Sagan, Paris 1954

by Anne Berest

  We are as embarrassed as young newlyweds on the first evening of their honeymoon. You just can’t avoid the bed, which takes up the whole room. However, we manage to act as if everything were perfectly normal by checking that we have our identity cards for getting into the casino.

  I put on a dress when I get out of the shower; our belongings are all mixed up on the bed, our gestures are gradually becoming more relaxed and flowing and I am experiencing that excitement mingled with childish joy which I have not known for several months.

  Once we get to the gaming room – not the room with the one-armed bandits, but where the ‘tables’ are – I have to exchange my money for chips. I settle down to blackjack, for roulette still makes a big impression on me and I daren’t sit down at that. What is truly exciting in this place is the ceremonial aspect, the rules. Everyone is where they should be and plays their role as required. I can hear the sound of hundreds of roulette chips tumbling and each time it is as if something is shattering. The young man shows me how to play and straight away we have a win. Intoxicated by the champagne and by our success, we walk back in the direction of our pretty room with its toile de Jouy. Beginner’s luck, they say. Walking through the empty streets of Deauville by night, after the day spent in his company, I wonder how this boy can be so detached from his own beauty, as if he were unaware of its existence. How can he be so indifferent to his own sharp – almost violently-so – qualities.

  At around seven o’clock in the morning I slide noiselessly out of the bed that has become our bed. I can’t sleep, and it’s because of that skin, which is different in texture from the skin I have slept up against for years.

  I am going to take a walk in the hotel, hoping to find an echo of Françoise’s footsteps somewhere here. I am in that state of bliss that follows when you have conquered love.

  It’s Sunday morning and no one is awake, apart from a man near the conservatory, whom I catch sight of from behind and who is drinking coffee and looking out at the garden. He is wearing a suit jacket in grey wool and his shirt collar is up, but just on one side. He is sitting quite still and appears to be absorbed in whatever it is he can see. I bend down to get a glimpse of what exactly might be happening outside, but there is nothing, nothing at all. I go round the breakfast buffet to get a rather better view of his face, or at least his profile. I am impelled by that curiosity I have about people in restaurants who take lunch or dinner alone – for that is one of my own most prized luxuries, being alone and able to listen in to the conversations going on nearby.

  I recognise him immediately. The incongruousness of the situation gives me licence to go and speak to him, the fact that he should be sitting there alone in this place. And that I should be up, and alone too, at the same time as him. It is all very strange.

  ‘May I join you to drink my coffee? I know, it’s very early, but we don’t have to talk …’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you. When I get back to Paris I shall be able to say that I had breakfast with you in Deauville.’

  ‘What are you doing here, and so early?’

  ‘I am trying to cure my depression,’ I say, laughing.

  ‘You don’t seem at all depressed.’

  ‘I am, I assure you, terribly so. I am in the middle of a divorce. But meeting you has cheered me up. It’s a great pleasure for me.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And what are you doing here, and so early?’

  ‘I’m on the jury of a film festival.’

  ‘I see. Do you enjoy that?’

  ‘Yes. It makes a change. It gets me out of my rut.’

  ‘Are you writing anything at the moment?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘A new biography?’

  ‘Err … no, not exactly.’

  ‘When I was little, there was a copy of Cherokee on my parents’ bookshelf and I don’t know why, but the cover fascinated me, and the title, and your name – all those vowels surrounded by unusual consonants. But I’m sorry, I said I wouldn’t talk and I’m rambling on. Anyway, I’m going back upstairs to bed. Apologies for having disturbed you but, although I can’t explain why – it would take too long – meeting you this morning has been very special for me. It’s like a sign, you see, a sign of encouragement that gives me the strength to do all the things I still have to do.’

  And Jean Echenoz bids me goodbye, with a lock of hair falling over his large forehead and those washed-out blue eyes that have known all epochs. I am going back to Paris having, for the first time in my life, gambled in a casino, having for the first time spent a night with a man other than the father of my daughter and having met Jean Echenoz.

  And it is all thanks to Françoise. I haven’t forgotten my young friend from 1954. I continue to look at the calendar of that year, and write my book, while hers, every day, sells a few more copies.

  Jacques Chardonne, a writer of the so-called ‘Hussard’ group, who was not exactly well-disposed to young women, nor indeed to the human race, wrote the following letter to Roger Nimier:

  This week I read Françoise Sagan’s novel. That girl comes from a good family, the family of great writers. There’s no mistaking it, it’s as plain as the colour of a person’s eyes and the texture of their skin. It makes one’s heart jump for joy. Talent is a unique thing; it has to be excellent in every particular, radiant, sharp and unblemished. One either loves the talent or is indifferent to it. If you love it, you do so boundlessly. And love like that arises from the exercise of rigorous judgement.51

  24 May

  More than 8,000 copies of Bonjour Tristesse have been sold by this date.

  Dien Bien Phu has fallen.

  The red flag with the gold star has been planted in the French camp – it is the beginning of the end for the colonial empire.

  For Françoise, too, it’s the beginning of the end, that is, if you accept the dictum of Madame de Staël: ‘Glory is the dazzling funeral of happiness.’

  Françoise is in something of a fix: an American, who does not exactly appeal to her but who does not leave her totally cold either, has offered to take her to Senlis, in the Oise, near the Forest of Chantilly. He is a poet and his friends are organising a Bal nègre like there used to be in the bar of the same name before the war, at 33 Rue Blomet, in the fifteenth arrondissement. Everything will be organised as it used to be by their sassy elders, with ’ti-punch cocktails, orgiastic dances and a few notes of the beguine to evoke the West Indies. Dancing, laughing and drinking: the very thought is enough to thrill Françoise. But, most thrilling of all, the American is to take her to Senlis on a motorbike, a Honda JC Benly with a 125-horsepower, four-stroke engine, based on the engine of the Dream, seldom seen in France – and what’s more, he dresses like Marlon Brando, the actor in the recently released film that everyone is talking about, in a white T-shirt and a Perfecto leather jacket, which to her mind is both ridiculous and exciting.

  Françoise very nearly got to drive the Honda, like in The Wild Ones; there were only two votes in it. But at six o’clock precisely she received a phone call from her publisher telling her to put on an evening dress, a string of pearls and her mother’s gloves, and be ready for the party that would be held that evening in her honour. She was the lucky winner of the Prix des Critiques. Françoise was, of course, delighted for her publisher, who set such great store by prizes, and she was flattered to have been selected for a distinction with so much prestige attached. But she heaved a sigh: so that was what success meant, a long series of obligations.

  The jury for the Prix des Critiques is made up of sixteen men, one of whom is a woman – and even she has a man’s name – who are going to join hands and form a circle, with the girl in the middle, and then whirl round her in a dance that no one will ever be able to stop. Let us break into that circle to be a little part of it. Let us too join hands with them to discover who these gentlemen are who are frivolous enough to award the crown to a little girl, which they do, perhaps, in a spirit
of challenge or provocation. Whatever the truth of the matter, these are not men who were born yesterday, no, they were formed in the First World War; these are men who have seen other men die, who have fought on the field of battle; some have been in the Resistance; they are men who have held the dead in their arms. Émile Henriot served in the dragoon regiment during the Great War; a journalist, a man of letters and a writer, it is he who coined the expression ‘Nouveau Roman’. He is now sixty-five. Gabriel Marcel is exactly the same age and, similarly, has a moustache, though his is a flowing white moustache that looks like a huge silkworm. Henri Clouard was born the same year as them, and is an admirer of Maurras and a Balzac specialist. Marcel Arland, a winner of the Prix Goncourt and a mere fifty-five years old, had opposed the Surrealists and is co-director of La Nouvelle Revue Française along with Jean Paulhan, just exactly sixty years old, a prominent member of the Resistance and a friend of Sartre’s; his writings on literature are still invaluable reference works for students of French. Jean Blanzat is not yet fifty; a figure in the Resistance, he has obtained the Prix Femina and the Grand Prix de l’Académie Française. Jean Grenier was the philosophy teacher of Albert Camus, who dedicated his first book to him. Robert Kanters is director of the science-fiction section at Denoël and, most notably, is to introduce Philip K. Dick to a French readership. Robert Kemp, seventy-five years old, is a literary critic and later a member of the Académie Française. Thierry Maulnier, theatre critic for Combat and La Revue de Paris, played a part in the setting-up of the review associated with La Table Ronde and will also be elected to the Académie. Armand Hoog is a literary critic whose first novel was awarded the Prix Sainte-Beuve. Maurice Nadeau was orphaned in the Great War, was a prominent member of the Resistance and is uncompromising as a publisher and unsurpassed when it comes to recognising talent. Roger Caillois, who will in his turn become a member of the Académie, is a sociologist and literary critic and had been a friend of Paul Éluard’s. And then there is Dominique Aury, the token woman, who is about to publish, in June, perhaps one of the greatest works of pornography ever, Story of O written as a love letter to her lover Jean Paulhan. And then there are Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, the two writers of immense stature on the jury, who each in his own way is defined by transgression.

  If I attach importance to this rather long, perhaps rather tedious list, it is because we have to understand just what the prize represents in the France of 1954: it is an award which, given the jury’s prestige, commands respect, guarantees the admiration of readers, but also makes a big impression on those in ‘the trade’. It is a famous prize, which, after the war, was bestowed on Albert Camus for The Plague, a prize that has come to be noted, evaluated and discussed, a prize in the hands of the ‘experts’ in literature, since the critics, whom it represents, are credited with having the gift of perceiving the ‘objective’ merits of a particular literary talent.

  What is it that they have acclaimed in this young girl’s work? The classical form embodying a contemporary mindset, the freshness of expression, the choice allusions, the elegant concision, the fluency of the dialogue … but all that is not enough. It has to be a book that spoke of them and of their generation. In it, a child is observing how these old gentlemen live and she pronounces them to be admirable: ‘I much preferred my father’s friends, men of forty, who spoke to me with courtesy and affection, and treated me with the consideration of a father or lover.’ Ah yes, youth is a beautiful thing; after all, young people are not children any more, so one is permitted to go to bed with them.

  In Sagan’s later novels, the different generations, far from being in conflict, will enjoy mixing, living and making love together. In that respect she seems most unlike the young of 1968: she wants to live with her father, just the two of them, whereas, in future, children will want to make a clean sweep of the patriarchs. And yet, and yet, she plays more of a role than you might think in that coming revolution.

  Françoise Sagan, five foot four and seven stone, arrives late at the party given in her honour, for there has had to be a very frank discussion with René Julliard as to the possibility of reconciling professional obligations with going to the ball in Senlis.

  The photographers, the journalists, the petits fours: everything is in place including the 100,000 francs in cash presented to her by the sponsor of the prize, Florence J. Gould – previous winners had received a cheque, but it has to be said that they had come of age and were thus in possession of a bank account.

  Marie Quoirez, who is to find the rolls of banknotes in the tea-towel drawer, will wonder for a moment whether she isn’t seeing things,52 while Pierre will give this advice to his daughter: ‘At your age, money is something you have to force yourself to spend.’53

  How is she to quell the terror that success brings? Answer: with alcohol. Françoise drinks whisky and doesn’t say a lot, but fortunately the guests round the table have much to talk about among themselves. All those adults. For they are adults! They play games, they give rewards, they distribute good and bad marks. But how can they desire or hate to the extent that they do?

  ‘What makes you write?’ I write to be rich and famous, she says, kicking the question into touch. For would it not be ridiculous to tell the truth: that one writes to give voice to the poem, to move people, perhaps to change them, to transform them through words, to make contact with the soul … Doesn’t such talk make you want to die of boredom? It’s much more fun, and much more respectful of literature, not to take yourself seriously. But that’s how the myth of her offhandedness gets started. At the end of the day, it is probably the only thing that she will take seriously and will work at without let-up, just as, by dint of hard work, the principal ballerina eliminates all trace of effort from dancing. Putting all one’s effort into feigning the absence of effort is like painting white on white: it’s not a colour that’s easy to see.

  To take her mind off the motorbike trip that she has just missed, Françoise thinks of the second-hand Jaguar XK120 that she will be collecting from the garage next week. She would like to set off south in it directly on leaving the garage. She would go with her brother Jacques. They would head for Cannes or Nice or perhaps even Saint-Tropez, which she has never been to. She would spend all her money, for, after all, this shower of banknotes will soon dry up and, when eventually she becomes her parents’ young daughter again, she will certainly have to work hard and write a book – a good book, a great book, she tells herself. It will be a book to be proud of, as thick as a dictionary. And while Françoise, when she shuts her eyelids, is seeing red and green spots from the flashlights of the journalists, she tells herself that she should urgently begin writing the next novel.

  But the problem is that the money is not going to dry up. Quite the contrary. Up to today she has sold 8,500 copies of her book. But a year from now, after the media scandal that the awarding of the prize is going to provoke, she will have sold 850,000 copies. Then it will be a million.

  The next day, on the front page of Le Figaro, François Mauriac writes that famous article of his which will give rise to innumerable debates, so much so that the press cuttings for Bonjour Tristesse, when they put them on the scales, will weigh nearly two stone.54

  François Mauriac, the Christian believer, who has but recently been the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, sums up Sagan in the formulation that has since become famous: the ‘charming little monster’. She will reply by saying that she is neither little, nor charming, nor a monster.

  And so it was that the prize was given and the book was acclaimed, booed, hated, adored and read in secret; and thus it became necessary to sign new contracts, write articles for women’s magazines, travel to Venice and go on a hectic tour of the United States, talk for months, years, decades, about a book that was written in six weeks, adapt it for the cinema, go from party to party, from jazz club to nightclub, drink litres of alcohol, pretend to be drunk in order to escape people, narrowly escape death as well, have her skull split
open and her pelvis shattered, meet Bernard Frank never to leave him, form hectic relationships, drive sports cars barefoot, park her Jaguar behind the kitchens of Hôtel de la Ponche in Saint-Tropez, own a Gordini Type 24S, a Jaguar E-Type convertible, a Maserati Mistral, a Lotus Super Seven S1, as well as a Ferrari California cabriolet, win and lose fortunes in casinos, buy a house in Normandy early on the morning of the eighth day of the eighth month of the year, having bet on the number eight in roulette at eight o’clock that morning, buy a house simply in order to avoid having to pack up and go, buy a house in order to to be able to sleep peacefully in it after a night without sleep, buy a racehorse for the sheer excitement of it, love various men, have her wedding splashed on the front pages of the papers, be the target of a plastic bomb attack for having denounced the use of torture in Algeria, sign the manifesto of the ‘343 Sluts’, be friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and François Mitterrand, surrender her lips to Ava Gardner and Massimo Gargia, laugh with Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, meet Mikhail Gorbachev and Tennessee Williams, be obliged to justify everything she has previously done, explain herself over and over, be the recorder of her every act, be always brief and precise, say ‘to make love’ at the start of her life for it to be thought scandalous, say ‘to make love’ at the end of her life for it to be thought quaint, say ‘to make love’ and do so all her life, write other books, write plays, write lists of things to do that she doesn’t want to do, write love letters and letters breaking things off, no longer have time to write at all, so much time does she spend talking about what she has written, no longer remember what she has written, the words she has thought up, the titles of the books she has published, never stop writing, until the end.