Sagan, Paris 1954. Anne Berest

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 that Françoise Sagan might be lost to view. I am appropriating her for myself, just as a portrait painter imposes his own profile 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