Not wishing either to flatter her or to fill her with false hope, Jacques has told her that the book she has written is a nice little composition,6 not at all bad for a first novel. He agrees to help his little sister parcel up the manuscripts, while at the same time giving her a warning: you have to be patient, and very patient at that, if you want to get yourself published. He has friends, some decidedly more gifted than she is and others with better contacts in the publishing world, who are still waiting for replies. Françoise, he muses, will soon discover that life isn’t as cushy everywhere as it is in Boulevard Malesherbes. Little Kiki has been so spoilt and pampered by their parents, Pierre and Marie, that one day she is going to have to be surprised by the real world. But the later the better, he thinks, for at the end of the day he loves his kid sister more than he loves any other woman.
All the same, Jacques has been impressed by ‘Franquette’. No one really believed that she would write that mysterious book of hers so quickly. In places he has recognised literary influences: the ‘warm, pink’ shell like the ham in Rimbaud’s ‘At the Green Inn’; the words of Cécile, with their echoes of Musset’s character Perdican; the quotations from Oscar Wilde and the influence of Choderlos de Laclos. But he has no wish to discourage her; there is nothing more tiresome than critics. We shall see – after all, this is a child who has always got what she wanted, from no matter who.
After much debate, they settle on three publishers, Gallimard, Plon and Julliard. They put the typed manuscripts in big yellow folders and Françoise asks her brother if he will write her address on them. She feels sure that confident masculine handwriting will put the publishers’ readers in a positive frame of mind.
Françoise Quoirez,
167 Boulevard Malesherbes.
When he has written the addresses, Jacques has a thought.
Françoise really must put her date of birth on the manuscripts. His hope is that the idea of a little eighteen-year-old will touch the hearts of the readers and that when they return the manuscripts they will perhaps be less nasty in their accompanying letters.
‘What if we added the phone number too?’ suggests Françoise.
‘What for?’ asks Jacques.
‘In case they want to take me on immediately! In case they really, really like the book!’
‘No, Françoise, no. That would look silly. Publishers don’t phone you. They send a letter.’
But Françoise is insistent. She agrees to include her date of birth as long as they add the phone number. So, on all three copies, Jacques writes:
Françoise Quoirez,
167 Boulevard Malesherbes.
Carnot 59-61. Date of birth: 21 June 1935.
He suddenly feels very afraid for his little sister.
‘Whatever happens, if this one doesn’t get published, you will write another, won’t you?’
‘Yes, of course. It won’t be the end of the world.’
‘Not even a little bit, OK?’
‘I don’t write in order to get published, you know. I write because, first and foremost, it’s something I enjoy doing.’
‘That’s just as well.’7
Smiling, and as a parting shot before closing the door behind her, Françoise calls out to her brother, ‘But I shall get published!’
At that very moment, on that fourth of January 1954, a boy of the same age – eighteen, to be precise – is recording two songs. It costs him four dollars, which he pays for out of his own pocket, and he records them in a small studio specialising in the black soul music of Memphis.
The songs are ‘My Happiness’ and ‘That’s When Your Heartaches Begin’.
Both those kids, Françoise Sagan and Elvis Presley, are going to need shoulders broad enough to bear the weight of what they are going to become in a few months’ time: two idols pursued by frenzied crowds. But today they have quite simply done something, and it all stems from there. You never lose out by just doing something; there is a chance you might even win. You have to take on board the risk of winning, and the young do not realise just what the consequences of winning can be.
This is a book I have to write quickly, and it is taking shape and gradually coming into focus.
It is to be neither a biography, nor a journal, nor a novel. Let’s just call it a story.
The idea is that it’s the story of a girl, a very young girl, writing her first novel.
I will be cataloguing the various stages in the life of a budding author: her excitement, her fearfulness, her sense of anticipation.
My book will be about the progress of another book, from the moment the manuscript is sent off to the point at which it receives a literary prize. My plan is to focus on a few days in one year, the year in which the heroine’s life will be turned upside down. With every passing day and week, the anonymous teenager will be on her way to becoming a recognised writer.
If this were a made-up story, I would have to work on the issue of plausibility in order to get the reader to accept that certain incredible things can actually happen. I mean things like a book becoming a huge success while simultaneously causing a monumental scandal; I mean things like a girl who had not yet come of age becoming a social phenomenon and the most famous Frenchwoman of her era.
But that story is true. So my task is to understand and then explain to others how implausible things can suddenly happen in life. I have to be able to show how a book can explode on the scene like a bomb, how it can burst forth like springtime, how it can have an impact like the catastrophe in a Greek tragedy.
‘Françoise,’ says Jacques, ‘are you sure you won’t be sad if your novel isn’t published?’
‘I don’t know. We’ll see. I like writing.’
‘Why do you like writing?’ asks Jacques. He can see that his sister does not envisage being met with rejection, still less with indifference.
‘To write a novel is to construct a lie. I like telling lies. I have always lied,’ she answers laughingly. ‘Come on, wish me luck.’8
I visualise this girl in the Métro, sitting among other girls. They are all dressed just like their mothers, in long coats down to their ankles, Jacques Fath-style coats in dyed wool, or tweed coats. They wear little silk scarves and have their hair tied back, revealing the few pearls round their necks – there are no pierced ears. They are all dressed severely. It is an era when the transition from childhood to adulthood is a brutal one and there is nothing in between.
Like the others, Françoise is wearing a heavy coat and a red-and-white striped blouse buttoned all the way up. She could be anything from fifteen to thirty.
This is the last stage in her life when Françoise’s face is not the face of celebrity. These are the last weeks in the whole of her existence when she is still a girl like other girls, a girl of eighteen. She doesn’t know that there’s not much of the old life left for her, nor that everything is about to be turned upside down because of what she is carrying, like a cancer, under her arm. Those sheets of paper covered in words, typed up by a friend ‘because it’s neater like that’,9 are going to change her life for good.