Then my eyes light upon the very first page:
A Room of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf
Translated by Clara Malraux
Reading these words, I feel the veins in my neck throb, just as they do when you find something by chance that you hadn’t been looking for: a hidden love letter not intended for you; a 500-euro note just when you are short of money; or the offer of a trip when you want to get away from someone.
Clara had translated Virginia Woolf. That is, Clara Malraux, the mother of Sagan’s best friend.
So I was fully justified, justified at least in placing that book on Françoise’s bedside table. And why not even a copy with a dedication from the translator? ‘To Françoise, who will one day be a writer.’ For that is what her daughter had told her a few weeks previously, having just read her friend’s manuscript at a single sitting: ‘Françoise is a writer.’
Now that I have set the scene, with the books, the music and the blouses, I can wake Françoise up. I can get her to rub her eyes like a child, as she does in a photograph taken in Saint-Tropez in which she is wearing a checked nightdress. Then, in the corridors of her parents’ apartment, she goes in search of her brother, who is her best friend as far as boys are concerned. Jacques Quoirez is twenty-seven. He has gone off to London to ‘get experience’ in a business there but he comes back to Paris for the end-of-year festivities. I am struck by the photographs of him that I have found in trawling through archives on the internet. He looks nothing like Françoise – you wouldn’t think they came from the same family.
Jacques has read his little sister’s manuscript.
Jacques has been impressed by what he has read.
Yet he is not a man to set aside his usual cynical attitude. With his stripy blazers, his threadbare Charvet shirts and his hide moccasins, he is the darling of the circles he moves in. He is blithe and devil-may-care and he possesses what is known as charm, which, in a man of leisure, is a terrible defect.
Not wishing either to flatter her or to fill her with false hope, Jacques has told her that the book she has written is a nice little composition,6 not at all bad for a first novel. He agrees to help his little sister parcel up the manuscripts, while at the same time giving her a warning: you have to be patient, and very patient at that, if you want to get yourself published. He has friends, some decidedly more gifted than she is and others with better contacts in the publishing world, who are still waiting for replies. Françoise, he muses, will soon discover that life isn’t as cushy everywhere as it is in Boulevard Malesherbes. Little Kiki has been so spoilt and pampered by their parents, Pierre and Marie, that one day she is going to have to be surprised by the real world. But the later the better, he thinks, for at the end of the day he loves his kid sister more than he loves any other woman.
All the same, Jacques has been impressed by ‘Franquette’. No one really believed that she would write that mysterious book of hers so quickly. In places he has recognised literary influences: the ‘warm, pink’ shell like the ham in Rimbaud’s ‘At the Green Inn’; the words of Cécile, with their echoes of Musset’s character Perdican; the quotations from Oscar Wilde and the influence of Choderlos de Laclos. But he has no wish to discourage her; there is nothing more tiresome than critics. We shall see – after all, this is a child who has always got what she wanted, from no matter who.
After much debate, they settle on three publishers, Gallimard, Plon and Julliard. They put the typed manuscripts in big yellow folders and Françoise asks her brother if he will write her address on them. She feels sure that confident masculine handwriting will put the publishers’ readers in a positive frame of mind.
Françoise Quoirez,
167 Boulevard Malesherbes.
When he has written the addresses, Jacques has a thought.
Françoise really must put her date of birth on the manuscripts. His hope is that the idea of a little eighteen-year-old will touch the hearts of the readers and that when they return the manuscripts they will perhaps be less nasty in their accompanying letters.
‘What if we added the phone number too?’ suggests Françoise.
‘What for?’ asks Jacques.
‘In case they want to take me on immediately! In case they really, really like the book!’
‘No, Françoise, no. That would look silly. Publishers don’t phone you. They send a letter.’
But Françoise is insistent. She agrees to include her date of birth as long as they add the phone number. So, on all three copies, Jacques writes:
Françoise Quoirez,
167 Boulevard Malesherbes.
Carnot 59-61. Date of birth: 21 June 1935.
He suddenly feels very afraid for his little sister.
‘Whatever happens, if this one doesn’t get published, you will write another, won’t you?’
‘Yes, of course. It won’t be the end of the world.’
‘Not even a little bit, OK?’
‘I don’t write in order to get published, you know. I write because, first and foremost, it’s something I enjoy doing.’
‘That’s just as well.’7
Smiling, and as a parting shot before closing the door behind her, Françoise calls out to her brother, ‘But I shall get published!’
At that very moment, on that fourth of January 1954, a boy of the same age – eighteen, to be precise – is recording two songs. It costs him four dollars, which he pays for out of his own pocket, and he records them in a small studio specialising in the black soul music of Memphis.
The songs are ‘My Happiness’ and ‘That’s When Your Heartaches Begin’.
Both those kids, Françoise Sagan and Elvis Presley, are going to need shoulders broad enough to bear the weight of what they are going to become in a few months’ time: two idols pursued by frenzied crowds. But today they have quite simply done something, and it all stems from there. You never lose out by just doing something; there is a chance you might even win. You have to take on board the risk of winning, and the young do not realise just what the consequences of winning can be.
This is a book I have to write quickly, and it is taking shape and gradually coming into focus.
It is to be neither a biography, nor a journal, nor a novel. Let’s just call it a story.
The idea is that it’s the story of a girl, a very young girl, writing her first novel.
I will be cataloguing the various stages in the life of a budding author: her excitement, her fearfulness, her sense of anticipation.
My book will be about the
