Sagan, Paris 1954

by Anne Berest

  There will be all of that, but, unlike Flaubert’s Frédéric and Deslauriers, when Françoise sums up for her friends – her women friends – the lives they have had, she will comment that they haven’t made such a mess of things, she and they. And the reason for that? Perhaps it’s because they will never stop furthering their ‘sentimental education’ so, in that respect, they will all their lives remain the girls they were in 1954.

  I would like 21 June that year, Midsummer Day and her birthday, to be the day that Françoise sets off in secret in her new car as a fitting celebration of having reached the age of nineteen. Seated in her Jaguar, she is level with the ground; she can feel the speed through her body. The RN7 is narrow and dangerous – the motorway to the South has not yet been built. She drives her fine car as if it were a fine beast that had a mind of its own and would not always react instantaneously.55 This would be the first time, I imagine, that she had gone to Saint-Tropez and this is how I would like to finish the book, on a note of sun and speed.

  I got out of bed, I opened the shutters, and the sea and the sky thrust in my face that same blueness, that same rose colour, that same happiness.56

  I myself have never been to Saint-Tropez. I decide to spend a couple of days there in a final push to finish the book. A friend suggests I could rent his aunt’s studio. I would like to hear the echo of Françoise’s laughter, her joy at being read and fêted, in spite of the frenzy that is starting up around her.

  I quickly pack my case, with a yellow dress, a blue swimsuit and books for the train, including La Chamade – I really loved Alain Cavalier’s film of it, without even knowing that it was an adaptation of one of Sagan’s novels.

  This ‘writer’s retreat’ of mine is almost like heading south for a holiday. Before going to the station, I give my daughter Brigitte Bardot’s song which we like to dance to: ‘Tu veux ou tu veux pas?’ and I kiss her on both cheeks – they are like brioches with specks of white sugar and I am going to miss them over the next two days and two nights.

  Obviously I should have gone by car but I haven’t driven since the day I took my test. So I opt for the train.

  In my brightly coloured carriage, I read the description of Sagan by Tennessee Williams who, in 1954, wrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for Broadway.

  Françoise Sagan met him the following year in the course of her great American tour, more colossal than that of any rock star. Watching through the window of my high-speed train as the landscape rushes past, I dream of Tennessee Williams, forty-four years old, Françoise Sagan, nineteen, and Carson McCullers, thirty-eight, spending two weeks together at Key West, fishing, smoking and drinking neat gin. Françoise Sagan is later to write that those were two baking-hot, tumultuous weeks. In the description that he gives of her, Tennessee Williams speaks first of the terror that takes hold of him whenever he witnesses a young writer being lionised by the press.

  In the morning she was sun-bathing and swimming, and in the afternoon we went deep-sea fishing and in the evening, when it came again, she took the wheel of my sports car and drove it so fast, with such a gay smile, that I had to warn her of the highway patrolmen. I think a passion for speed is a healthy sign in a young artist: it shows that they know already the need to keep distance between them and the pack.57

  Gradually, outside, the landscape is changing, the sky is becoming brighter, the sea is getting nearer and, on the spur of the moment, I send a message to the young man asking him to come and join me in the South.

  Then I go back to thinking about the encounter between Matthieu Galey and Françoise. It took place, if I am to believe his Journal, on 3 June 1954, that’s to say, a week after the awarding of the Prix des Critiques.

  They arrange to meet in Les Deux Magots. Matthieu Galey gets there early and the question he asks himself while waiting for her is ‘Will she disappoint me?’ Then he goes up to another girl by mistake, just like Fabrice Luchini, the character in the film La Discrète. I try to imagine Matthieu Galey at the age of nineteen, right in the middle of his work on a study of Raymond Radiguet, which he is never to publish, even assuming he ever finished it. No matter: out of it came his encounters with Cocteau, Brancusi and Joseph Kessel, as well as his extraordinary Journal, in which he describes Françoise as follows:

  She is small and brown-haired, with round, sombre eyes, and barely looks as old as her eighteen years. No powder, no lipstick, her hair all over the place, her forehead hidden by a fringe. A brittle voice, talks fast; her speech is almost indecipherable, just the opposite of what she actually says, which is so fresh and clear.

  Unusually for him, Matthieu Galey reckons the girl is very intelligent and their conversation focuses principally on questions of literature and love. She tells him that she once loved a stupid boy who was not interested in her and that she now blushes at the thought of it. She confesses that, for her, love is the only thing that is worthwhile and she would be prepared to give up all literary ambition for it. She claims that the ballyhoo surrounding her book has bored her stiff and made her punch-drunk. Matthieu Galey goes away from their interview quite charmed, and happy to answer the question he had put to himself: ‘All in all, she has not disappointed me’. Many will think of Françoise as a promise that will not be kept, but has she ever disappointed anyone? I don’t think so. And, anyway, there seems to me to be huge merit in being true, not so much to your actual promises, as to the spirit of what you promise.

  Arriving in Saint-Tropez, I do of course find it difficult, in today’s town, to uncover traces of the year 1954.

  I search for ‘“the mad, mad sea that on the beach shatters its goblets of champagne”, as Cocteau puts it, and that, here more than elsewhere, is frothy, unanticipated and refreshing. Then there is the countryside, real countryside nestled behind Saint-Tropez, and green, unlike the rest of the Maures Massif …’58

  I search for the little streets that Françoise loved so much and that she describes as squabbling among themselves; I search for the countless hours in which she loved to lose herself; I search for the paths beyond Pampelonne; I search for the houses basking in the sun and reminding her of large cats; I search for the sea that gradually takes on an authentically blue colour below the cemetery that poor Michel Tardieu skirts in And God Created Woman.

  Walking on the beach, I try to visualise Françoise Sagan and Brigitte Bardot, meeting for the first time in the summer of 1955. Brigitte, with her head slightly bent, is making circles in the sand with her toe, as if she were pushing round an invisible shell.

  They became, both of them, the most famous girls in France. And both were to come back from the brink of death before the age of twenty-five, Françoise in a car accident, Brigitte in a suicide attempt. Both will know what a lunatic thing fame is, and its laxness and decadence. It would require an exceptional character to stand up to what is going to be their lot: a life of satiety.

  ‘Of course the youth of today possesses incredible nerve, a shamelessness that looks very much like genius or, at least, has no scruples about sending bursts of intelligence shooting out in all directions. Plenty of genius. Too much genius. A machine gun loaded with genius. What these young writers need on top of that is a bit of talent …’59 writes Cocteau that year.

  Coming back to my rented studio, I get a message from the young man, who won’t be joining me in Saint-Tropez. I am sad at that, so, instead of writing the last pages of the book, I compose this letter:

  You don’t want to come south to join me because, you say, you can’t ‘afford the train ticket’.

  But at the same time you won’t let me buy it for you, and your refusal saddens me.

  Yet I do understand you. At your age I would never have agreed to an older man paying for a ticket for me to meet him. I would have thought: He takes me for a whore. Or, rather, I would have thought: Someone, somewhere, might say I’m a whore. I would have done a lot of thinking, instead of quite simply enjoying the trip and – why not? – enjoying my ressemblance to a whore.

&nbs
p; I understand you, because not so long ago I was your age. I’m barely out of my twenties, and I lived through them without understanding anything. During that decade, which seemed very long to me, I missed out on everything and most of all I missed out on myself. I did not seize the opportunities that came my way; I did not take risks; I was afraid of dying before I had even lived; I was afraid of not becoming somebody; I was ‘boxed in’ by ideas of my own making and by a false idea of myself. For, yes, I had a precise and lofty idea of how the elements of my life had to fall into place, in a way that would allow me at last to come into my own.

  You can’t possibly imagine.

  I went through my twenties without ever being unaware of myself. I wore my identity as if it were full of fragile promise, like a garment that is so new you don’t want it to get shabby or stained, you only want to take it out on special occasions and in the end you never wear it.

  I was waiting for my life to begin because I wanted it to just happen to me.

  But today if you asked me, ‘Would you like to relive your twenties, but differently?’ I would reply, ‘No.’ For it is because I stopped myself doing so much that today I dare ask you to take a train. It’s because I believed in the existence of fate that today I no longer even know the meaning of that word. It’s because I was afraid of so much that today I am afraid of nothing. So I don’t hold it against you for not taking that train. But just be clear that no one will ever give you back those two days that we will not be spending together.

  Right now, at the precise second that I am writing these words, I would like once more to see the expression on your face that appeared the moment I told you that we mustn’t see each other any more.

  You asked me then if I had always wanted to become a writer. I didn’t answer, because your question took me by surprise. So here, somewhat belatedly, is the answer I would have given you if you had come to join me here.

  Yes, I have always wanted to write, long before I knew what it really means to write, rather as a child dreams of becoming a fireman, for the sake of the red uniform and the shiny fire engine. And then, one day, when the child is an adult, he is confronted by a fire and he realises that he has never thought about the fear involved, only the prestige, but that he is now going to have to put out the fire and, to do so, he is going to have to withstand the heat and the anxiety and the smell of burnt flesh.

  I wanted to write in order to live the life of a writer, which seemed to me the only kind of life worth living, and I tried as best I could to make my life the story – whereas writing is the very opposite of that.

  Writing means putting your life on hold for days, weeks, even months on end. It means believing that those who share your time are stealing it from you and wasting it needlessly. Writing means gradually cutting back on the story of your own life.

  My other problem was that I had a very lofty idea of what I had to write in order to become a ‘writer’, such a lofty idea that I didn’t manage to write anything. I wanted to write a great book or nothing at all.

  But one day – I remember it very clearly; I was the same age as you are today – I said to myself: You will never be Sagan. You will never write Bonjour Tristesse at seventeen, it’s much too late for you. But you will write ‘your’ books. They will be what they will be and each one will be better than the one before. Or not. No matter. They will be the only thing that truly belongs to you, the only thing that no one will be able to take away from you. You will tell people stories and, if it keeps them entertained, they will be grateful to you. For it’s no bad thing to entertain people. Wait till you get on a bit before wanting to instruct them or dazzle them. And while you may not yet be an artist, do not disparage the idea of becoming skilled in your craft.

  That day, thanks to Françoise Sagan, I wrote the first page of my first novel, then the second page. And over the next two years, without stopping, I wrote all the subsequent pages. And I wrote one book, then another and yet another today. With every page I hear my heart beating out: So, that way of life is possible.

  Today, with Françoise Sagan’s help, I am trying to change the way I live a little by following her advice, all of which ultimately carries the same message: seek what is important, don’t seek to be important.

  That is why I am able to write to you today and tell you how I loved exploring that chamber we shaped out of the night that was ours. In a day’s time, or after a thousand nights, spent with one woman or a thousand, suddenly you will remember me.

  As for me, I shall never forget our kisses or your face, or your fearfulness or mine.

  A.

  The next day I walk alone through the streets of Saint-Tropez and on the beach. On the terrace of Sénéquier I breakfast on marmalade and pain de mie cut into triangles. Then for lunch I have a tarte tropézienne, thick as a sweet soft loaf, filled with white vanilla-flavoured cream. It’s the best moment of a day on which I fail to write anything: the book refuses to be finished. I just can’t bring myself to write the closing pages and I think it’s quite simply because I don’t want to.

  I don’t want to part from Françoise. I look for her swirling figure as it was that summer. Her new clothes – a woman’s clothes – hamper her as much as the child’s clothes she wore before. In the one set of clothes she felt restricted, while the other set swamps her, I would say, in imitation of what Bernard Frank says about Benjamin Constant.60 But, exhilarated and enchanted, she is watching the world watching her.

  I see her on the terrace of the La Ponche restaurant. It is the sixties.

  The man sharing her table is an Italian who looks like an American film star. He is square-jawed – when he clenches his teeth his cheeks become hollow, in the same great way that the dimple in his chin deepens. He is handsome in a manly way, just as Françoise loves them to be, or, rather, as she will love Bob Westhoff. Together they discuss the cinema of René Clair and Maurice Ronet who is a friend of Françoise’s brother; they discuss Alberto Moravia, whom they both know; they discuss the theatre and Laurel and Hardy.

  ‘Yes, I love Italian cinema. The Easy Life and of course La Dolce Vita, which I saw last year. And most of all Visconti. I love Rocco and His Brothers, which I prefer to The Leopard,’ says Françoise.

  ‘Visconti is a great friend of mine,’ replies the enigmatic Italian, without elaborating.

  ‘If there’s one of them I find really tedious, though, it’s Pasolini,’ she goes on. ‘I just don’t understand his films. Yet I’ve seen them both, Mamma Roma and Accattone, but I would be hard put to say which of the two bored me more.’

  ‘It’s sometimes good to be a little bored.’

  ‘Oh no, not at the cinema. At least with a book you can close it and put off reading it until later. But at the cinema you’re constrained and you’re forced to stick it out. There’s nothing worse.’

  Discussion then moves on merrily to the latest French directors and the famous New Wave. It is getting ever hotter on the terrace of La Ponche. The conversation is most agreeable, but siesta time is approaching, and in high summer that means it’s time for love in the afternoon, which no one would miss for anything. Françoise stands up to take her leave.

  ‘It’s been lovely having coffee with you,’ she says, shading her eyes from the sun.

  In response the man raises his white straw hat. ‘Likewise. But I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Pier Paolo Pasolini. Very pleased to have met you.’

  Françoise was not abashed, of that I am sure, nor was Pasolini vexed. They were each too much amused at having been, over coffee, characters in a piece of vaudeville.61

  Returning to my little rented studio, I quickly write the last scenes of the book, those where we suddenly see the girl, in spite of herself, become the heroine of a novel that she is gearing up to inhabit, declaring to delighted journalists, ‘Give me nightclubs, whisky and Ferraris any day, not cooking, knitting or making do’62 and having to reply to a thousand questions of the type: ‘Do you still take the bus?’, ‘Do you eat no
odles?’, ‘Is the heroine of your novel you?’

  In Saint-Tropez, Françoise swops her grey pencil skirts for a blue sailcloth shirt and trousers like those the fishermen wear, she slips her feet into rope sandals from Vachon’s, at that time the only shop overlooking the harbour, and she feels free to go clambering over the rocks, as children do. The years for doing the twist in Saint-Tropez have not quite arrived yet, no, we are still in the well-behaved era of beach games, ping-pong matches, reading in the shade of the umbrella pines and drinking cocktails when evening drapes your sun-kissed shoulders in its slightly chilly gauze.

  Françoise spends the summer of 1954 in Hossegor with her family, in the holiday house she quit the previous year in order to escape back to Paris and, in the shadow of her father and the shade of the apartment on Boulevard Malesherbes, write the famous book that she told her friends she had ‘been writing for a long time’, which was a lie. How good it is to turn a lie into truth. Françoise applied herself to the task earnestly and with ardour. Working in Paris in August, while others are away getting their bikinis scorched, is so very pleasant.

  Thus a year has passed, and Michel Déon is sent by Paris Match to report on the holidays of France’s latest idol. It is a summer that will be much less warm than the previous one, that will witness the flight of the first Boeing 707 in its skies, the first playing of ‘That’s All Right (Mama)’ on Radio WHBQ of Memphis, the freeing of the prisoners of Dien Bien Phu and François Truffaut’s first short, Une Visite, shot in Rue de Douai in the apartment of the editor-in-chief of Les Cahiers du Cinéma, with photography by Jacques Rivette and edited by Alain Resnais.

  Colette dies on 3 August. Did she, before she died, have time to read the book by the girl whom the newspapers63 were calling ‘an eighteen-year-old Colette’?