The two teenagers were going to become the very best of friends.
They shared a love of literature and they both subscribed to the same principle, namely, that you should treat great matters as if they were of little account and small matters as if they were great ones.
It was something that Françoise had come to understand as a result of the carefree life she had led and that Florence had come to understand as a result of her sombre life.
What they didn’t know was that they were going to spend the next fifty years of their lives hand in hand and that it was all going to go by in a flash.
Françoise had read Proust, and Florence, Dostoyevsky.3 Between them they had the century wrapped up and they swopped books as others swopped taffeta frocks.
But on that first of January 1954, as day breaks over the Pont des Arts, they still barely know each other.
‘We must make a vow,’ says Françoise.
‘Fine,’ replies Florence.
And the vow the two girls make is one and the same: they vow that Françoise will find a publisher.
Meanwhile, in Rue de Montpensier, Cocteau, who is ill, falls asleep, as he does every night, thinking of the young man he has loved so much. He is thinking of Radiguet. He thinks of him every second of every hour. Radiguet goes on living in him. And goes on dying too.
For the second scene in this book, I would like to describe Françoise waking up in her childhood bedroom at her parents’ home in the elegant Monceau Plain district, at 167 Boulevard Malesherbes.
There, in a vast apartment from the Haussmann era, Pierre and Marie Quoirez, originally from the provinces, have installed their three children. As members of the bourgeoisie, they ‘both loved partying and had a liking for Bugattis. They drove round the roads at breakneck speed. My parents were youthful and up-to-the-minute.’4
Marie, the mother, is perfect. She is like a brown butterfly with blue wings and always impeccably turned out. She loves to laugh, loves going out, loves to make the most of everything the capital has to offer. Much later, Françoise will say of her that she did not live in the real world, that she was always somewhere else as she rummaged among her hats. But, for the moment, Françoise does not pay much attention to her mother. She has eyes only for her father, her ideal – Pierre. It was for him and by his side that she wrote her manuscript the previous summer, in just six weeks.
Françoise, of course, went to bed late the night before. She had been living it up with her brother Jacques. They had drunk whisky because, with whisky, you sink into a respectable melancholy that does not involve self-loathing – but, even so, this morning her eyelids seem full of grit.
Since daybreak, several people have gone into Françoise’s room. The first had been Julia Lafon, the girl from the plains of Cajarc, the limestone plateaux in the Lot. She is the family’s housekeeper and she comes in to gather up some blouses from Weill’s ready-to-wear collection. Next comes Marie Quoirez to encourage her younger daughter to get up at a suitable hour for a young lady of her age. But, oh well … she’s got the rest of her life to get up early.
Pierre, who is an engineer and the technical director of a factory, merely opens the door to look at his big girl sleeping. He remembers stroking her head when she sat on his lap in the Jaguar as a tiny child, her little hands on the wheel.
A yellow pillow lies on the ground, like a block of fresh butter. It’s the biggest pillow in the house and Françoise makes sure she has it so that she can read late into the night, comfortably propped up against the wall. The bedside table has a glass top, strewn with magazines and piles of books.
At the foot of the bed, on a fringed rug, an enormous record player is positioned at just the right distance so that Françoise only has to stretch out her arm, without getting out of bed, to turn her records over. On it I picture the Billie Holiday sleeve where you see that wonderful face, with a large flower behind the ear and pearls round her neck, just like Frida Kahlo.
The teenage girl, asleep on this morning of 4 January 1954, whose parents still call her by the pet name of ‘Kiki’, is far from imagining that in the not too distant future Lady Day will sing for her, in her presence, and will hug her and talk to her as a friend.
In order to put the finishing touches to this tableau – this imaginary representation of Françoise waking up – I have to decide what books will be lying on the bedside table.
Because this is the room of a girl who has set her sights on becoming a writer, I choose A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.
I search for the book on my shelves in order to reread certain passages that I would like to quote here.
I study Woolf’s words, wondering what Françoise Sagan would have made of them. It’s like rediscovering a book you have just given as a present: putting yourself in your loved one’s shoes, you wonder what their feelings will be when they read it.
Yes, it’s clear that Françoise Sagan loved this book. I have to select two or three sentences from it, although I would like to include them all.
‘Why did men drink wine and women water?’
‘Of the two – the vote and the money – the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.’
‘Intellectual freedom depends upon material things’ or, again, ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’5
The pages of A Room of One’s Own bring a lump to my throat because I am reminded that when last I read the book I had dreams of becoming a writer and I wondered if one day I would have the necessary strength and courage.
Then my eyes light upon the very first page:
A Room of One’s Own
Virginia Woolf
Translated by Clara Malraux
Reading these words, I feel the veins in my neck throb, just as they do when you find something by chance that you hadn’t been looking for: a hidden love letter not intended for you; a 500-euro note just when you are short of money; or the offer of a trip when you want to get away from someone.
Clara had translated Virginia Woolf. That is, Clara Malraux, the mother of Sagan’s best friend.
So I was fully justified, justified at least in placing that book on Françoise’s bedside table. And why not even a copy with a dedication from the translator? ‘To Françoise, who will one day be a writer.’ For that is what her daughter had told her a few weeks previously, having just read her friend’s manuscript at a single sitting: ‘Françoise is a writer.’
Now that I have set the scene, with the books, the music and the blouses, I can wake Françoise up. I can get her to rub her eyes like a child, as she does in a photograph taken in Saint-Tropez in which she is wearing a checked nightdress. Then, in the corridors of her parents’ apartment, she goes in search of her brother, who is her best friend as far as boys are concerned. Jacques Quoirez is twenty-seven. He has gone off to London to ‘get experience’ in a business there but he comes back to Paris for the end-of-year festivities. I am struck by the photographs of him that I have found in trawling through archives on the internet. He looks nothing like Françoise – you wouldn’t think they came from the same family.
Jacques has read his little sister’s manuscript.