In the car on the way home, my parents spoke very frankly: the film clearly showed that it was a profession that could be very brutal. They stressed that I should never forget that I had a free choice and that I could decide what I wanted to do and what I didn’t want to do. That I should never put up with people treating me badly. That they would always be there for me, and that I could call them at any time of the day or night. ‘Well, preferably in the daytime, actually.’
Dad was trying to make light of it, but deep down inside I could feel something electric rousing itself in the pit of my stomach. The same thing that had stopped me sleeping before the Sciences Po exams. In fact, it was something I’d been familiar with for virtually my whole life. It was a stabbing anxiety that implanted itself in my guts and then wouldn’t let go. The same anxiety that had made me ill at primary school, that had stopped me returning to secondary school and that demanded that I be the best at everything all the time, so that people would choose me, love me and stick with me.
It was that bastard fear. That evening, I felt it stirring within me. And I realised that it would be my sole companion when I set off for New York.
Mum, Léopold, my grandparents and I left for Marseille. Dad was due to join us the following week, while Alexis had decided to go to the Bayonne festival with his friends instead. And so there we were on holiday in a pretty villa and the only thing on the agenda was to enjoy ourselves and each other’s company. Well, not quite, because I did have a bit of ‘holiday homework’. For a start, Seb and Flo had both insisted that I swot up by reading the fashion magazines and taking note of the postures and faces of the models and the names and styles of the designers, the make-up artists and the hairstylists. That way, I’d get a better idea of what was expected of me. Then I had to practise walking according to Évelyne’s instructions: relax the facial muscles and the shoulders, think about my fingers in order to avoid the Playmobil arms, move my pelvis smoothly, focus on keeping straight, stare into the middle distance (for the killer look) and put one foot in front of the other like a big old horse. I performed all this by the edge of the pool, which made for a perfect catwalk, but only on the shady side to avoid getting tanned.
Finally, I had to continue to lose weight so that I could easily get into that famous size 4, which I hadn’t even known existed before being spotted by Elite. Up until that point, I’d managed things impeccably: three apples a day, carefully selected on the basis of their appealing colour and appetising shape. Before each meal, I picked out a pretty plate and laid out the contents of my unchanging menu on it with ever-increasing artistry: in a mosaic, in a fan shape or cut into little dice or thin slices, all to be savoured slowly, biting into them and chewing well before swallowing. I also drank a few coffees, but not too many, and a lot of Pepsi Max (because it tasted better than Diet Coke and the bubbles made you feel full). I didn’t drink anything else at all. For the first three days, I felt a bit hungry, but nothing I couldn’t handle. And in the days that followed, I began to feel lighter and lighter and stronger and stronger, like a sportswoman pulling off a good performance. In the space of a week I had already lost nearly 2 kilos. Losing weight was quite easy, in actual fact!
But things began to get a bit complicated in Marseille. As I had nothing else to do but think about what lay in store for me, Flo’s voice started to echo around incessantly in my head: ‘Like that, you’ll never get into the clothes.’ This was just around the time that I was beginning to get fed up with apples. Sometimes I replaced them with other fruits, but how could I know what their exact calorie content was? Did half a melon or a punnet of strawberries contain more or less than an apple? On top of that, I had constant stomach ache. I didn’t realise initially that eating nothing but raw fruit could cause these symptoms. I thought that it was the anxiety, because my fear had flooded into the vacuum and silence of the holidays, as if I’d opened the taps on a big pipe and a nasty, heavy anxiety was bubbling up inside me. And I had to fight hard to avoid drowning in it.
The results from Sciences Po finally came through: I’d failed. The doors to the other colleges were also beginning to close: I called Fénelon, Henri-IV and Louis-le-Grand to see if I could potentially postpone my starting date by a year. They said that I couldn’t, but that there was nothing to stop me from reapplying the following year. This time, the die was really cast: I had no choice but to succeed in the path that fate had set me on.
If I screwed up in New York, I’d have nothing to fall back on.
Since I wasn’t all that intelligent, the only option left to me was to be beautiful. I’d signed with Elite, and so I was going to be the best model in town. Impeccable, beyond reproach, utterly in keeping with what was expected of me. I was going to lose even more weight, learn to walk perfectly and do everything to ensure that my skin was an immaculate white. I was going to stack absolutely all the odds in my favour so that I would have a meteoric, explosive and dazzling career, because this was now my destiny, and it was up to me to grasp it by the horns.
So long as I managed to ‘get into the clothes’, obviously.
When, for the second day running, the scales stubbornly continued to read 52.9 and refused to go any lower, which they had been doing regularly since I’d started my diet, I cracked. I opened up to Mum, who always looked trim and sublime, no matter what. I’d never really broached the subject with her till then and she’d been watching me eating my fruit day after day without uttering a word. Naturally she did everything she could to reassure me: she told me that I was very beautiful, that I was already decidedly thinner than when they’d chosen me and that there was nothing to get worked up about, because I still had another month in which to lose that inch around the hips.
But I did go back onto the internet to look for some info on diets. All the websites talked about ‘plateaux’ – those times when, even if you stick strictly to your diet, your weight remains constant instead of dropping. If only I could have done a bit of sport, that would doubtless have helped me to get past the plateau, but all sport was forbidden. I did, though, permit myself a few lengths of the pool and I went to buy my fruit on foot so that I could get a bit of exercise – but only at the end of the day when the streets were in the shade.
It was the first time in my life that I hadn’t spent the summer at La Baule. Every year from the year dot we’d always got together there with my grandparents. I loved their cute little house, nestling in a garden awash with lavender and a stone’s throw from the beach. Granddaddy would take us shrimping and there was the smell of the sea and the seaweed. At teatime we would stuff ourselves on niniches, those long soft lollipops in all the colours of the rainbow, and large slices of brioche with redcurrant jelly, which was Nan’s speciality. Or else a nice slice of buttered bread copiously smeared with rillettes. Granddaddy was a real food lover! When I was 10, they stopped renting that house and took a large seafront apartment instead.
I was the one who first noticed that Granddaddy was trembling. I remember it very well: it was the year I turned 13. I’d decided to interview him about his life story, because I admired him and I wanted to know everything about him. For several hours every day, he spoke into my microphone about his childhood and his youth. After studying at the École des Arts et Métiers, his dream had been to become a master glazier or else an art teacher and to take over the stained-glass workshop that his great-uncle had bequeathed him. But his grandmother had been firmly set against it. And so he set aside his dreams of being an artist and became an engineer and surveyor instead, always telling himself that once he retired he would take up painting, for want of stained glass. He drew wonderfully well, perfectly even. But when he finally did have the time for it, his hands began to tremble. In the space of a few months, his Parkinson’s had put paid to his drawing.
That summer, Granddaddy had been too ill to enjoy the beaches of La Baule. And that was why we were now in Marseille, in this large, comfortable, one-storey house where he could get around more easily.
The more the days went by, the worse I felt. I was afraid of what lay in store for me, of not being up to it, of being separated from my family. And seeing Granddaddy in this state made me