While Jacques was shooting one film after another, I was doing the same with albums. I recorded Gin Tonic in 1980, Tamalou in 1981, and Tirez pas sur l’ambulance in 1982, all under the leadership of Gabriel Yared. Our professional relationship remained tense. For Gin Tonic, my dear producer had gotten into his head the idea of making me sing a song titled “Jazzy Retro Satanas,” written specifically for this, alongside a large jazz orchestra. This kind of thing typically repulsed me, as I am only interested in lyrics and melodies based on emotions—painful ones preferably—and I have nothing to give in songs of this nature. But this album had even worse things: three songs made to order—as in the order of the musical costumes Gabriel and Jonasz wanted to see me wear—“Juke Box,” “Bosse-bossez bossa,” and “Minuit, minuit.” The musical introduction of the last song ended in a break, after which I had to leap straight into the void while singing: “Minuit, minuit, faut q’j’me sauve qui peut,”1 over a syncopated beat.
I had not hidden my reservations about singing something so remote from my moods and aptitudes from Gabriel. Unsurprisingly, I was not able to pull this off. I had begged him to drop this song, as well as the other two I mentioned, but he decided I was intentionally failing. This was not the case and it is my worst studio memory. As unimaginable as it might seem, I had to repeat this cursed first phrase for six hours without success, in the presence of a stubborn Gabriel who did not believe I was really trying. In comparison, Michel Berger’s sulking was a mere trifle. As the hours added up, I became increasingly convinced I should end my singing career once and for all and hit bottom.
After he realized how thoughtless he had been, Gabriel gave me a small, fancy tape recorder as an apology. I submitted to his wishes, as it seemed this was the price to pay to sing one of the most beautiful songs ever: “Que tu m’enterres” [May You Bury Me]. He first made me listen to it while saying that he had written it for me. Because he didn’t dare show it to me, he then recorded it himself. Being the first person to perform a great song is not very important to me and because this song was such a good match, I insisted on being allowed to sing it. On the eve of the vocal session, fearing I would not be equal to this masterpiece, I arranged to sleep in a small room where I felt sure nothing would wake me, including the cats who had free run of the house and sometimes threw up noisily between two and four in the morning. This did not work out at all. It was one of those rare nights during which, tortured by stage fright, I was unable to close my eyes for more than a second. Despite my exhaustion and my growing apprehension, I did not have any vocal problems. I need time to become familiar with a song, and it is only after I have sung it a few times that I begin to find pleasure in it. I had hoped to sing “Que tu m’enterres” for the entire afternoon, but after three takes, just when I was beginning to feel in my element, Gabriel decided he had what he needed. I insisted we continue a little longer, to correct a disjointed phrase among other things, but more to prolong the pleasure I took from Gabriel’s arrangement and its melody, for which Michel Jonasz had written some poignant lyrics. Unyielding, my tyrannical producer decreed that doing another take would be at the expense of the emotion and I regretfully conceded. I have to admit, however, that too many takes will lead to a mechanical performance. It encourages the tics all singers exhibit when they allow themselves to be so carried away by a piece of music that they begin listening to themselves sing and more or less forget the content of the lyrics.
During this same time, Jacques was working in Sauve qui peut la vie [Every Man for Himself], which was directed by Jean-Luc Godard. While he liked and respected this director, he also viewed him as a real piece of poison. After hearing my wailing about the sessions with Gabriel, he claimed he would get my revenge by heartily recommending him to Godard for the film score. This was a private joke, of course, and he wouldn’t even have lifted his little finger if he were not fully convinced of Gabriel’s talent and expertise. At the same time, he was sure that Godard would put Gabriel through a psychological ordeal just as harsh as the one about which I was complaining. This was how Gabriel was able to enter into the highly select circle of film score composers—through the front door. Every year he sends Jacques a box of cigars for his birthday, to which he attaches a small note with the heading: “To my benefactor.” When I saw the 1996 Oscars on television, I could hardly contain my joy when Gabriel received the Best Music award for the score he wrote for Anthony Minghella’s film, The English Patient.
While his wife Nathalie took care of Pascal Jardin, who was suffering from the Hodgkin’s Disease that would soon kill him, Jean-Marie left for the United States, where he lived for the next twelve years making commercials. I now had to make my way without him. For the album jacket of Gin Tonic, I allowed myself to be swayed by a proposal from a crew who worked for Façade, a trendy magazine with small print runs whose lack of taste and bias for kitsch should have sounded every alarm bell in my head. The mock-up depicted an enormous block of ice, on which I could be seen sitting very small. I liked the originality of the idea, the aptness of its symbolism, and its elegant type treatment. Alas, when I got to the photo session, I saw with horror that I was expected to sit inside an atrociously cheap refrigerator plunked down in the middle of an equally mediocre room. In dismay, I began railing against the deception I believed I was a victim of, but it was too late. I grudgingly lent myself to the demands of the photographer of what would be one of my worst cover photos. The ruse that consists of giving the green light to an attractive project that turns out to have no relationship with the promises made at the beginning is, alas, more commonplace in show business than elsewhere. This made me realize how lucky I had been to have Jean-Marie to rely on, as well as Andréa Bureau, who worked for the Filipacchi Group and created the layouts of all my album jackets with equal talent and affection.
Between recordings, I continued pursuing my astrological activities. Jean-Pierre Nicola asked me to collaborate on a new collection of books on the zodiac signs launched by Tchou Editions. The idea was to entrust each book on a given sign to an author born in that sign. As there are quite a few Capricorn astrologers and, in this instance, Joëlle de Gravelaine had taken this sign, I had to fall back on my rising sign: Virgo. Lack of time prevented me from being able to guarantee completion of all the work involved in the writing of this kind of book. Jean-Pierre introduced me to Béatrice Guénon, a very friendly astrologer born under the sign of Virgo, and we shared the work. For the chapter on the personalities of the sign, we decided to interview several celebrities directly. This seemed far more lively and striking than the umpteenth theoretical presentation.
Reading The Story of O a few years earlier had both overwhelmed and dazzled me. This novel goes far beyond the context of erotica as it primarily deals with mad love and frustration, and does so with a rare degree of subtlety and depth. The exceptional beauty of the language has made it a masterpiece of French literature. For a long time it was rumored that the author of this novel was none other than the publisher Jean Paulhan.2 But I was certain that only a woman could have explored the twists and turns of the female heart and feminine desire with such acuity. Pascal Jardin confided to me that behind the pseudonym of Pauline Réage, which had led many people to go astray in conjecture, was in reality a very discreet woman named Dominique Aury who worked at the La Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF). He even gave me her telephone number, which I was satisfied to simply jot down, never dreaming I might use it one day. A short time later, I became thoroughly engrossed in reading the little book O m’a dit [O Told Me], which was a long interview with Pauline Réage by Régine Desforges. In light of some of the admissions she made, particularly those having to do with submitting to discipline, physical disgust,3 and self-mastery, and also because of her need for concealment and the extreme modesty of her personality, I gradually became convinced that she had been born under the sign of Virgo.
Overcoming my shyness, I telephoned her to share my intuition and asked if I could interview her for the book on Virgo—if my intuition was on the mark. “The problem,” she responded, “is that I was born under the sign of Libra” But when I looked into the actual day, I learned, while feverishly consulting my ephemeris, that this was the day on which the signs changed. Only the exact hour of her birth would allow me to know if it took place at the end of Virgo or at the beginning of Libra. She then told me the name of the village in which she had been born so I could contact someone in the records department to send me this valuable information. But no Dominique Aury was listed in the files of the town hall office employee I had at the other end of the line and I had to call her back. Dominique had forgotten that this name was also a pseudonym and she gave me a third name, which proved to be the right one. This allowed me to establish that she was definitely born when the sign of Virgo was nearing its end. In our Northern latitudes, at the precise moment when the Sun leaves the zone that corresponds to the last sign of summer in our solar system and enters the first sign of autumn, the day-night ratio undergoes a reversal. In this case at 29° and over of Virgo, the length of the day still prevails a little over that of the night, whereas at 0° of Libra, night slightly outweighs the day. As a symbol of the self, the day at the end of Virgo’s course encourages a retiring dynamic that is expressed by self-protective reflexes, while the night—symbol of the non-self—that starts blossoming in Libra goes hand-in-hand with an expansive dynamic that assumes the form of associative reflexes founded on socialization.
The Story of O touched me so strongly and the author’s style was of such high quality that I was literally petrified when I met Dominique Aury, whose physical appearance only made me feel even more ill at ease. This may be because I found the personality of O to represent the quintessence of femininity and therefore was not prepared for her creator to have the austere and masculine appearance that many elderly women possess. Rightly or wrongly, the ambiguous aspect of this appearance has always inspired in me a particular image of female homosexuality.
She wished to answer my questions spontaneously, and requested that she be allowed to remove any details that might reveal her true identity. In my letter thanking her after these corrections, I evoked the great author she was as well as the emotion I felt on reading her book. I still have the handwritten response she sent me on May 22, 1978, in which she assured me she had never received such an invigorating letter and still hardly dared believe it. “I have no wit, no imagination … all I did was state the obvious,” she claimed during our interview.
When he was five, Thomas attended the neighborhood school, quite close to our house. Like most children, he displayed great resistance at the announcement of this change in his life, constantly stating throughout the summer vacation that he did not want to go to school. On the first day, he clung to me, weeping, until a teacher tore me from his arms and ordered me to take off. But he adapted quite quickly, especially after he managed to interest his entire class in his current craze—dinosaurs—and his teacher considered bringing them to the Museum of Natural History at the Botanical Gardens, which we had already visited several times to admire the reconstructed skeleton of a diplodocus.
I had planned to let him stay in public school, but parents who had a child in one of the higher grades told me the teachers were often absent and advised me to send Thomas to a private school. I telephoned the Alsatian School where I was told that there was a four-year wait for a place. Just as I was about to hang up, and although I had never mentioned my name, the person at the other end of the line thought it wise to explicitly tell me that I should not even dream of getting someone to pull some strings for me and recommended the nearby Collège Sévigny. Several years later, when I told a friend this story, she could not hide her surprise. “But you can only get in there by pulling strings!” she exclaimed. “My father was on the administrative board and, if you had contacted me, Thomas would have been accepted immediately.”
With its black walls, cramped recreation yard, and lack of space, the Collège Sévigny seemed far less attractive to me than the Alsatian School, whose classic nineteenth-century buildings and gardens visible from the entrance had seduced me. Before enrolling, I brought Thomas to meet the headmaster and take a look at the premises. He did not balk this time, saving his litany of protests against changing schools for summer vacation. But in the car on the morning he went back to school, he told me with some malice that all things considered, this new school “felt” fine. Did he have a sixth sense like his father? Whatever the case may be, it did not take him long to adapt and make new friends. He and his little classmates complained that the schoolwork was not interesting, which seemed entirely topsy-turvy to me. The headmaster looked at this as a grade-level problem and decided to move the most intelligent students into the next grade. This is how, like his mother, Thomas got his diploma at sixteen, after a fairly painless education, as he was quite talented, particularly in mathematics—for which neither his father or I had any aptitude.
It must have been in 1980 when the press agent for Pathé-Marconi, the record company Gabriel had me sign with, informed me that she had turned down a request for me to appear on Gilbert and Maritie Carpentier’s variety show. They were the best producers of that time, and the show was to feature the stars Daniel Balavoine and Louis Chedid, both extremely promising newcomers. I not only would have loved to meet them, but having been requested by either of them was a dream come true. The press agent set matters right, and I was introduced to Louis at the production site. As I was about to leave, I told him how much I regretted the shortness of these on-set meetings, which were often one-time encounters, and we set a date to see each other again. By chance, he lived a mere five minutes away from Rue Hallé, on one of those lovely little streets that run perpendicular to the Parc Mountsouris, with their pretty houses surrounded by gardens. He lived with his wife, the adorable Marianne, and daughter, Émilie, and a boy, Matthieu,4 who was almost the same age as Thomas. For almost ten years, we ate together at the end of the week, at least once a month, sometimes at their house and sometimes at ours. While our children played together after bolting down their meals in five minutes, we would relax around a rare roast beef and a good bottle of wine. One afternoon, I brought the children to the amusement park. Thomas was still quite young and sometimes quite willful. I recall how I was both struck and touched by the infinite patience Matthieu and Émilie, who were only two or three years older, showed him. The Chedid family owned a house near Bastia, and one summer Matthieu came to spend a few days at Monticello. His stay was cut short by the customary problems with fires that rightfully alarmed his parents, but I can still see us shopping together at L’Île-Rousse. Although he was only knee-high to a grasshopper, he absolutely insisted on carrying my grocery bag, which was much too heavy for him.
Once I had acquired a certain amount of fame, my father, who tenaciously kept our existence a secret when my sister and I were little, was unable to resist the human temptation to tell those around him that I was his daughter. I was still living on the Rue du Rocher when he telephoned me in tears to tell me that he had been living for some time with a young woman, with whom he had a daughter, and that both had suddenly left him with no forwarding address. Life always managed to take his children away from him, he lamented, after begging my aid. More annoyed than feeling sorry for him, I immediately told my mother about it. Her rock-solid pragmatism allowed her to immediately detect the vagaries and inconsistencies in these inopportune revelations, as well as question the reality of this relationship. As if to only add more fuel to her fire, my father became increasingly evasive when I tried to get the information that would have allowed me to find the young woman in question. Had he smelled out my mother’s involvement or not? In any case, the matter rested there.
I sometimes went to see him, and I recall that I brought Jacques, Patrick, and Jean-Marie with me in turn. He often praised their merits while regretting I had built my life with Jacques, whom he liked less, probably because he was the least civilized of the three. He lived in an apartment on Rue Boileau, which would have been nice if he had taken the trouble to maintain it. My mother often mentioned the house he owned in Montmartre, 15 Rue Ravignan, and lamented how he had literally let it rot. The dishes were never done on the Rue Boileau, much less the housekeeping. There was rust everywhere, as well as other less appetizing substances, and the toilets stank. My father had more than enough money to pay a maid, but he preferred to live in the vilest filth rather than part with a single penny. During his final years, he dressed like a tramp and sympathetic neighbors brought him food, thinking he did not have enough money to feed himself. One day when I was dining with him, an unusual gleam flashed through his eyes when he told me that he had three bank accounts, and gave me documents concerning them in case something were to happen to him. But, he insisted, I should not tell my mother about them for love or money, and even less my sister.
I never kept secrets from my mother and handed the precious bank account details over to her without delay. She immediately got it into her head to have my sister and I officially acknowledged by our father so that we would have rights to his inheritance, and began visiting him regularly on the pretext of cleaning his apartment, to show him his moral obligation to take such a step. At first he did not want to hear anything on this matter, but he eventually ceded to her persistent harassment. He had an electric piano in his apartment that he played sometimes. One day my mother made a clumsy movement while dusting it and knocked it over. “Get out,” he ordered, pointing to the door. “I never want to see you again.”
“Your mother is truly devoted,” he confided to me a short time later, “but as soon as she gets here, I want her to leave.” I learned from my grandmother—who he could barely stand—that my mother showed up unexpectedly one day when he was having lunch at Aulnay. This occurred shortly after they had broken up and I must acknowledge that my mother could be a real dragon who scared everyone, including her own children. This was probably how she appeared then to my father, because he rushed into my grandparents’ room, which overlooked the garden, and jumped out the window, at the risk of breaking a limb, to escape her. My mother suffered greatly from his miserliness, whose pathological nature I only realized later, but to hear him talk, he was only a big softy. When he was still in love with her and she refused to see him, he would sing over the telephone: “I am alone this evening with my pain …”
What fallacious pretext had made me accept meeting with a young man who I disliked at first sight? What lie had he invented? I no longer remember. We were sitting in the music room at Rue Hallé and his speech was so confused that I thought I was dealing with a deranged individual that I needed to get rid of as quickly as possible. He accused himself of stealing from me and I was wondering what he was getting at, until, one thing leading to another, I eventually grasped that my father was giving him money. Fed up, I told him that it was none of my business and that his scruples were groundless. Obviously this sorry individual was seeking to worm his way into my good graces, but his motives were obscure to me then and remain so. I cut our conversation short.
The truth came out a short time later thanks to one of Jacques’ friends who sold luxury cars. I forget the connections that allowed me to learn that the young man in question had recently been showing off in his garage, bragging about how my father was supporting him. The revelation that someone is a homosexual is not shocking in itself, even if it is your own father, but the fact that at the age of almost eighty he was picking up young guys turned my stomach, despite the loneliness and suffering such degraded behavior implied.
Whenever I went to Rue Boileau, I had to take all sorts of precautions to get my father to open his door. He was obviously scared of something or someone, and the reasons became clear to me after I became aware of his lifestyle. He was found one day lying unconscious in a pile of his own shit. The investigation established that he had been bludgeoned by one of his “victims” looking for money, as shown by the gutted chest of drawers in which fishnet stockings and other accessories were discovered. He died in the hospital on February 6, 1981, the morning of the day I had intended to see him, and I felt a flood of relief at the thought of escaping the sight of his degradation—my mother had warned me that he had long hair and not all his marbles. Psychoanalysis has established a relationship between fecal matter and money. It seemed someone who had come to worm out of him what he had so jealously kept hidden had bumped my father off. His death therefore appeared to me as an amazingly abridged version of his life. As I have been given ample opportunity to observe since, it is not rare for the way a person dies to have a striking connection with the way he lived.
My father left behind some unpublished writings on his childhood and the years of the Occupation, but not the slightest word about his personal life as an adult. In 1947, his brother Robert, who was a rear admiral, published with Œuvres françaises a biography of Father Victor D, who died at Dachau on January 12, 1945. Thumbing through it recently, I stumbled upon the passage that described how in 1928 his superiors sent this exemplary uncle I never knew to teach at Evreux. I had sometimes heard Jacques’ father mention that the school of this town had been run by one of his own brothers. At the very moment I was saying to myself how extraordinary it would be if I were to stumble upon the name Dutronc, I read the following lines: “”He [Victor D.] has no claim to wrest the baton from the excellent choirmaster his friend M. Dutronc, but he will assist him in every way he can …”
At the end of the summer vacation in 1980, while Gabriel and I were contemplating our next album together, for which I had written, among other songs, the text of “Voyou, voyou” [Hoodlum, hoodlum] to a very pretty melody by Louis, I was contacted by Pierre Lescure, who was then managing the Radio Monte Carlo (RMC) station. He wanted to entrust me with the daily horoscope as well as a weekly show. I did not have the time to invest in an album and assume all the work such a proposal would involve at the same time. So I asked Jean-Pierre Nicola to collaborate with me; this would help him make a little extra money, and it would help advance my understanding of astrology while circulating his revolutionary ideas on a much larger scale than a specialist publication.
My domestic and professional activities, on top of recurring personal turbulence, was conducive to insomnia and allowed me little time to rest. Even vacations gave me no opportunity. The difficulties of living with my mother had been circumvented in a way that still makes me feel guilty when I think about it. Her boundless self-sacrifice moved her to suggest that she spend the summer on Rue Hallé to watch the house, while we brought Jacques’ parents to Monticello, as they were more easy-going than she was. There were at least six or seven of us at the table every day, and sometimes fifteen when we had guests. A part-time housekeeper spared me the big chores, but I had too many things weighing on me. Of course, I was happy to keep the household going and to have my close friends around me, but at the same time I was regretting deep down that I only saw Jacques now in a familial setting that was hardly ideal to rekindling the flame between us. I had not yet realized that even a sexpot could not fight back those implacable enemies of time and habit so clearly condemned by Michel Berger in “Seras-tu la?” Serge Gainsbourg repeated at every opportunity Balzac’s claim that in love there is always one who suffers and one who is bored. My impression of not inspiring Jacques as much as he inspired me tormented me constantly and, aware that the suffering of one could only dampen the ardor of the other, I knew of no way to break free of this vicious circle.
Jean-François Adam, under whose direction Jacques and Isabelle Huppert had made the film Retour à la bien-aimée [Return to the Beloved], came to spend several days in Corsica. Apparently at loose ends, he often kept me company. He would sit at the bar in the kitchen while I washed dishes and we talked about Françoise Dorléac5 (among others.) One evening, when some sign of animosity or indifference on the part of the head of the household hurt me more than usual, I took the car on a sudden impulse in the delusional hope of worrying him and to get a brief respite from my burdens. When I returned, Jean-François, who had remained waiting for me, displayed an anxious solicitude that touched me deeply—especially because of how lonely I was feeling. He committed suicide several months later, which I blamed on his professional difficulties—his film had not been a success—combined with personal problems. The veil of mystery that had surrounded his death was slightly lifted long afterward, I have forgotten how: an impossible and inadmissible love had most likely been the last straw needed to move from thought to action. I feel dizzy when I think of the relentless suffering that must have been tormenting Jean-François while we were discussing everything and nothing. His cheerful friendliness let nothing show through, completely distorting our relationship as it was impossible for me to suspect the violent and conflicting emotions tearing him apart.
After he saw Jacques in Rouffio’s Violette et François, Maurice Pialat told me on the telephone that he considered Jacques to be the greatest actor of his generation. He approached him for his film Loulou, which contained some daring scenes that alarmed Jacques, and the role went to Gerard Depardieu. Pialat also made a brief trip to Corsica. I especially remember the very dark rings beneath his eyes, the stigmata of his chronic insomnia, as well as his tendency to denigrate everything and everyone with a loquacity that was his alone. No director or actor ever found grace in his eyes, and it was quite colorful to hear him unload his dissatisfactions this way—insofar, of course, as he lumped himself in with all those he badmouthed so heartily.
At the same time, he was extraordinarily kind. In 2002, when the deteriorated state of his health was no secret to anyone, chance found us—Pialat and I—eating at the same restaurant one evening. He dragged his feet to my table to ask me to give his excuses to Jacques for treating him badly. He had made some very cutting remarks about his acting talent after Jacques received a César6 for his performance as Van Gogh, as if he was annoyed with Jacques for receiving this kind of acknowledgment instead of him. I used all my persuasive powers to assure him that Jacques loved him a lot, understood him, and held no grudge against him, as I knew it was perfectly true. Tears sprang into his eyes and he went back to his seat. The news of his death reached us a short time later.
At the beginning of 1981 a small lump appeared near my right armpit. Oddly enough, as I am usually overly alarmed by this kind of thing, I did not worry about it, thinking it would disappear as quickly as it had come. This was not at all what happened and, one Saturday when we were dining together, I asked my sister-in-law Christiane, who underwent radical surgery for breast cancer at the age of thirty, if she remembered her first warning signs. She had only felt a growth the size of a pea when she was washing herself, she answered. My tendency to always imagine the worst plunged me immediately into the throes of unimaginable torment. I promised myself that if I got through this okay I would take steps to ensure I was no longer overburdened with work and would no longer spend my life making myself unhappy for no good reason.
First thing Monday morning, I called my gynecologist Dr. C, and got a mammogram that very afternoon. The doctor who came to speak to me after the examination was reassuring, but when the results confirmed his impression, his secretary said that Dr. C. would never leave me hanging like that. I should make an appointment immediately with a surgeon to remove this suspicious growth, for only extensive examination after it had been cut out would provide a sure diagnosis. The surgeon recommended to me saw me at once and asked me right off if I took the pill or if I already was following a hormonal treatment.7 The operation was scheduled for a week later, although I had to take care of my shows on RMC and the recording of my album À suivre … had just started.
No longer imagining the worst but not ruling it out either, I began wondering what would happen to Jacques if I did not wake up from anesthesia, as I was the owner of our homes in both Paris and Corsica. I consulted a lawyer, who briefly explained to me why it would be a good idea if we got married. When I repeated the lawyer’s observations to Jacques, he suggested that we get married in Corsica after my operation. This way, he said very kindly, we could throw ourselves into something more cheerful than the worries and inconveniences connected to my health problems. Neither of us were fans of marriage, and a photo had been taken of us for Paris Match as the lead to a story on famous unmarried couples. How could we have foreseen that it would no longer be current fifteen days later?
When I left for the clinic, I had taped several shows in advance for RMC and could lean on Gabriel’s shoulders for the recording sessions. A fibroadenoma the size of a walnut was removed from my breast, and I woke up from the operation feeling extremely sore where the cut had been made. When I returned home and was about to leave for Corsica, I learned that Thomas, most likely “molded” by his maternal grandmother, refused to miss class to attend his parents’ wedding. Apparently less than thrilled by this official consecration of our relationship, my inveterate spinster of a mother asked me with an annoying formality to be very careful not to get married under common law.8 At the time this was the least of my worries, and I thought it was quite petty. Sick of arguing about this with her, I ended up promising that I would follow her advice. It was only much later that I grasped how well-founded her reasons were and I am grateful for her vigilance.
The marriage took place on the eve of April 1, 1981 and was a kind of condensed version of my relationship with Jacques. I no longer remember what reason he gave, but I had to travel there without him. I had only invited my witnesses: Jean-Pierre Nicola, accompanied by his wife Yen, as well as Gabriel, who came with his pretty fiancée of the time, Muriel. Jacques the producer and Yvette Étiévant, the agent for Jacques the actor, would join us. Other pals of Jacques were invited and our Corsican friends, François and Mimi Paoli, who owned a butcher shop in L’Île-Rousse, took care of the buffet that followed the ceremony—which was only a civil ceremony. At the moment we went to the town hall, I had an altercation on the doorstep with my future husband. Not only had he not given any thought to the wedding rings9—the sole jewel that finds favor in my eyes—and this sign of his casualness was painful, but he had arranged to bring only our witnesses. Given my inability to tolerate large groups, I disliked having to share him all the time with his buddies, but in this instance leaving all these friends who had taken the trouble to come from Paris behind seemed unthinkable and my exasperation with him reached its peak.
I won my case, and the mayor had us sign our marriage contract for better and for worse (much of which was already behind us) in the presence of all our guests. The evening provided an even larger illustration of what our relationship had been. I spent it talking with my friends while he talked with his. There were several delightful moments; the one I best remember is the humorous talk of my friend Fanfan the shepherd—his brother was and is the mayor of Monticello—as well as the brown nougat wedding cake that was almost impossible to cut. Between the cold cuts, the wild boar, and the cakes, all the food was too heavy for me, but that did not matter. I was happy that my health problem seemed to be behind me, happy to be married to the man I loved and desired more than anyone in the world. Nothing else mattered, even though I was sorry that our little Tom was not with us. My recent operation had weakened me and I went up to bed around one in the morning hoping that my “new” husband would not be long in joining me there. From one last glass to another last glass, he did not make it until three. Nothing had changed. His proximity electrified me, but he had exhausted his reserves on other pursuits. He slept like a log, after going to the trouble of asking me in a whisper if I was happy. Hopes for a night of torrid lovemaking after a fourteen-year relationship are unrealistic, and despite the wave of sorrow this realization brought, the tenderness with which he had asked that question made me melt.
Medical and professional constraints forbid me from extending my stay in Monticello even a little longer. I did not want to go back alone, and had asked Jacques several times if he had gotten his ticket, without ever getting an answer. The day of my departure, I was forced to realize that he had given it no thought or it had been too late, and because our short stay in Corsica had been hopelessly platonic, when we said our goodbyes at the airport I angrily shouted out: “This is definitely the last time I ever get married” I did it without revealing how heavy my heart felt in the vague hope that he would enjoy my humor. I recently heard Jean-Marie on the radio say that there had not been many men in my life, but all of them had made me wait. This was such a striking summary of my personal life that I could hardly keep from crying.
1 Midnight, midnight, gotta run for my life—Trans.
2 Jean Paulhan (December 2, 1884—October 9, 1968) was a French writer and literary critic. He worked as a publisher for Gallimard and was the longtime editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française—Trans.
3 “I did not find all these flows of mixed fluids, sweat, and saliva very engaging. Luckily, there is hot water, towels, and eau de Cologne!”
4 Matthieu has become a famous musical performer under the name of “M.”
5 Françoise Dorléac (1942–1967) was a French actress and the elder sister of Catherine Deneuve. She appeared in films with stars such as Jean-Paul Belmondo, David Niven, Michael Caine and her sister (The Young Girls of Rochefort) and worked with directors François Truffaut, Philippe de Broca, and Roman Polanski. She was killed in a car accident—Trans.
6 The César is the French film industry’s equivalent of the Oscar—Trans.
7 At the moment I am writing these lines, two relatives have had a hormone-dependent breast cancer. One of them died from it after two years of agony. Both of them had taken a hormone treatment when they started menopause in order to age more gracefully.
8 A common law marriage in France is equivalent to a civil union in the United States—Trans.
9 Several years later, Serge dragged Jacques to Cartier’s, where they each purchased simple platinum wedding bands.