The carriage doors were now closed at nightfall and I did not know the building code. I was too sick at heart, though, to not wait as long as necessary for the man I loved, as everything gave the impression that he was out. Singer Marcel Mouloudji, who lived down the street, spotted me when he was going home. We hardly knew each other, and the solicitude he showed me when offering his help warmed my heart. I reassured him as best I could and he left me, looking slightly worried. I began a long vigil that was only broken at seven in the morning when someone entered the building. I managed to slip in behind him and climbed the five flights to Jacques’ door. I sat down in front of it while mentally repeating what I had been ruminating on all night. When a woman is in love with a man who is famous and attractive, she should expect other women to fall into his arms and not judge if he succumbs to certain temptations. Presuming that this was a one-time thing, what happened during Zulawski’s film would not fail to happen again in later films. I could understand it, it was out of my power, and it would be better if we ended our relationship.
He arrived an hour later and my heart began pounding as he climbed the stairs without any hurry, carrying a black leather briefcase in which he probably had put a couple cigars and the film script. I was not only distraught because he was coming straight from another woman’s home, one who I thought might be more desirable than me and with whom he may have been in love, but also because I was the last person he expected to see in my pitiable state of the deceived, weeping woman, and catching him in the act could only annoy him. When he came face-to-face with me, not a muscle on his face quivered, as if he found my presence on his landing at this hour of the morning completely natural. Deep down I admired and envied the force of character that allowed him to never betray his emotions. Did he simply feel them with no need to express them? He invited me in, and I felt torn between the obligation to break things off and the devastating impression that I could not live without him. Sharing him was already destroying me; leaving him would surely destroy me. There I was in front of him, like a druggie needing a fix—one who after spending the entire night swearing to go cold turkey is ready to murder his mother and father once the drug is again within reach, if only to taste it one more time.
In contrast to me, Jacques is more sensitive than emotional. He is also someone who proceeds instinctively, does not like grandiose speeches, and never seeks to explain himself, especially when someone bids him to do so. Did he even listen to me when I presented my side and talked of leaving him? He only advised me to get a little sleep and when he joined me to do the same, showed me that I still turned him on. This was his way of telling me that nothing had changed. He subsequently claimed that at Andrezj’s request a work meeting had been held that evening at Romy’s, which had been so interminable it had put him to sleep. He likely counted on my naiveté or weakness, because he was the first to know that a silence that allows doubt to continue is preferable to childish lies that fool no one. The “If you only knew…” that he would be content to throw out when I later, despite myself, alluded to this liaison, still bothers me today. What game had he been playing with me? What game had he played with her?
In June 1982, Andrezj Zulawski was interviewed about Romy Schneider, who had just died at the age of forty-three. He thought it worth mentioning her mad passion for a young actor who had come to inform her on the last day of shooting that their own relationship was over. According to Zulawski, the shock this gave her accelerated her physical deterioration—her alcohol problem was no secret to anyone. The press misrepresented everything, or almost. Better to look for the truth elsewhere. Beyond the boundless compassion the tragic way this great actress’s life ended inspired in me, the reading of an interview like that turned the knife in a wound that had taken a dozen years to scar over, as that is how much time it took before I could watch that film again.
Many years later, after many storms and periods of dead calm, after much heartbreak, but also much love on both our parts, when time had done its work and Jacques was struck down in turn, he suddenly said that he had never cheated on me. This statement would certainly have shocked the partners of his escapades, but I clearly got what he meant: what happened below the belt didn’t count. Too bad that he had waited until the point of no return to express, in his convoluted fashion, what he had felt for me so long, even if I half suspected as much. What really is too bad is that we cannot do without those things that don’t matter, at the risk of losing what does matter. This insoluble problem is as old as the world. I thought of Mireille. She always wanted to know how things were going in my life with Jacques and often took his side. Shortly after their marriage, Theodore had warned her that if he happened to find the female baker or florist on the corner attractive, that was none of her business. “All my life it has been difficult to make the transition from desire to respect,” Emmanuel Berl acknowledged. How can you be mad at the other person for being different from you, when that is the very thing that attracts people to each other? How can you believe you are so wonderful that you should be enough for him in all things at all times? Oddly enough, the heart cannot manage to follow what reason finds so easy to accept. Like crystal, it cracks or breaks at the first impact. From a simple misunderstanding, from such a little thing sometimes ….
Life resumed its normal course. This was difficult at the beginning. Jacques was not able to grant my wish to get together at least every Saturday night, which would have given me the strength to tolerate the situation. I realize better today that he did not have more than a two-day break to pull himself together and learn his script for the coming week. The smooth working order of this particularly difficult film also most likely depended on that of his relationship with Romy Schneider. The pressure was so intense that she could not even allow him one night with a woman desperate for proof of love and who he was unintentionally frustrating. One night when I was hitting bottom even harder than usual, I did something forbidden—at least in my opinion—I called his apartment at three in the morning. Against all my expectations, he picked up, but I could tell by his tone that he was not alone, especially when I heard the—eminently recognizable—voice of his famous partner asking him if he wanted her to leave. This new blow turned me so topsy-turvy that, once again going against my nature, I decided to respond favorably to the puppy dog eyes a great Italian artist had been making at me even though all I felt for him was deep admiration. I was most likely confusedly trying to establish a pathetic symmetry between Jacques and I of this kind: Italian star versus Austrian star. No one got wind of this digression, which was all the more pointless as polygamy—an essentially male thing—is totally foreign to me. Nevertheless, I got back a little of the self-confidence I had lost by inspiring in a man I found attractive the feelings time appeared to have stolen from the man I loved. But I was also ashamed by selfishly thinking of only my problems at the expense of the possibly sincere feelings of the other man. I also felt guilty for not treating him fairly, though he was married and there was no reason to deal gently with someone like my child’s father who was ready to cause deep pain to the woman he shared his life with in order to realize a fantasy. I cut things off very quickly.
I had made my happiness and balance so dependent on the birth of a child that I was now upset that I could not be satisfied with his presence. Everyone knows that during the first months of life, a baby sleeps most of the time, and your relationship with him, tender as it may be, essentially consists of changing, feeding, and rocking him. The last bottle was at one in the morning and the first at six, which made my nights quite short. And then the happiness of having this little being with you was inevitably accompanied by worries. One day when a loud noise occurred while he was sleeping, he did not wake up. Immediately fearing that he was deaf, Jacques and I made all sorts of loud noises that left him impassive, whether he was sleeping or not. At the height of anxiety, I called the pediatrician, who assured me that babies only react to rhythmic noises, which we had no difficulty verifying.
For four months, I forced myself to visit an average of two apartments a day with an eye to moving, but nothing was suitable. Tired of wasting my time this way, I resigned myself to stopping my efforts. I had barely come to this decision when a real estate agency contacted me about visiting a house in the Fourteenth Arrondissement. The price was way beyond my means, but the person at the other end of the line was so emphatic I acceded to his request. When I crossed the threshold of 13 Rue Hallé, despite the poor condition of the premises, I immediately felt that this was the place of my dreams. This was mainly because of a large living room that had a floor-to-ceiling glass wall overlooking the garden, among other things. When Jacques came to visit in turn, his reaction was just what I had expected. He had always dreamed of a garden—or a patio, if the first was not available—and the prospect of one helped him break with his bachelor ways.
It was at the beginning of 1974, I think, when, buoyed by the success of Personal Message, Michel Berger made me listen to “Je suis moi” as a possible new single. I liked the melody a lot—that of the verses especially, as the choruses were a bit pompous for my liking—but I really disliked the lyrics, starting with the title. I found it grotesque to sing: “Je suis moi / j’entends, je sens et je vois / Je suis moi / comme pour la première fois.”1 Michel did not keep his promise to improve his lyrics and I found myself at the recording session with the song just as he had presented it to me. Having repeated it assiduously in my corner, I was again caught by a couple wrinkles that caused me to trip over one or two notes. Matters stupidly degenerated between us. As I was on bottle time, the short duration of our sessions did not allow me to sing too late and we had agreed not to work past eight o’clock. When eight came around, the song was still not wrapped, and Michel asked me to keep going. Obviously, the combination of weariness and pressure made me sing worse and worse. Not seeing any exit from this impasse, I ended up complaining about the time and suggested that we resume the next day. Acting as if something had bitten him, he then accused me of acting like a diva, behaving a priori poles apart from my sensible, hard-working side, but people do not see you as you see yourself. Justified or not, his criticism wounded me to the point where I felt obliged to follow his commands. To make matters worse, he went to sulk in his corner, while I tried for the umpteenth time with only the help of the lovely Bernholc, who was distraught at being sandwiched between us. When he finally stopped sulking three hours later, Michel declared that everything he had heard was worthless and everything would have to be done over. I returned home, much more upset by his cold indifference than by his criticisms.
I recall that it was the next day that France Gall came to eat with us in a restaurant next to the studio. She was in such a sour mood, constantly sniping at Michel, that I was the last to believe the rumor that had spread a few weeks earlier that she and he were now a couple. Perhaps she was putting up a smokescreen, in the event I suspected something. Her very unpleasant attitude would have planted a suspicion in my mind, though, as it hardly matched the standards of professional behavior that she herself wanted and inspired. Perhaps she was protecting herself this way from a growing attraction? When the rumor was confirmed, I initially had a hard time understanding why she would leave Julien Clerc for Michel Berger, but a few reasons leaped to mind. Michel took France’s artistic ambitions with the seriousness he was known for and which they deserved. Her ambitions did not matter as much to Julien, in whose shadow she had lived with a great deal of self-denial. Furthermore, Michel was faithful and capable of giving his best to ensure his kindred soul’s fulfillment. But the main reason was that Véronique Sanson no longer needed him for the next stage of her career and their musical similarities formed a kind of handicap. France and Michel artistically complemented each other much better; he needed her as much as she needed him.
France’s departure made Julien so unhappy that he managed to extort three days from her in which to try to convince her to come back. Michel hit bottom at this time, convinced in advance that he had already lost the person he had managed to seduce so quickly. I remember this because it took place around May 1 and I was so affected by his pain that I had my heart set on bringing him a pot of lilies of the valley with a note that spoke about his complementarity with France and my conviction that she would come back to him. This feeling was based on the often unpredictable information provided by astrology, which he wanted nothing to do with, but which, in this instance, clearly spoke in his favor. I have always felt, though, that it was during these several days in hell that Michel composed and wrote his sublime song “Seras-tu là?” which came out a year later. Véronique Sanson thinks differently, and I don’t know which of us is better placed to know the truth. Perhaps each of us is partially right? It is quite likely that Michel was just as inspired by Véronique’s disappearance without any advance warning several months earlier as he was by France’s hemming and hawing, which gave new life to the earlier trauma. The record company executive Bernard de Bosson gave me a first pressing of this song before its release and it was hard not to cry when listening to it. This was not only because of the poignant beauty of the melody, but also the tone of the lyrics that twist the knife in the wound.
Hughes de Courson,2 the friend of Patrick Modiano with whom he wrote “Etonnez-moi Benoît” [Surprise me, Benedict], offered to produce my next album, which I was already working on and which I wanted to be more personal than the one before. As I am never too sure who I should turn to, I accepted. This was my only album constructed around what is pompously called a “concept.” It was called Entracte and tells, song after song, the successive phases of a one-night stand between a stranger and a young woman, who, abandoned by the man she loves, is looking to give him a taste of his own medicine. The idea that Jacques might hear this album and ask himself some unsettling questions about me stimulated me to the nth degree, but he hardly took any interest in what I did and probably never heard the pleas for help I was sending him in this disguised form. Luckily, because overexposing your own vulnerability most often backfires …. Wasn’t it far more important to sublimate my torment?
There are two compositions on Entracte by Catherine Lara that are titled “S’il avait été” [What Might Have Been] and “Il y a eu des nuits” [There Were Some Nights]. In them I revealed certain inadmissible things with a sharpness that still amazes me today. Of course Catherine was at these sessions. She had the art of relaxing the atmosphere as well as electrifying it. Having left for a few minutes to get something to eat, she came back, laughing, to tell us she had just swallowed a temporary tooth while eating a sandwich, which made me laugh so hard I cried. Several years later, when she was eating at my house with her companion of the time, we heard a strange small popping noise after she had bitten into a chicken leg. One of her teeth had fallen onto the ground. A situation like this is as comical to others as it is nightmarish to the person experiencing it and I dare hope Catherine has since found a new dentist!
Hughes de Courson had the excellent idea to ask Del Newman, who had written the string arrangements for Elton John’s Yellow Brick Road and Cat Stevenson’s Tea for the Tillerman, to write ours. I remember a man of an above-average human and spiritual quality. He radiated such kindness and humility, everyone loved him. His strings were magnificent and—a rare phenomenon—the musicians hired by Hughes to perform them stood up at the end of the recording to applaud his work and conducting.3 But if I have to choose one song from this album, of which I am still proud although it went nowhere, it would be “Fin d’après-midi” [Afternoon’s End]. This was one of my more recently inspired melodies and I could not figure out how to find a bridge for it. Jacques, who I asked for help, suggested one to me. Because I liked the harmonies better than the melody line, I made it an instrumental bridge. A young black musician, whose name I regret not noting down, played a formidable saxophone improvisation based on this interesting series of chords, which gave the song the dimension it was missing.
Jacques, Thomas, and I went back to Corsica that year with my mother. Thomas had barely begun to walk. One morning the village church bells began ringing in a disturbing way that, combined with the howling wind, was not at all conducive to peace of mind. I quickly went to tell Jacques something unusual seemed to be happening but he said it was perfectly natural for churches to ring their bells on Sunday. In reality, they were tolling the alarm and we learned that there was a fire a good distance away. But several minutes later, it was at our door and we took flight in the direction of Bastia. This was because if the situation grew worse, I would be able to get back to Paris with the baby easier there than in Calvi, where the planes would not take off when there was too much wind. This turned out to be a bad idea, because fire blocked the road before we reached our destination, forcing us to retrace our steps. At the Hotel La Pietra on the Île-Rousse, located on a rocky spit sticking into the sea, we found a makeshift room where we stayed anxiously waiting for news from Monticello, which a thick cloud of smoke hid from view. Like any time when the entire landscape is on fire and the wind is blowing at more than sixty miles an hour, the atmosphere was apocalyptic.
As soon as he could, Jacques returned to the house, where he met the neighbors who had courageously remained there to fight the fire that was directly threatening our respective houses. They were interesting, charming people that an old quarrel with the Billon-Périer family had prevented us from spending time with until then. As Jean and Madeleine Billon had left Monticello for Deauville, we had greater freedom of movement and were happy to make up for lost time with our helpful neighbors, thanks to whom our house escaped the flames that year.
Vandalism outrages me. When I learned that the fires were arson and heard that a champion for independence was boasting with ill-placed pride that Corsica would be a desert island but it would be a free one, my first instinct was to leave a region whose natives were stupid enough to set fire to their own homes and risk the destruction of their entire ecosystem. But Jacques told me things were more complicated than that, that there were problems everywhere, and that I should not throw in the towel at the first hint of trouble. He was right, of course, and there were a number of reasons for the various cases of arson, which generally had no connection: carelessness, pyromania, and agricultural reasons, as well as political, economic, and real estate reasons. This does not change the fact that in the seven years since I had come to Corsica there had not been a single problem with fire and that starting in 1974, a difficult year in many respects, all it took was a weather forecast of windy weather for fires to break out simultaneously in a number of places the firefighters could not reach.
My sister was then living with the boss of a small scandal press agency, a disreputable German who, when he lived in le Midi had, I don’t know how, tried to shift all his telephone charges onto those for my house in Corsica, where he and Michèle had stayed several times. He probably thought that I was as ditzy as a lot of artists and never paid any attention to what came out of my purse. He was not wrong, but my mother, who had quit her job as an assistant book-keeper to oversee my finances, was quickly alerted by the sudden, enormous rise in my bills. For her part, my sister had found nothing better than a job at Içi Paris and bombarded me regularly with tiresome requests. Long before Thomas’ birth, she had telephoned to tell me that her newspaper wanted to do a feature on Jacques and a young television hostess. “What do you think?” she asked me with a false candor that infuriated me. It was all I could do to not just send her packing and politely responded that it was not my place to make this kind of decision but Jacques’, thinking deep down he would categorically refuse. But when she managed to get a hold of him, she told him I knew all about it and was totally okay with her idea. He must have felt boxed in and the story was the headline for Içi Paris. Obviously, when I became pregnant, it was fully expected that I would grant this newspaper an exclusive on the news as well as photos of the birth, but I hung tough. There was also an inconceivable piece of blackmail that my mother, charged with the task of convincing me to agree to an interview with my sister’s companion’s agency, ended up revealing: if I refused, he had threatened to publish sensational revelations about Jacques’ personal life. I gradually reached the point where I could no longer tolerate this manipulative, unethical, and tactless couple.
The fire that had ravaged our corner of Balagne had barely been gotten under control when, to my sharp annoyance, I learned that my sister had shown up unexpectedly to interview me about the events. Jacques took a dim view of her arrival as well. He feared journalistic distortions as much as I, and mentioned the Corsican sensibility: some people might react quite badly to awkward statements about the fire and a scandal sheet was definitely the last kind of paper one would want dealing with a sensitive subject like this. So when Michèle, who had not bothered to ask me if her visit would be welcome, put me in the uncomfortable position of having to answer her questions, I outright refused. This was the start of some extensive bullying, in which my mother participated, whose leitmotif was that I should cooperate with my sister who did not enjoy all the benefits I had and who had trouble making ends meet. I had already shown my support by buying her a large studio in Montmartre, but that was no longer relevant. One day, they both ganged up against me so relentlessly that I hid in my room to cry. Sickened, Jacques joined me and took me in his arms. He offered to take me straight back to Paris if I wished. I ended up giving in to Michèle, but not without posing some conditions, which were not respected. She blamed that on the newspaper’s head editor. How many times have I felt like strangling her when I hear her say: “Françoise systematically says no to everything, but if you insist, she always ends up saying yes …” She attributed my attitude to weakness and being susceptible to persuasion, without imagining that I had been able to give priority to her interests, although with a heavy heart, over mine. Would I have behaved like she did if I had been in her place? I am tempted to say no, but that is only a mind game because nobody knows what he would do in a given situation if he never really has to face it.
To my immense relief, Michèle left a short time later to move permanently to Munich with her German fiancé, who Jacques had nicknamed the “Wild Boar.” From that time on, our relationship was confined to post cards at holidays and birthdays.
Since his first record, I had liked the gifted young English singer and songwriter Nick Drake, to whom the media inexplicably gave the cold shoulder. For this reason, when I was in his country I spoke to every journalist I met with all the enthusiasm his work inspired in me, in hopes of getting him more attention. He heard of what I was doing and surprised me by coming to the London studio where I was recording. He visited me several times, but the language barrier prevented us from communicating, unless that was a convenient screen to disguise deeper blockages in each of us. He would sit in a corner of the studio and stay there for hours, without saying a word, as if it was enough for him to know I liked his songs.
Nick’s excessive introversion bordered on autism. The photo on his record jacket shows him sitting down next to his shoes, as if he wanted to exorcise his personal discomfort by playing on it. Sometime toward the end of 1972, he telephoned me to let me know he was visiting Paris. I already had plans to go out with some friends that evening for dinner and to see Véronique Sanson at the restaurant of the Eiffel Tower. I had no choice but to bring him with me, which seems surreal when I think about it now. Not because of Véronique Sanson, whose immense talent was fed by an existential angst equal to his own, which I thought he’d find moving. No, it was because being in a public place where strangers were knocking back champagne and talking too loud was the last thing he would have wanted.
It was so odd that he would show up like this without warning, without once abandoning his total silence that I instinctively—and maybe mistakenly—respected. It is rather strange that he knew nothing about me and I knew nothing about him, and we did not try to get to know each other better. Did he expect something? A word, a gesture, a step? What brought him to Paris? Could he have come because of me? This last possibility never crossed my mind, and in hindsight I am surprised that I never questioned his visit. Perhaps it was the fear of rushing him … and the fear of hurting him.
At the end of 1974, his mother told me that he had died in his sleep because of an overdose, she thought, of medication. He was only twenty-six! Once past the turmoil this news plunged me into, I could not help but think that his death fit into the logic of the angst that was so visible in his being. Would he have lived longer if he had become a success? Or, on the contrary, was it because a part of him remained in limbo that success never came?
Someone sent me a letter from Mrs. Drake some years later. In the meantime, I had taken courses in graphology, most of the basic principles of which had stayed in my mind. I was emotionally moved by the beautiful handwriting of an intelligent, balanced woman who was full of warmth and life, and it raised additional questions about the roots of the anguish that had gnawed at her son. Maybe he was simply too sensitive, a tormented soul that everything affected with its full force? He could have been a pure soul that underestimated the difficulties of an earthly incarnation and went back up to heaven almost as quickly as he had come down, after giving the world some pearls of rare beauty it had not wanted.
We moved into 13 Rue Hallé in September or October. This large house had no working kitchen and the wallpaper of the two tiny bathrooms was falling from the walls in strips. But I had no regrets about leaving my apartment on the Île Saint-Louis where everything was handsome, Zen, and functional. Nothing could make me happier than the prospect of finally living with the man I loved and our irresistible little boy. A new life had begun.
1 I am me, I hear, I sense, and I see.
I am me, as if for the very first time.
2 Hughes de Courson is a French musician and arranger best known for his work with the electric folk group Malicorne. Many of his works combine electronic effects with baroque or medieval instruments—Trans.
3 I witnessed the same thing at sessions with Gabriel Yared; after recording the string section for his song “Mazurka”—a real gem—all the musicians spontaneously gave him a standing ovation.