with the scent worn by the young woman at reception. Jolie Madame, the latest perfume from Pierre Balmain, is a mixture of violets and leather and has been popular as a gift this last Christmas. Jolie Madame goes through the same rigmarole as her predecessors: Are you submitting a manuscript? You can expect a letter. You’ll hear nothing for several weeks, etc.
The die is cast. With her arms now free and swinging by her side, Françoise crosses Place Saint-Sulpice in the cold of that sixth of January. All she is thinking of is dinner that evening, when her big sister Suzanne will be celebrating her thirtieth birthday.
As happens every year, her mother will have bought a huge galette des rois, still warm. And as happens every year, everyone will make sure that Kiki finds the charm hidden in it and gets to wear the crown.
To Françoise, thirty seems a lifetime, too far off to contemplate. She doesn’t know that, by the age of thirty, she will have been married and divorced twice, will be a mother, and a writer acclaimed throughout the world, her work adapted for the cinema by Otto Preminger, acted by Jean Seberg and sung by Juliette Gréco; she will be both loved and loathed and, in a terrible accident, she will have come close to death, a place beyond the reach of memory.
Between now and the age of thirty she has so much to experience.
Suddenly I visualise Françoise in the radiance of youth. I am more than thirty now and I feel out of place as – on the run from my own life – I immerse myself in the life of another. I am following in the tracks of a child; I see her cross the square by the side of the church of Saint-Sulpice. She crosses it diagonally, passing close to the fountain and its lions.
Fully preoccupied as she is by the thought of the birthday present she is planning to give her sister, Françoise does not know that she is being watched from behind the façade of the church by the painting by Delacroix.
It is of Jacob wrestling with the Angel.
His raised knee is a sign of his will. His muscular back tells of his resoluteness. And his arm and shoulder bespeak his determination to fight. Every sinew in the magnificent body of the man called Jacob is straining towards victory and, at daybreak, he will gain God’s favour because he, a natural man, has wrestled with the supernatural. But his thigh will be for ever marked by the injury he has sustained.
In every combat undertaken, in every task completed, in every victory gained, one must accept that something will be lost.
In every task completed.
In every combat undertaken.
One must accept that something will be lost.
What shall I lose through this book?
I was immersed in the writing of my third novel when, more than ten days ago now, Françoise Sagan’s son suggested that I should write a book about his mother. Denis Westhoff is a man of around fifty. Listening to him talk is very pleasant: he speaks rapidly, in a soft, staccato tone, without any hesitation, like the needle of a sewing machine regularly piercing felt.
‘We will soon be marking the tenth anniversary of her death, ten years already, and I would like people to remember just what the publication of Bonjour Tristesse represented for society back in 1954. That was sixty years ago!’
This proposition is like a sign; it is obvious to me that this is something I must do. I drop the book I’m working on for her, for Françoise.
I phone Édouard because I am delighted to tell him the news. But we argue: he says that I feel flattered to set my name alongside Françoise Sagan’s and that I should guard against vanity, etc.
I send him an email telling him how hurt I am:
Sometimes your friends attack you with cruel words that hurt. But because they aim true and see in you the things you keep most hidden, they say, ‘It’s because I care about you that I can see the part of you that you would like to hide. And, seeing that side of you, I still go on caring about you. Perhaps I care about you even more, knowing what I do. Because you and I are alike, united in guilt.’
When your friends act like this, they bind you to them more strongly than by any declaration of love.
But when your friends attack you and their aim isn’t true, when they are aiming at other people (usually themselves) through you - that’s to say, instead of looking at you, they are looking in the mirror - that’s when your friends become terribly remote from you.
Édouard phones me back to say that there has been a misunderstanding and that I have misrepresented what he has said. He gently mocks the emphasis I put on our being friends, something I have done regularly over the nigh on fifteen years that we have known each other. We make up by having lunch in the little Italian restaurant at the entrance to the library where I work.
Édouard knew Françoise Sagan. He tells me the things he remembers about her – he does an imitation of how she used to answer the phone in a Spanish accent in order to weed out unwanted callers informing them that ‘Madame Sagan is not in.’ I say to him, ‘You loved her so much, so I don’t understand why you shouldn’t be pleased that I – your friend – am writing a book about her.’
‘Of course I’m pleased,’ he replies, ‘but that’s not the problem. What annoys me is that you’re abandoning your novel.’
Édouard is a generous soul, just as Françoise was.
So, for the last ten days roughly, whenever someone asks me, ‘What are you up to at the moment? Are you writing anything?’ I answer, ‘Yes, I’m writing a book about Françoise Sagan.’
Like a chemical reaction, people’s initial response is always the same: it’s as if a combination of certain words automatically produces a smile.
Utter the name ‘Françoise Sagan’ and you will see a smile come over people’s faces, the same smile you would see if you were to say, ‘Will you have some champagne?’
I am wondering whether, in agreeing to write about her, I am not going to put myself in an impossible position by touching on what belongs to everyone. All of a sudden I am afraid of this book.
Yesterday when I put a whole series of questions to Denis Westhoff (What perfume did she wear? What year was it that she met Pasolini? Where was her brother Jacques living in January 1954? etc.) he said something very important.
‘My mother was never afraid.’
‘Even in 1954, when she was just a young girl, before her first book came out, do you not think she was afraid?’
‘No, she wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone.’
‘But she must have wondered whether she would get good reviews.’
‘It was one of the things she taught me. Not to be afraid.’
I make a note in my work-book: ‘A scene to show that Françoise Sagan was never afraid of anything.’
I make a note in my head: Must teach my daughter that the only thing to be afraid of is fear itself.
Clearly, in my hands, there is a danger
