Sagan, Paris 1954

by Anne Berest

  It’s good. Carry on with it. Except for the scene where René Julliard reads the manuscript. It’s pure kitsch, like something out of Labiche.

  He is right, I am going to have to look at that part again, but not straight away. This evening I have decided to ‘live like a boy’.

  I make a few phone calls, to this person and that, to find out the whereabouts of any parties in town, what’s on offer, just as in the past when we used to go out every night and Paris belonged to us.

  The shape of the evening quickly emerges: drinks in a studio behind the Cité Universitaire, followed by a party at the house of an American actor in the eighth arrondissement, all ending up, no doubt, in a fashionable nightclub. It is such a long time since I have done that kind of thing and I think back to the words of the clairvoyant: ‘may your drinking make her tipsy … Let yourself go … Let her enjoy some final moments through you.’

  In the crowd I notice the colour of his hair first of all. I glimpse him in a corner of the kitchen at the American actor’s; the actor himself isn’t there and probably doesn’t know that his impressive town house near Avenue Foch has been taken over by about a hundred people.

  It is the colour of a child’s hair, so blond that it is almost white, with a blondness that is redolent of holidays by the sea, of August, of sun mingled with salt; it’s a blondness that children lose as their childhood morphs into adolescence and then, with adulthood, it is no more.

  For a long time I find it hard to look at him properly because the whiteness of his skin, accentuated by the black of his beauty spots, like small, shiny insects that have landed on his face, disturbs me.

  I am disconcerted.

  Because I have never, never before experienced what is coursing through my body at this moment. It is what a man may experience when he comes face to face with a girl, that powerful sensation of being in thrall to a face; you are on your knees, you have lost the battle and you know it.

  ‘Shall we go back to my place?’

  Yes, yes. How could I say no? I do believe it is Françoise replying for me, and we find ourselves in a taxi, Françoise, the young man and I. I assess the situation: he must be almost ten years younger than me. Obviously it has never bothered me when it has been the other way round, but this time I want to sink into the recesses of the back seat, melt into the upholstery, vanish into the green glow of the traffic lights. We get to his place. I am not so much walking as creeping along behind that soft, pale colouring of his, which is offset by the powerfulness of his man’s body. I am aware already that I will never tire of looking at these things. I have never known anything like it in my life. I have lost all sense of myself, as if overwhelmed by a picture or a landscape.

  It’s a student bedsit that I crawl into, with course documents spread over the floor, earplugs, scribbled post-it notes on the wall, books scattered here and there. We are drunk; I tell him that I am planning to cut my hair to rid myself of a few bad memories along with it. ‘Let’s go for it,’ he replies, seizing a pair of kitchen scissors, and all at once six inches of my long tresses, last cut when I was a teenager, fall, while day breaks and a ray of sunlight creeps over the carpet to what has been scalped, Red Indian style, and suddenly seems to catch fire. And I leave; we won’t have exchanged kisses this morning. I set off in search of a Métro station. Lost in Rue de Lisbonne, I travel south, towards the Mediterranean, towards the very special green of umbrella pines. I’m broke, I haven’t a bean. I look at the façades of the buildings, the green plants on the balconies. I am surprised at how light my skull feels; my fingers seek the vanished tresses. I realise that I do not even have the boy’s telephone number, nor his surname – and I stop short in front of the blue street-name sign and I smile as I think of Françoise, for here I am at the corner of Boulevard Malesherbes; she would be delighted to see me in this dishevelled condition, so I push her gently away from me. Françoise, don’t start getting me up to all sorts of things; let’s go back to 1954 when you were still only a more or less good little girl and not yet a model of offhandedness – I’m not ready for that.

  So we both go back to that first day of March, to the exact time, that terrible moment, when the first American hydrogen bomb explodes in the Pacific over Bikini Atoll.

  5 March

  How will she get through those days of waiting? She knows what to do at night. It’s always easy to fill the nights. But it’s different during the day; everyone is busy with their own activities – Florence is in her office at Gallimard, Véronique is at lectures at the university and her brother Jacques has gone back to work in London.

  So Françoise goes for walks around Paris, since she still has ten long days to wait until her book appears in the shops and something happens at last.

  She walks along the paths in the Luxembourg Gardens, where the chairs sit all alone in the cold, so thin that they look like bones, like skeletons of chairs. Going up Rue Soufflot towards the Panthéon, she meets a man delivering Valstar beers – ‘bottled and pasteurised’ – at the Kentucky Club.

  Françoise loves walking in Paris and watching the knife-sharpener and the porters transporting calves’ heads go past, watching men working on the roofs and black Citroën Tractions leaving the factory.

  She is used to dawdling like this: at the age of twelve she was expelled from the Louise-de-Bettignies School, but she did not tell Pierre and Marie. She kept the disgrace of her expulsion secret – instead she happened to be a little poorly and they dosed her with vegetable broth and an infusion of thyme, and applied a camphor liniment.

  For three months, from April until the school holidays, the little twelve-year-old Françoise set off in the morning with her satchel on her back. But instead of turning into the school courtyard, she went off at a tangent. For three months a little girl gave her parents to believe that she was going to school. But the truth was that she was walking around Paris until it was evening. Of Sagan’s entire life, with all its outrageousness, I think that what surprises me most, and what I most admire, is this: that a little girl of twelve could spend entire weeks roaming around Paris without her parents realising and without being afraid herself.

  It is more incredible than the millions of books sold, the fortunes spent, the carry-ons in casinos, the passionate love affairs: that small girl is my heroine. How I love little girls – they delight me, they fascinate me, I envy them for still being like boys, without curves or bleeding, yet with all the strength that women have. I do believe that there is nothing more potent, more monstrously potent, than a little girl of twelve.

  Six years on, and Françoise Quoirez is still a vagabond, a bluffer and a free spirit, in a state of transition, not quite Sagan, but those are the same feet on the same pavements; the shadow she casts has barely changed; her breasts are scarcely discernible and her hips have not grown much wider.

  Françoise draws up a wish list: one day she will earn so much money from her books that she will put banknotes in a hatbox for her friends to be able to help themselves without having the embarrassment of asking her.

  She hopes that one day the President of the Republic will come and have lunch with her in secret, to gain a little respite from the crushing obligations of power. They will talk literature and share society gossip.

  She dreams that one day she will be paid to write columns about New York and Venice. She will spend evenings in smoke-filled restaurants talking to men who, like her, will be writing books.

  She will meet the writers she admires, Jean-Paul Sartre, Carson McCullers and even Tennessee Williams, and they will become not just admired elders, but true friends. She will move into a hotel so that she can drink cocktails and not have to make her bed.

  One day she will earn enough money never to have to think about money again.

  She dreams of a life as flamboyant as Colette’s: Colette who danced naked except for a panther skin, who drove men and women mad, whose companions were princesses and very young men with the same taste on their lips, the red taste of
delirious love, luscious as a cherry, who went to Saint-Tropez, that sunny little port that no one knew, and spent happy days there on holiday; Colette who did not take herself seriously and whom nobody, therefore, took seriously; Colette the ghostwriter, robbed by her husband, Colette-Zelda; Colette displaying her white breasts in photographs, magnificent breasts as soft as children; Colette whose name was ‘Sidonie-Gabrielle’ which, if you listen carefully, has within it the music of ‘Sagan’.

  Rereading Gigi, I am struck by the following description of Gilberte, which seems to me to describe, word for word, Françoise’s appearance in 1954: ‘She looked like an archer, or an unyielding angel, or a boy in skirts; she rarely looked like a girl.’

  7 March

  At last it’s a day when something happens, for Françoise and also for me.

  Her books have arrived at the press office in Rue de l’Université.

  A postcard has arrived at my door as if by magic, with a few words from the young man.

  I spend a long time looking at the card. I have placed it on my sofa near the window and I wonder what it is doing in my home. I can’t reply to it, nor do I even want to. Better quite simply to act as if none of it had happened: the night without sleep, the postcard.

  I am going to get back to work. I am going to get back to writing. I am going to reconnect with Françoise. I envisage her arriving late at her publisher’s; René Julliard had been expecting her much earlier in the course of the morning. She doesn’t realise how long it takes to sign books and write the dedications as required by the press office.

  On the desk, piles of books are set out in rows, one behind the other – it’s highly impressive. They have round them a red promotional wrapper bearing the words ‘Devil in the Heart’, in reference to the book by Raymond Radiguet which, ten years previously, had been a huge success.

  No one has asked her opinion of the wrapper. Françoise is not sure that she likes it very much, for she knows only too well what it means. Of course, she understands that they want the media to highlight her age but she can already predict the consequences of such a legacy: the sarcasm, the false comparisons, the readers who will be annoyed by the analogy. At the very worst, the comparison won’t hold up and at best she will be called ‘a Radiguet in petticoats’.

  But there is nothing she can say or do about it. The process of letting go is under way. The book does not belong to her any more, she barely still belongs to herself.

  She has been practising her new signature, ‘Françoise Sagan’. The Françoise bit is easy enough to write, but Sagan looks different every time – it’ll come.

  René Julliard explains in detail the ins and outs of signing books, for you don’t address a journalist from La Dépêche in the same way as you would François Mauriac of Le Figaro or the members of the Académie Française as a whole. Françoise rolls her eyes: could she not write the same thing to everyone? It would be much simpler. At this point, René Julliard starts to laugh and agrees that she can write ‘avec toute ma sympathie’ to all. It is a dedication she will continue to use until her trip to America, where, after a whole day spent writing ‘with all my sympathy’ for readers who react with either amusement or discomfiture, she finally has it explained to her that ‘in English it means “with my deepest condolences”’.43

  When, with a numb hand and heavy wrist, Françoise escapes to breathe the cold air of the outside world, night has descended over Paris. But, in truth, she has put her heart and soul into the task, for example in her dedication to Colette: ‘To Madame Colette, with the prayer that this book will give her one hundredth of the pleasure that hers have given me. Respectfully, Françoise Sagan.’44

  Suddenly she is struck by the thought of all those books that are going to wend their way through the streets and arrive in people’s letter boxes, at concierges’ lodges, on Parisian doormats. There’s no going back: in a few hours the first readers will be opening the book by a young unknown called Françoise Sagan and will be deciding, after just the first few lines or pages, whether to carry on reading – or not.

  There is nothing for it but to light a cigarette (it has become a habit now, smoking alone), cross the road, walk a little distance to call in to see ‘Flo’ in her office at Gallimard and ask her to come and have a beer (not a shandy). Opposite the front door of the prestigious publishing house a woman has dropped off to sleep in a car. Françoise recognises her by her red lipstick and her Buddha-like eyelids. Françoise had so liked the sense of torpor in the woman’s latest book, the noxiously torrid heat of The Little Horses of Tarquinia, and she ought to have been daring enough to tell her so, but Queen Marguerite, asleep, presents the radiant face of a drowned maiden whom one would not dare disturb.

  ‘Love does not take holidays,’ he said, ‘that just does not happen. You have got to live out your love entirely, with its tedium and everything else. There can be no holiday from that.’45

  Whenever Françoise meets Florence, she knows that something is bound to happen, because her friend is like a heroine in a novel: events will always come rushing to throw themselves at her feet.

  Sitting in the lobby of Gallimard while the young woman receptionist goes off down the corridors to look for Florence, Françoise smiles. Just a few months ago they were two schoolgirls in scratchy skirts, yet today one of them works for Gallimard and the other is waiting for her book to come out. Gradually, like a drum roll getting louder, she becomes aware of her heart beating beneath her dress and is surprised to find strange thoughts occurring to her. She is suddenly aware that a certain destiny awaits her, a destiny that will be both cruel and exciting. She ‘sees’ the whole of her life to come, just as in the past, on one miraculous day, she saw the book that she was to write.46

  Françoise thinks back to Florence’s eighteenth birthday some months before. That day, her father, André Malraux, had summoned her to say, ‘Get it into your head that the boys who will hang around you will be doing so in order to gain access to me.’

  And the girl, with her soft curves and bright open face, had replied to him quite simply, ‘Perhaps it will also be because I’m quite attractive.’47

  There is so much that is effortlessly attractive about her that individuals, both men and women, are affected by her and charmed by her, without being able to explain exactly why.

  ‘I think I liked listening to people,’ Florence tells me, ‘even when they weren’t saying anything. Michel Leiris would often come to my windowless little office at Gallimard. He would sit down opposite me without a word and could stay like that for an hour, or two hours. To my mind he was just looking for a bit of peace. I was impressed by him. I had loved Manhood. I got on especially well with Jean Genet. Sometimes, when I arrived back after the lunch break, I would find a little note from him on my table: “When can you call by so that we can have a bit of a laugh?” It was an era of fantastic, unexpected encounters and Françoise loved to come and see me at the office. When she became famous through her book, Gaston Gallimard would always say to me, “Right, do what you can to bring her over to me” … but they had missed the boat.’

  Yes, Françoise loves hanging about at Gallimard, and all her life will love the distinctive atmosphere in publishing houses. Now here comes Florence, smiling at her friend who has been waiting for her patiently, her head slightly tilted to one side, as usual.

  ‘So, how was it at the press office?’ she asks.

  ‘My wrist is knackered. I think I’ve signed two hundred tons’ worth of books. But it would be churlish to complain.’

  Florence laughingly puts her two lovely little hands up to Françoise’s ear and whispers, ‘We’re invited to dinner at Dionys and Marguerite’s. I said I was bringing a friend.’

  Their cheeks glow rosy from that feeling, so joyful and childish, that signals the beginning of one’s golden age, that all-too-brief period between childhood and adulthood. Having waited for a long time in the wings, you are at last stepping out onto the stage of your life.

 
; The girls arrive at number 5 Rue Saint-Benoît around 8 p.m. Marguerite Duras had moved into that street, with the Café de Flore on the corner as its magnificent portal, in 1943. She lived there with her first husband, Robert Antelme, then with the father of her son, Dionys Mascolo, but the three of them spend most of their time together, lunching on the terrace of Le Petit Saint-Benoît, a restaurant which is still there in its folksy decor of red-and-white check – it’s not clear whether this is just a relic of bygone days or whether it has been done up to look picturesque. Françoise and Florence have bought a bottle of red wine there and are excited by the idea of spending an evening with writers from the Gallimard stable. Florence knows that she’ll be seeing Edgar Morin, her wartime friend, but they will also meet the writers Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Italo Calvino or, even, Francis Ponge and Maurice Blanchot, for Marguerite and Dionys have taken the words of Friedrich Hölderlin as their household motto: ‘The life of the mind shared with friends and the thoughts that arise through exchanges both written and spoken are necessary to those who seek.’48

  It’s ‘the Rue Saint-Benoît gang’ as, later, people will say ‘the Sagan gang’. The latter will not have a quotation as its emblem, nor any literary – still less political – aim. But in my view a gang is a gang, and gangs always come together for the same reason: to fight a common enemy, be it capitalism or boredom.

  Marguerite Duras’s apartment is nothing like any of the adults’ apartments that Françoise is used to visiting. It is a kind of physical representation of the writer’s thought: entering it is as if you were entering her memory. There are the two pairs of scissors hanging from a nail on the wall, fully opened, because open scissors allow you to find things that have been lost. There are newspapers, lots of them, books, objects acquired here and there and carefully conserved, for each one of them represents a world, and who cares whether or not they ‘go together’? There are photographs stuck on the mirror above the mantelpiece, unframed, lipsticks and bottles of perfume, the imposing typewriter, strange pictures, coloured textiles, cushions faded by the sun, a wickerwork lamp, wooden toys belonging to Outa, the red notebook with recipes in it called ‘The Lorry Notebook’; and the aroma of coffee beans roasted in the frying pan envelops all these objects in a warm nimbus.