would flow more naturally than the present subjunctive, which is rarely the case. But Mademoiselle Quoirez persists in not using it. Another example of a barbarism, and a rather curious one, concerns the book’s actual title, inspired by its final lines, where the author tells us that, with the advent of evening, a strange face appears to her which she greets with the words ‘Bonjour tristesse’. In that it is evening, would it not be better to say ‘Bonsoir tristesse’ and, furthermore, would not the title gain thereby?19
As if clinging to a talisman, I have retained all the reports I wrote when I was a reader. They are in a big grey box file which I keep archived in the bedroom I had as a child in my parents’ house. I would like to reread them all, one day. In amongst them is a report on a first novel that went on to be a great success. It had been written by a girl of my own age – twenty at the time – and I had been greatly struck when reading it. It was the first time I had read a manuscript that seemed to me to be undeniably both well written and likely to sell. So I had spoken up for it to the publisher, for whom I was working as an intern.
Some years later, at a dimly lit Parisian party, I ran across that same girl, who was now famous on account of her book. I was then working in a theatre on the Champs-Élysées. Needless to say, we were still both the same age as each other. But the success of her book had catapulted her into what seemed to me to be life as it was meant to be lived, whereas I was vegetating in the limbo of my own mere existence. I asked her for a light, and she obliged, but in an offhand way, without even bothering to look at me, so as not to lose the thread of the animated discourse with which she was regaling her male audience.
I said to myself, ‘You’re not looking at me and you don’t know who I am. Yet I was one of the fairies present round your cradle.’
I often think of that incident.
In doing so, I wonder which of the people who cross my path, their faces unknown to me, have nonetheless played a part in my life without my being the slightest bit aware of it.
What I find striking in the story of Françoise Sagan is that the fairies who were present round that little girl’s cradle, all those capricious fairy godmothers – toutes les capricieuses mères du destin – in whose hands her destiny lay and who played their part in the making of her fame, were all very elderly gentlemen.
First there was François Le Grix, then Pierre Javet and René Julliard, the publishing house trio. Next up were Mauriac, Blanchot, Paulhan, Bataille and then many others, a whole Senate’s worth of wonderful old men who covered their faces in dainty veils to grant the wish of a girl-child newly born.
But we are not yet at that point. We are still just at the point where the reader’s report from François Le Grix lands on the desk of Pierre Javet, editorial director at the publishing house of René Julliard, who, in turn, is shortly to be overcome with stupefaction (in the etymological sense of the word).
Before I recount what happened on the night of 16–17 January 1954, the night René Julliard read the manuscript of Bonjour Tristesse for the first time and wanted to publish it before he had even reached the last page, I must describe something that happened to me yesterday. It was such a strange thing that I wonder if I really did experience it, so strange that I could not say exactly what was going on.
I had decided to make an appointment with a clairvoyant, because, after I had written the episode with the fortune-teller, I reckoned that for me to meet a ‘real’ clairvoyant would be useful for the book and would make my description a bit less kitsch.
There are two sorts of writers. There are those who plumb their own depths to extract all the black gold they can find there and who, for that reason, are forced to live a life of asceticism. And there are those who need to experience things in order to write about them and who lose their way as they journey through life on the edge of a fantasy world, obliged to lead a kind of existence that sometimes proves fatal to them, as the wild ass’s skin does to the hero in Balzac’s story.
Be that as it may, I had made an appointment with the clairvoyant using the book as a pretext even though, probably, at an unconscious level, I wanted just as much to hear things about my personal life: my separation from the father of my daughter was looking as if it might be permanent and never in my life had I felt quite as lost as I did then. But instead of speaking to her about that, I put the following question: ‘I am writing a book at the moment. Can you see it?’ This is what I asked the clairvoyant when I met her in her studio near the Anvers Métro station, which in the fifties was the exact location – and I am not making this up – of the Pigalle carnival.
(What I am going to write next is the exact transcription of the notes I scribbled down in the course of our conversation. I am reproducing the words just as they were said to me, without any attempt to dress them up stylistically or to impose any kind of coherence on them after the event.
I know that most readers will not for one moment accept the veracity of what I am going to report. Yet it is all true and I leave it to each individual to interpret as they wish, and as best they can, the remarkable occurrence that I was party to and that I restrict myself here to conveying as faithfully as possible.)
‘Yes, I can see that you are writing a book on someone’s life. It’s the life of a woman who lived as a man would. She was very masculine. But she was benevolent towards people. She was a woman who had experienced everything. She did whatever she wanted to do. But she did it alone. She experienced everything on her own.
‘She was a woman who felt misunderstood. She had stepped aside from time. For her there was no longer any such thing as a calendar, only a life lived in the present moment.
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