on the portrait of the sitter.
I am going to slide her into my bed with its rumpled sheets, there to wipe away the anguished sweat that, though I attribute it to her, is so like mine. She may not be afraid, but I am. So I let my black hair intertwine with her fairness and, like a photographer using light-sensitive paper, I develop the outlines of a silhouette that, while grave, is full of joy. I can’t help myself. If it’s a problem, all anyone had to do was not to ask me in the first place.
It is 11 January 1954.
It is so cold outside that Marie Quoirez, Françoise’s mother, has agreed to lend her daughter her fur coat, made from the silvery pelts of squirrels which, even after death, do not lose their ash-grey colour, while the belly remains as pale as Snow White’s thigh. The fur coat is so big on Françoise that Marie pictures her daughter as she was eighteen years previously, a gift from heaven, a newborn baby wrapped in a blanket.
Jacques is expecting her to join him for dry martinis at the Hôtel Lutetia. In the taxi taking her across town, Françoise is deep in thought as she looks out of the window at the succession of illuminated signs adorning Haussmann’s buildings: ‘Frigeco’, ‘Paris-Pêcheur’, ‘Chocolat Suchard’, ‘Janique’, ‘Gevapan’ and, especially, ‘Grand Marnier’, advertised in that Gothic script that makes you want to be sipping a liqueur in front of a log fire.
The taxi carrying Françoise drives alongside the courtyard of the Palais-Royal, as yet devoid of Buren’s columns, then past the Louvre without the addition of the Pyramid and the Jardins du Carrousel without Maillol’s bronze statues. By day Paris is sooty black. At night she is navy blue.
Françoise enters the Lutetia through the revolving doors, which muffle the noise from outside and give you the feeling of moving into a world wrapped in cotton wool. Her feet go trotting over the chequered marble floor of the luxury hotel. She recalls that, at the Liberation, a girl Jacques was engaged to at the time, Denise Franier, whose surname before the war had been Frankenstein, had been driving them through Paris in a mustard-coloured Rovin D4. As they passed the hotel she had told them it was there that whole families were awaiting the return of their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and children, and news from Poland and Germany.
Françoise has not forgotten those entire families that had disappeared. Even if she never referred to them, some things may be heard very clearly in the silence of their not being spoken about.
Comfortably ensconced in one of the deep red-velvet armchairs, sipping a cocktail, and paying no heed to the shrieks of laughter that pierce her heart like shards of glass, Françoise is not listening to her brother’s friends, who are already drunk.
At that moment she is immersing herself in her memories.
The sharp, crystalline music of the tinkling ice cubes is taking her back to the war years.
She is seven.
Seven is old, so old that it is called ‘the age of reason’.
She is living in the Isère, in Saint-Marcellin, at the foot of the mountains of the Vercors. The whole family has left Paris because of the war; on the day of their departure they had to turn round and come back because Marie, the mother, had forgotten to collect her hats from the famous milliner’s, Paulette’s.11
Some weeks later, soldiers of the Wehrmacht come to search the house, which has the misfortune to be called ‘The Gunnery’; they are looking for arms. They know that a van belonging to members of the Resistance has been spotted in the area. They get all the Quoirez family to line up and face the wall while they carry out the search. The story has a happy ending, as the Germans don’t find anything.12 But Françoise can remember the sound of her own breathing as, hands clasped on her head, she heard orders being given in a foreign tongue and the dogs barking. And she also remembers not being afraid.
I get the impression that for many French children of that generation, that is to say, those who were children during the war, their memories are not painful. Fear is not their abiding memory and the expression ‘a long holiday’ often crops up. Two things are mentioned: the women whose hair was shorn for having fraternised with the enemy and the revelation of images from the death camps. When you come to think of it, it is rather strange that an awareness of the war should be defined by those two things, both of which date from the period after the war, and yet they are cited in answer to the question ‘What do you remember about the war?’
This is what Françoise remembers: she was eleven when she went to the cinema in Saint-Marcellin to see In Old Chicago, an American film starring Tyrone Power. It was 1946 and newsreels were shown before the film started. Suddenly there appeared on the screen those images of Buchenwald and Auschwitz in which you see snow ploughs clearing away heaps of corpses. It took Françoise some time, a few seconds at least, to realise what she was seeing.13
A friend of mine, Gérard Rambert, once told me that when he discovered some photographs under his parents’ radiator cover, all he could see in them were hills. He could not understand why his parents would hide ‘photographs of hills’ in their radiators. It had taken him several days to realise what it was all about. Just as the faces in the paintings of Arcimboldo are made up of vegetables or fruit, so the hills in the photographs belonging to Gérard’s parents were made up of bones and decomposed corpses.
In Un Pedigree, Patrick Modiano would write, ‘At the age of thirteen I discovered the images of the death camps. Something changed for me that day.’
Those two sentences say it all.
‘Something changed for me that day’ is an experience that we have all had, every one of us, whatever our age or culture and whatever generation we belong to.
I remember the day when something changed for me.
I must have been six or seven.
My mother placed a big history book on the baize surface of her writing desk. We pored over its pages. I don’t think I realised at first what I was seeing – I’m not talking about its meaning or import, I am merely saying that it was difficult to work out what the photographs were of.
My mother explained to me that we belonged to that family of bodies, that we were ‘Jews’.
‘Something changed for me that day.’
If I mention all these things, in a digression that is taking me further than I intended, it is because I see in Françoise Sagan’s levity, in her irreverence and offhandedness, not an elegant front concealing despair, but a sign of her secret awareness of human suffering. She had no legitimate right to speak of suffering, for she belonged neither with the victims nor indeed with the executioners. Françoise Sagan was never to tire of exploring forms of distress that may be regarded as merely trivial but I sense that there was a deeply embedded seriousness in Françoise Quoirez that she respected too much to make it her own. And I know that the sight of a shaven-headed woman paraded through the streets of the village where she, Françoise, lived as a child was to haunt her for the rest of her days.14
‘So, what’s this about you waiting to hear back from publishers?’
Françoise, put on the spot by a friend who is flirting with her brother Jacques, comes out of her daydream.
‘Yes, well, we’ll see,’ she replies, pushing
