‘have you heard back?’
Few things make Françoise feel more ill at ease. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She is furious with her brother and his big mouth.
‘No, not yet. I only dropped the manuscript off last week … it can take several months.’
This is the cue for people to give their opinions, to come up with an anecdote about someone who had been read by Gide for Gallimard, or someone else who received a letter with a positive reply, or Proust who paid to have his work published, and so on and so on. Françoise has had enough. She doesn’t want to have to listen to them any more; she feels dizzy.
It’s at this point that her friend Véronique whispers to her, ‘Come with me, I’ll take you to the carnival. We’ll have our fortunes told.’
The two girls grab their coats, then hail a beetle-black Citroën taxi on Boulevard Raspail.
‘We’re going to Pigalle,’ says Véronique, in the serious voice she reserves for special occasions.
So here are the girls, speeding through the night towards their future. It’s not the first time that Françoise has met a fortune-teller. The previous year, in Rue l’Abbé-Groult, a blonde woman with an enormous bosom had announced to her, ‘You will write a book that will cross the oceans’15 and that had encouraged her to take from her drawer the few pages that had been lying there abandoned.
So it all stemmed from the woman who had predicted that Françoise would write books and that they would be very successful.
I can’t see into the future, but I do have one extraordinary power, the power to transport Françoise back to that night in Pigalle.
Up there on the heights, from mid-December until mid-January, a carnival with dozens of strange booths sets up along Boulevard Rochechouart, stretching from Place Blanche to the Anvers Métro station. There you can find women who will tell your fortune with playing cards, as well as shooting galleries, bearded ladies and fishing for prizes.
I quote here from the photographer Christer Strömholm, who photographed these carnivals in the late fifties:16
You could get to see wrestling matches … Dwarves with beards would invite you to performances that lasted an hour.
The female snake charmer in her glass case would allow big, lazy snakes to coil languorously round her body. You had to pay to see her. We would watch in fascination for a good quarter of an hour.
Her working day was long and whenever she took a break she would leave her glass case but she never parted from her snakes. They stayed tightly coiled round her half-naked body. There was always a packed house for the ‘leopard woman’. She would let us stroke her hairy patches.
I can imagine Françoise and Véronique wandering among the stalls and the roundabouts. I can see them laughing at the dodgems, sinking their teeth into round, sweet toffee-apples and getting candyfloss moustaches as they stood guffawing in front of the booth of the crocodile woman – half woman, half crocodile.
I like to picture them, complete with the leather handbags that mark them out as well-brought-up young ladies, entering the fortune-teller’s booth.
There are some grey and orange stones on the fortune-teller’s table; light from the candles throws into relief the wrinkles on her face – she could be one hundred years old – she wears jewellery, lots of jewellery. She asks Françoise to choose some cards and place them on the table, then she stands up, takes a pendulum and, looking Françoise straight in the eye, says to her in a gravelly voice that conjures up some never-never land, ‘I see someone who is coming to live with you, someone who will be arriving in the near future.
‘It’s someone you will get to know very well indeed, someone you will love and who will love you straight away, for you are very lovable. But, beware, the relationship between you will be one of extremes for she is haughty and capricious. She will love you as children love, unreasonably. She will love you as women love: if you neglect them, they do not easily forgive.
‘This is someone you will know for the rest of your life, who will at times desert you and then you will suffer greatly. As she brushes past, you will always call her name. You must honour and cherish her, for you are one of those who know how to make her happy. You know how to make her laugh and to entertain her. She is on her way towards you. And when you open the door to her, you must look her straight in the face.’
‘Who is this person?’
‘It is Lady Luck.’17
My first paid job was as a reader for a publishing house. So I know all about manuscripts and what peculiar, repugnant, necessary, exciting things they are, inviting contempt and consideration in equal measure. I know the mystique surrounding those pages, those accumulating piles. I am familiar with the disillusionment and sadness that come from reading words that are just not right, that are as indigestible as food which doesn’t taste as it should. But sometimes, too, you feel your temples begin to throb and walls come tumbling down, when you read words that make a deep impression on you and help you to go on living.
Readers in publishing houses are a strange breed, somewhat wan, somewhat apart, somewhat feared; because the talent they have, their possessing ‘a good eye’ (in the same way as a person is said to ‘have a nose’ for things) is a gift: it’s a type of expertise that cannot be either passed on or explained – it’s as scary as witchcraft.
These are creatures wreathed in a slightly malodorous aura who loiter alone in the corridors with sheets of paper and folders under their arm, and such a one was François Le Grix, the reader at the publishing house of René Julliard in 1954.
He was nicknamed ‘Grixe’ or ‘the Grey Lady’ and, on account of that ridiculous moniker, I imagine him to be a tall, slender, colourless individual, made fun of by the others for wearing ‘a toupee which only he thought was undetectable’.18
François Le Grix is the first reader of Bonjour Tristesse on that thirteenth of January 1954.
Conscientious as ever, before he finishes his work for the day, in his fine hand – the handwriting of a schoolboy brought up under the Third Republic, who knows all his sous-préfectures by heart and can solve problems involving trains that pass one another – he writes this:
What Mademoiselle Quoirez has penned bowls along nicely without faltering. Hence we are prevented from noticing the numerous barbarisms that it would be appropriate to eradicate from such a pleasing text. In the very first line, I light upon the following: ‘To this strange feeling … I hesitate to apply the fine name of sadness.’ Not only does it lack euphony but the syntax also offends … At one point the author writes of ‘the hearing of that exaggerated laughter’ instead of ‘hearing that laughter’. I have underlined many of these infelicities, which the exercise of a little care would suffice to correct. The charm of the work, the rather particular spell it casts, produced by its mix of perversion and innocence, stems also from a complacent attitude to life being coupled with bitterness towards it, and from gentleness being coupled with cruelty. In places it is a poem as much as a novel, but without there being any break in tone or any false note
