‘It is Lady Luck.’17
My first paid job was as a reader for a publishing house. So I know all about manuscripts and what peculiar, repugnant, necessary, exciting things they are, inviting contempt and consideration in equal measure. I know the mystique surrounding those pages, those accumulating piles. I am familiar with the disillusionment and sadness that come from reading words that are just not right, that are as indigestible as food which doesn’t taste as it should. But sometimes, too, you feel your temples begin to throb and walls come tumbling down, when you read words that make a deep impression on you and help you to go on living.
Readers in publishing houses are a strange breed, somewhat wan, somewhat apart, somewhat feared; because the talent they have, their possessing ‘a good eye’ (in the same way as a person is said to ‘have a nose’ for things) is a gift: it’s a type of expertise that cannot be either passed on or explained – it’s as scary as witchcraft.
These are creatures wreathed in a slightly malodorous aura who loiter alone in the corridors with sheets of paper and folders under their arm, and such a one was François Le Grix, the reader at the publishing house of René Julliard in 1954.
He was nicknamed ‘Grixe’ or ‘the Grey Lady’ and, on account of that ridiculous moniker, I imagine him to be a tall, slender, colourless individual, made fun of by the others for wearing ‘a toupee which only he thought was undetectable’.18
François Le Grix is the first reader of Bonjour Tristesse on that thirteenth of January 1954.
Conscientious as ever, before he finishes his work for the day, in his fine hand – the handwriting of a schoolboy brought up under the Third Republic, who knows all his sous-préfectures by heart and can solve problems involving trains that pass one another – he writes this:
What Mademoiselle Quoirez has penned bowls along nicely without faltering. Hence we are prevented from noticing the numerous barbarisms that it would be appropriate to eradicate from such a pleasing text. In the very first line, I light upon the following: ‘To this strange feeling … I hesitate to apply the fine name of sadness.’ Not only does it lack euphony but the syntax also offends … At one point the author writes of ‘the hearing of that exaggerated laughter’ instead of ‘hearing that laughter’. I have underlined many of these infelicities, which the exercise of a little care would suffice to correct. The charm of the work, the rather particular spell it casts, produced by its mix of perversion and innocence, stems also from a complacent attitude to life being coupled with bitterness towards it, and from gentleness being coupled with cruelty. In places it is a poem as much as a novel, but without there being any break in tone or any false note sounded. Above all, it is a novel where life is depicted authentically and where the psychology, for all that it is daring, cannot be faulted, since its five characters, Raymond, Cécile, Anne, Elsa and Cyril, are boldly drawn and not to be forgotten in a hurry. The style of writing is in essence so classical that in quite a few instances the imperfect subjunctive would flow more naturally than the present subjunctive, which is rarely the case. But Mademoiselle Quoirez persists in not using it. Another example of a barbarism, and a rather curious one, concerns the book’s actual title, inspired by its final lines, where the author tells us that, with the advent of evening, a strange face appears to her which she greets with the words ‘Bonjour tristesse’. In that it is evening, would it not be better to say ‘Bonsoir tristesse’ and, furthermore, would not the title gain thereby?19
As if clinging to a talisman, I have retained all the reports I wrote when I was a reader. They are in a big grey box file which I keep archived in the bedroom I had as a child in my parents’ house. I would like to reread them all, one day. In amongst them is a report on a first novel that went on to be a great success. It had been written by a girl of my own age – twenty at the time – and I had been greatly struck when reading it. It was the first time I had read a manuscript that seemed to me to be undeniably both well written and likely to sell. So I had spoken up for it to the publisher, for whom I was working as an intern.
Some years later, at a dimly lit Parisian party, I ran across that same girl, who was now famous on account of her book. I was then working in a theatre on the Champs-Élysées. Needless to say, we were still both the same age as each other. But the success of her book had catapulted her into what seemed to me to be life as it was meant to be lived, whereas I was vegetating in the limbo of my own mere existence. I asked her for a light, and she obliged, but in an offhand way, without even bothering to look at me, so as not to lose the thread of the animated discourse with which she was regaling her male audience.
I said to myself, ‘You’re not looking at me and you don’t know who I am. Yet I was one of the fairies present round your cradle.’
I often think of that incident.
In doing so, I wonder which of the people who cross my path, their faces unknown to me, have nonetheless played a part in my life without my being the slightest bit aware of it.
What I find striking in the story of Françoise Sagan is that the fairies who were present round that little girl’s cradle, all those capricious fairy godmothers – toutes les capricieuses mères du destin – in whose hands her destiny lay and who played their part in the making of her fame, were all very elderly gentlemen.
First there was François Le Grix, then Pierre Javet and René Julliard, the publishing house trio. Next up were Mauriac, Blanchot, Paulhan, Bataille and then many others, a whole Senate’s worth of wonderful old men who covered their faces in dainty veils to grant the wish of a girl-child newly born.
But we are not yet at that point. We are still just at the point where the reader’s report from François Le Grix lands on the desk of Pierre Javet, editorial director at the publishing house of René Julliard, who, in turn, is shortly to be overcome with stupefaction (in the etymological sense of the word).
Before I recount what happened on the night of 16–17 January 1954, the night René Julliard read the manuscript of Bonjour Tristesse for the first time and wanted to publish it before he had even reached the last page, I must describe something that happened to me yesterday. It was such a strange thing that I wonder if I really did experience it, so strange that I could not say exactly what was going on.
I had decided to make an appointment with a clairvoyant, because, after I had written the episode with the fortune-teller, I reckoned that for me to meet a ‘real’ clairvoyant would be useful for the book and would make my description a bit less kitsch.
There are two sorts of writers. There are those who plumb their own depths to extract all the black gold they can find there and who, for that reason, are forced to live a life of asceticism. And there are those who need to experience things in order to write about them and who lose their way as they journey through life on the edge of a fantasy world, obliged to lead a kind of existence that sometimes proves fatal to them, as the wild ass’s skin does to the hero in Balzac’s story.
Be that as it may, I had made an appointment with the clairvoyant using the book as a pretext even though, probably, at an unconscious level, I wanted just as much to hear things about my personal life: my separation from the father of my daughter was looking as if it might be permanent and never in my life had I felt quite as lost as I did then. But instead of speaking to her about that, I put the following question: ‘I am writing a book at the moment. Can you see it?’ This is what I asked the clairvoyant when I met her in her studio near the Anvers Métro station, which in the fifties was the exact location – and I am not making this up – of the Pigalle carnival.
(What I am going to write next is the exact transcription of the notes I scribbled