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 back a lock of hair that has fallen forward.
‘So,’ insists someone else, ‘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