’

  ‘Offer accepted, on just one condition: that you NEVER bring her back!’41

  And Louis Neyton understands the joke as he sees Françoise walk up, smiling and pulling on a pair of grey gloves that she will take off as soon as they get to Louis’s hotel room near the Gare de Lyon, and Louis, my Louis, comes into my bed. We do not make love, we do not even exchange a kiss, but we talk together softly, calling each other by the ridiculous pet names of the past, my Louis, gentle as rainfall and better than anyone at making you laugh, and we fall asleep wrapped in the serenity of those far-off days and a youthful love affair.

  1 March

  At the kiosk in Avenue Marceau, Françoise has bought her mother the latest issue of Le Nouveau Fémina, which is just out.

  The previous day, Pierre and Marie Quoirez had dinner with friends in Boulogne-Billancourt. When they arrived in the building where their hosts lived, they went to the wrong floor. Pierre entered the flat of the downstairs neighbours shouting, ‘Here I come galloping, galloping, galloping in!’ while pretending to be a rider on his horse. But when he got to the far end of the hallway and saw the bewildered faces of a couple in their pyjamas, he went back in the direction he had come from, shouting even more loudly, ‘And off I go galloping, galloping, galloping out!’42 There was laughter all round at this anecdote, the dinner was truly hilarious and the wine flowed. Naturally, Pierre and Marie’s friends were curious to have news of the budding author: ‘And when is Suzanne’s book coming out?’ ‘Oh, no, it’s Françoise who has written a book.’ ‘At her age? It can’t be!’ ‘Have you read it? Does she mention you in it? Do you think she’ll be awarded the Prix Goncourt?’

  Looking back the next morning, Marie is vexed at having had to reply to the stupid, nosy questions of their acquaintances. If only she knew what lay in store for her!

  For the moment, she has sent her daughter out into the cold of that first day of March to buy her magazine, prior to explaining to her that it might be better if she were to consider returning to classes at the Sorbonne. She can’t keep just padding around in circles like a lion in a cage.

  *

  ‘You know, when your book comes out, you might have a few signing sessions in bookshops but, after that, you’ll have to have something to occupy yourself with. What are you going to do between now and the holidays? I really can’t stand having you under my feet all day long any more.’

  ‘I’m going to write another book.’

  ‘Write another book! But you could do both, study and write, like Simone de Beauvoir,’ Marie says with a sigh, before starting to read an article entitled ‘Mademoiselle Chanel is Back’ that Jean Cocteau has written for Le Nouveau Fémina.

  The doorbell rings. Yet Marie is not expecting anyone.

  Françoise has forgotten to tell her parents. Her publisher’s press office has sent over a photographer whose job it is to take the shots that are to be used in ‘promoting’ the book.

  Standing at the door is a very small woman, her hair styled like a child whose mother has tried to flatten a too thick mop. Beneath her raincoat she wears a black suit with sloping shoulders, and she has a a Rolleiflex slung across her chest.

  Sabine Weiss is thirty but looks ten years younger. She doesn’t look much, yet she is one of the most gifted photographers of her generation.

  Françoise was not at all expecting to see a wayward schoolgirl turn up in the guise of a photographer – they could easily be the same age, and this young woman is doing a man’s job, which both mother and daughter are impressed by.

  ‘Have you been a photographer for long?’

  ‘I have always taken photographs of things. My father taught me when I was a child. Would you mind if we went and had a look together at the different places where we could set ourselves up?’

  ‘Of course not. I thought we could go into the study.’

  ‘Yes, if you like.’

  ‘Did you always want to be a photographer?’

  ‘I bought my first camera with my pocket money when I was twelve.’

  ‘Shall I sit here, like this, at the typewriter?’

  ‘Yes, that’s good. There’s natural light. Just act as if I wasn’t here.’

  ‘You must be joking. I couldn’t! You are here.’

  ‘Wait, that won’t do. I don’t know why, but it looks ridiculous. Is this where you wrote your book?’

  ‘No, it’s my father’s study.’

  ‘So where did you write your book then?’

  ‘Oh … in lots of places … in cafés to start with, a lot of it in bed … and also lying on the floor.’

  ‘We’ll try that. Here, show me. Lie down just like when you were writing your book.’

  ‘So, like this.’

  ‘You see, all I have to do is to come across an authentic situation for the camera to tell me it’s just right and I can take the photograph.’

  I have spent a long time, a very long time, looking at that photograph of Françoise Sagan. I have studied the whiteness of her wrist, the bone that sticks out like a lump, her delicate hands, like those of a Botticelli Virgin, her boyish hairstyle whose rather rumpled state indicates the offhandedness of the girl – she has not even given it ‘a quick comb’ – and her sensuous, jaded pose, accentuated by one of those velvet cushions on which newborn babies get photographed.

  It is a touching photograph. Françoise appears particularly pretty in it. (I have read several times that she was not ‘photogenic’ and that pictures of her do not do justice to the grace and charm that radiated from her face.) It’s a photograph taken before the unleashing of the storm, before the madness that was to come. When I see pictur
es of today’s writers, I wonder why I find them to have less ‘depth’ and be less enigmatic than those of earlier writers who have so captured my imagination.

  Browsing Sabine Weiss’s website, I discover that one can send her an email.

  I write her the following message:

  Hello.

  I am a writer currently working on a book about Françoise Sagan and the year 1954.

  You photographed her for the publication of her book Bonjour Tristesse. I would like to talk to you about that.

  Thank you,

  Anne Berest

  I am hoping that she will get back to me soon. Anyway, today I received two other replies.

  Florence Malraux phoned to say that she liked the first few pages of my book and that she would encourage me to go on with it.

  And Julien, to whom I had given the opening section of my manuscript, sends the following text message: