Fifteen

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The well-lubricated outings with Armande Altai and Susi were lifesaving amusements that gave me a break from my torments, or rather gave me a different vantage point from which to see them. Susi succeeded fairly well at alleviating my feelings of guilt. Armande’s conversation was a treat, and as icing on the cake, she read my cards once a year. We often went to the little Chinese restaurant on the Rue Saint-Roch run by Davé, an old friend of the sex maniac who also boasted that he could see the future in the cards. When he was in the mood, he would drag me into the backroom and predict my future, nothing of which I remember. During those years when everything was going so badly, I became addicted to card readers and the hopes they dangled in front of me. It perked me up and helped me wait for time to do its murderous work. I say murderous because first your feelings are fanned into flame by unrequited love, and then slowly but surely it extinguishes them. A love without any physical nourishment is like living entirely on dreams or imagination. Death by starvation puts an end to sufferings that you would not wish on your worst enemy.

We gradually abandoned Davé for Le Petit Tonneau on the Rue Hallé, a five-minute walk from Susi’s and two minutes from my house. Also quite round in shape, the master of the premises did not conceal his fondness for the curves of the sex maniac, who he would have married on the spot if she said yes. He lived on the top floor of the building across the street from his restaurant, and the last time I saw him was surreal. He was confined to his apartment because of a bad fall and had watched us go in from his window. When we left, we made great signs of our affection for him while calling his name, while Susi yanked her huge breasts out of her bra while belting out: “these are for you, Eric!” It was a scene that Fellini would have been happy to call his own.

A less regular customer than I was of Le Petit Tonneau, Jacques had saddled Eric with the colorful nickname “Couillettes”1 and instituted a ritual in which his pals and he would each touch Eric’s crotch when they came in. Eric obligingly submitted to this by standing still when the joyful gang crossed his threshold and comically sticking his arms up while rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. It was irresistible. One night, a wave of madness swept through the restaurant. I can recall a hallucinatory fandango going on between the tables where, in front of the stunned customers, Mr. Léon—the waiter who was knee-high to a grasshopper and belonged to a huge Cambodian family—was chasing Eric, trying to stick his hand between his thighs. We later saw that Mr. Léon, contrary to custom, was filling our glasses as soon as we emptied them and soon each and every one of us found ourselves in an advanced state of inebriation. I suddenly felt so sick that I rushed into the bathroom, panicked at the thought I might not make it in time. Once I was locked into this cramped cubby hole, I remained there for a good quarter-hour unable to do anything but remain slumped on the floor over the toilet bowl, feeling like I was giving up the ghost along with the rest of my dinner. Étienne Daho grew alarmed and knocked shyly on the door. I could hear him begging me: “Open the door, open it for me.” I tried to answer, “I can’t…”

“I am your brother, open the door for me,” he insisted. Finally, Jacques almost knocked down the door and practically carried me back to the house, where I spent hours shivering in my bed. I learned the next day that Étienne, who had insisted on inviting us, had forgotten the code for his credit card and when he left the restaurant, he had blindly climbed into the car of a perfect stranger, mistakenly believing it was one of our friends who was going to bring him back home. Stabbed by a flash of sudden intuition as he told us this, I quickly consulted my ephemeris. It confirmed the moon had been full that evening and that we should have definitely been on our guard.

Le Petit Tonneau was where Armande and I tirelessly tried to lift Susi’s spirits when the split sale of her apartment building threatened to toss her into the street. Her patron, an American billionaire, had long been paying her rent, in return for which she would go visit him in London whenever he expressed the desire—two or three times a year—for a good time, but also when he wanted her to provide some lubricious gratification to his son, who an overdose of drugs and alcohol had turned into a blind quadriplegic. This obligation disgusted her—something that as a nymphomaniac rarely bothered her—not because of the vegetable this poor boy had become, but because she knew him before his accident and had found him repulsive then. Armande and I, whose partners could be counted on the fingers of one hand, therefore entirely went along with oddball Susi, whatever she represented for us on the plane of morals: the inestimable services she had provided this family of degenerates had earned her, with flying colors, the right to ask this billionaire to buy her this apartment. This is precisely what happened although it took months of infernal suspense for him to come through.

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Around 1992, Armande diplomatically warned me: “Your face is still holding up nicely,” she told me, “but you are reaching the age—I was forty-eight—when things start going downhill. You need to perform some facial gymnastics to limit the damage.” She made her living by giving singing lessons, which were broken down into several parts. One of these parts was facial gymnastics, which she had personally practiced for years with her students several times a day. This had kept the muscles of skin from sagging and wrinkling and they remained in tip-top form. They were in such good form that when she became a household name in France after several years of being the singing teacher on Star Ac—the most popular variety show on French television—everyone mistakenly believed that she had had plastic surgery. Like me, Armande is a born homebody and rarely leaves Paris. We agreed that I would take advantage of the next summer vacation to benefit from her valuable lessons.

In June 1992, Michel Berger and France Gall released an excellent album, Double Jeu [Double Dealing], on which they sang all the songs as duets. I wrote Michel a letter in which I shared the enthusiasm that his songs, production, and vocals had inspired in me—like always. Two years earlier, he had asked me to perform “Personal Message” with him as a duet for a broadcast of Michel Drucker’s show, Champs-Élysées, starring him. Because I had not seen him for quite some time, I was struck by how much he had aged. He was balding and his face seemed slightly swollen, although he never touched alcohol. When we performed the song, I was touched by the fact that he was even more paralyzed by stage fright than me. A short time later, I learned by chance that his daughter Pauline was suffering from cystic fibrosis, an incurable genetic disease, about which he and France had shown an edifying discretion. Michel was fragility and sensitivity incarnate and I immediately connected the alarming impression he made on me in 1990 to this ordeal, which was much too heavy for him to bear and had been eating away at him for years.

The letter he wrote back in response appeared disillusioned on every level. He bemoaned the development of our trade into something where “short-term profit” overrode all else, and also mentioned his frustrations about married life, as his marriage was obviously going through a crisis comparable to the one crossing through mine. “I read somewhere,” he wrote me, “that many people fantasize about our two couples, which is to say about how we have managed to stay together for so long. That made me laugh (or cry, I don’t remember).”

Early in the afternoon of Monday, August 3, 1992, I went to Armande’s place in the Rue Saint-Denis. Her facial gymnastics consisted of kneeling in front of a large mirror while reciting sentences as absurd as “Le loup de Léa a dit olé”2 several times in a row, while keeping your mouth puckered and your lips drawn back and absolutely still. This produced such a comical face that I burst out laughing every time. Armande started laughing as well, while saying: “Damn it, Françoise!” and the exercises fizzled out. Never mind the wrinkles!

The lost fight against time’s ravages had energized me briefly but when I got home I saw that there were already a dozen messages on my answering machine. This was so unusual—especially during this time of the year—that it gave me a bad feeling immediately. The first message I listened to told me of a rumor that Michel Berger was dead. This came from my friend Gilbert Foucaut, who sounded totally unlike himself. He wanted to know if I knew anything at all about this. Refusing to believe it and trembling all over, I listened to the following messages that confirmed the horrible news. While playing tennis at his house in le Midi, Michel had a heart attack and died before help could get there. I thought of the beautiful jacket of his first album that depicted a broken heart …I also thought of one of the songs from his last album, “Jamais partir …” [Never Leave], and of “Paradis blanc” [White Paradise] on the one before it. Both a record jacket and two songs had proved strangely prophetic.

Bernard de Bosson, record company CEO and friend of the Berger family, finally informed me that France, who had initially wanted the funeral to be strictly family, had decided that all those who knew and loved Michel would be welcome at the Montmartre Cemetery where the burial would take place. I went like an automaton, not daring to imagine the devastation of the family as well as that of Veronique Sanson. After Jacque Attali’s moving address and the intolerable burial, I went to hug France and could feel, despite myself, her solid skeletal frame: she definitely had a strength and solidity inversely proportional to that of Michel, who in spite of his fragility had always thrown himself head-long into his work, composing song after song, spending his life in the stuffy atmosphere of studios, and burning through his weak reserves too rapidly.

The nephrologist Jean Hamburger, who was world famous for having performed the first kidney transplant and for creating the first artificial kidney, had left his wife and young children overnight without any explanation. The resentment his son Michel felt for him on this account was extended to the medical world, which he avoided as much as possible over the course of his short life. The two men, whom France had managed to bring together late in life died in the same year, only a few months apart.3 A letter from his father advising him to see a cardiologist was found in Michel’s affairs. Perhaps he, too, was alarmed at the abnormally “puffed up” face of his son.

Jacques’ professional life had always gone through impressive ups and downs. In a certain way, he was the opposite of Michel Berger, more concerned about taking advantage of life than becoming a workaholic, waiting for requests to come his way and rarely pursuing them. This year, to the stupefaction of all, his agent convinced him to go back on stage. The venue chosen was the Casino de Paris, a hall of human-sized dimensions that he liked quite a bit, and where we had gone to see Serge and Jane. I have a generally painful memory of this evening. It was in November and Jacques had a sore throat. The Périer family sent him to see a top ear, nose, and throat specialist who examined his throat and told him that, except for some inflammation, all was fine. Convinced deep down that he could continue abusing tobacco and alcohol without paying a steep price, Jacques felt temporarily relieved in this regard. Alas, despite the medications, the night when all of Paris crowded into the hall, his voice left so much to be desired that it was torture for me to listen to him while imagining how he must have been suffering, since normally his vocal abilities were incredible and exceptional in both tone and phrasing.

A routine medical visit was scheduled after the vacation he took to recover from the emotions inspired by the Casino. Early one morning he went as planned to the Salpêtrière Hospital. When he returned, I was eating my breakfast in the kitchen without any undue worries. “I have a cancer,” he blurted out with that brutal tone I could never get used to and which he now used to speak to the traitor I had become in his eyes. He told me that he had been shown a suspicious tiny growth on one of his vocal cords on the screen and told it was cancer. Three days later, he had this small foreign body removed under local anesthetic, and it proved to be benign. I found it so incredible that a doctor would tell his patient he had a serious problem without being sure of his diagnosis, I wondered if Jacques had not simply wanted to scare me by exaggerating things, as he is sometimes wont to do.

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Like his mother, Thomas got his diploma at the age of sixteen, “cum laude.” His talents earmarked him for studies of higher mathematics, but what he imagined of the life to which such a curriculum would lead stopped him. Buoyed by his advanced studies and uncertain as to a precise career path, he enrolled in the Université Paris-I (Sorbonne) and took courses in the visual arts, with cinema as an elective, at the Saint Charles Center, allegedly to prepare for the entrance exam for the Fémis.4 This left him enough time to hang out with his friends and try a little of everything. When he was a child, he had photographed nature with an innate sense of composition, and found great amusement in staging short films with his friends. So it was completely natural for him to first pursue photography. For his father, he provided very professional photos for the program for the Casino performance in addition to some texts. At the same time, one of his friends, Jean-Pierre, introduced him to the guitar. These years when he was searching were fruitful ones as they led to his discovery of Django Reinhardt and, finally, to his decision to devote himself to the guitar.

In no position to reason with him, we asked his Uncle Philippe and Aunt Christiane, who were more knowledgeable about the hard facts of life than us, to reason with their nephew. After their conversation, Thomas was on the brink of tears. He told me he would prefer suicide right away to the life they had described to him. I was really exasperated. Although he had all the skills necessary to successfully pursue a difficult path that would guarantee him an interesting and well-paid job, here he was leaving something substantial and grasping at shadows by choosing the path on which many are called but few are chosen. Moreover, he was pursuing a niche—gypsy jazz—whose musicians start playing while still in the cradle, whereas he had barely started! I had to tell him that I could not stop him from doing what he wanted, but he could not blame me years later for not heeding my advice. In short, I asked him to take all the responsibility so I could let go of mine. In order to reassure myself, I made him promise to enroll in a school or conservatory where he would learn how to read and write music, which I thought would at least always let him find small jobs. He did not follow my recommendation and this distressed me because I had not yet learned of his talent for not putting the cart before the horse while going where he needed to go—toward the people who would help him grow.

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It was in 1993 that I was contacted to take part in the new album being made by Malcolm McLaren, a British artist who had been manager of the Sex Pistols at the start of the punk movement, which I humbly confess never interested me. It was a concept album about Paris, and McLaren came to my place with Robin Millar, a blind musician of austere appearance who was co-producing the album. I am usually ill at ease when someone is presenting a song to me, because nine out of ten times it leaves me cold, and to say so clearly to someone’s face so as not to waste their time is not easy. I was therefore mentally preparing the clumsy little speech I try to make in such cases when to my surprise I found myself liking the song “Revenge of the Flowers.” I liked its very original realization too, and I immediately gave my agreement to record it and to write the four lines in French the duo wanted. The recording was made in Michel Berger’s studio near the Boulevard des Batignolles, a dream location that France Gall had set up with exquisite taste, as I discovered in this instance.

As the CEO of Vogue, Fabrice Nataf financed the project. He had also been the first CEO of Virgin France and had signed Étienne as their first artist. They must have been conspiring together and organized a dinner at La Closerie des Lilas. During dessert, as proper, Fabrice asked me why I had stopped singing. After listening to my never-ending explanations about how promotion was an ordeal for me, he told me point blank that he was ready to sign me up without any obligation to promote my records. “We won’t sell a single record,” I pointed out. “Selling is secondary, the important thing is that the songs exist,” he told me. Coming out of the mouth of a CEO, this statement was instructive if not to say suspect, but I liked it.

Except for my collaboration with Julien Clerc, which remains a happy exception, working for others was such a source of problems that I had become discouraged. Thanks to Étienne, I had met Guesch Patti5 and written the lyrics for two songs for her, of which only the inferior one had been used. At Jean-Noël’s request, I also wrote lyrics for an excellent tune he composed that he wanted to show to Johnny Hallyday. It took a year for us to get him to hear it, and that required all kinds of approaches. In despair, we contacted his good-natured back-up singer, Erick Bamy, who could sing just like Johnny, and had him record a demo. When the idol finally had five minutes to listen to it, it failed to grab him and all our troubles were for nothing. I’ve mentioned earlier the hassles and arguments that my association with my dear friend Alain Lubrano earned me. In short, I had come to miss that blessed period during which I only fought for or against myself, all the more so as some of Alain’s melodies seemed to have been made for me—much like certain throbbing loops by Rodolphe Burger, the leader of the group Kat Onoma, who I became a fan of right at the beginning and with whom a friendship had grown.

Fabrice Nataf invited me to lunch to repeat his offer. He mentioned composers capable of providing me with good tunes: Laurent Voulzy, Julien Clerc …. I shared my desire to work with less famous artists who would be more receptive, and more apt to take me in a less-expected direction, comparable to that of my “orange”6 album, for which I was nostalgic. He seemed open to anything and I left feeling both perplexed and excited. After assuring me that Alain and Rodolphe had agreed to work with me, I told him if I were to sign a new record company contract, I would have to do things right this time and ask a good agent to take care of it. Bertrand de Labbey directed me toward Rose Léandri, who managed the VMA agency Voyez mon agent, which Jacques was quick to rename “Volez mon argent.”7

I met several CEOs, who were all apparently ready to sign me, but Rose advised me to go to Virgin. According to her, Fabrice Nataf could be gone from BMG overnight, and Laurence Le Ny, the CEO of RCA, who was offering me a substantial financial incentive, was no more guaranteed to keep her position. To the contrary, Emmanuel de Buretel, the head of Virgin, would still be there for a while and even if he was forced to leave, the company was structured solidly enough that his leaving would not adversely affect the artists. I did not think that it was really appropriate for someone else to benefit when it had been Fabrice Nataf’s initiative that had set me on this course. So I hesitated until the last minute, all the more so as he called me regularly and his calls always left me in a good mood. But the voice of reason prevailed and my regret about it vanished when I learned he had left Vogue a short time later. It was the same scenario with Laurence Le Ny, who left RCA even sooner. I have never regretted signing with Virgin, where I found all the professional and friendly support I needed.

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Because the thought of my performance not being equal to the pieces of music I am given constantly bugs me, I did not wait for the contract to be signed to begin working. Alain Lubrano’s mother, to whom he was greatly attached, was suffering from a cancer that would kill her within the year. He brought me the kind of sad and throbbing melody I love, with an original verse he had written that was directly inspired by the tragic events he was experiencing. Its title was “Le Danger” and it would become the name of the album. I invested all my intellectual and emotional resources into completing these emotionally charged lyrics as best I could, by marrying what was tearing Alain apart with what was tearing me apart. My forbidden love continued to torture me, and one of my best friends, Gilbert, had AIDS. He and I had gone to see Laurent Voulzy at the Casino of Paris. I had gotten there first and parked in a small street perpendicular to Rue de Clichy. I was waiting when I saw Gilbert go by. Most likely because he did not have much time left and the confused idea of what he must have been going through distressed me, his stooped silhouette, as if crushed by his ordeal and reaching toward his imminent end, remains my strongest visual memory of him. The last time I visited him, at the Saint-Antoine Hospital in March 1994, he was skinny but did not seem to be doing too badly, and was focusing on the trip he planned to make to Brittany the following weekend. On Friday, he telephoned me. The doctors would not give him permission to leave and he was touching bottom. “I can’t take this anymore, I can’t take this anymore,” I heard him say in a whisper before hanging up. I unsuccessfully tried to call him the next day and the days after. On Wednesday, his companion called to tell me that he had died during the night from a pulmonary embolism.

I did not go to Corsica that year either. Since the time I had been guaranteed a contract with a record company, I had somehow managed to write one song a month. I was even more reluctant to break the rhythm because Rodolphe had given me one of his magical loops at the beginning of July, for which he alone held the secret, and I did not have the slightest idea what I could write for it. During the isolation that allows a person to immerse herself in a piece of music in order to capture its spirit, I thought I could see a kinship between the strange atmosphere of this melody and that of the novels of Marguerite Duras, of which I could recall La Vice-Consul, La Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, and L’Amant …. On one mid-July evening, a kind of alchemy took place in my mind between the storm that had just blown in, the despair provoked by an unexpected meeting with the object of my torment accompanied by a new conquest, the hour indicated by my watch, and Marguerite Duras. This was how I wrote “Dix heures en été” [Ten Summer Hours]. After polishing the lyrics, I wondered if the title might not also be the title of a Duras book and started looking through my library. It took me a good chunk of time before I stumbled across an old paperback book with yellowed pages that had been published thirty-four years earlier. I had no memory of it, despite its title: Dix heures et demie de soir en été. I reread it in one go. It precisely described the violent and painful emotions I was going through and that I had tried to cram into my lyrics.

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At the beginning of August, just when I was attacking the writing of “La beauté du diable”8, for another, equally magical and hypnotic loop by Rodolphe, I received a letter from Germany. The ground fell away from beneath my feet as I deciphered it. In short, a psycho-sociologist of the German civil service informed me that my sister was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and had been secluding herself away for ages. Her neighbors had alerted the authorities, and he had to gain access to her so he could explain to her that she needed treatment. He hoped that I could convince her to open her door to him, otherwise he would be obliged to break in by force. Given the nature of her psychosis, he did not really expect my intercession to work, but he had to try every available option before going to that extreme.

It had been more than twenty years since I had seen Michèle and our contact was limited to two postcards a year, and a few rare phone calls—such as during my mother’s illness, for example. At the beginning of the year, she had sent me a letter to wish me a happy new year, whose incoherence should have alerted me more than it did. “If by chance, you learn of my death, don’t forget to get an autopsy and to have them look for cyanide in my body … you should also look out so you don’t die of poison like Dalida,”9 she wrote, among other things. Used to her whims, I had read it distractedly and was satisfied with simply advising her to see a doctor. Things had remained there and I had so many other worries on my mind I did not give it another thought.

I apprehensively dialed her phone number. The conversation began normally, as if we had just seen each other, but once I cautiously touched on the reason for my call and mentioned the name of Herr Senft, my sister began speaking German to me in another tone of voice, and in very formal terms, accusing me of being part of the KGB plot against her, then hung up on me. I described our conversation to the psycho-sociologist, who gave me some terrifying bits of information, which were completed by the “wild boar,” her ex-boyfriend and former employer, who I called next as he was the only person who had access to her. Moreover, this was the reason why Herr Senft, fearing that she would cut off her one remaining connection to the outside world, thought it would be better if I took the risk of mentioning his visit. Michèle had covered her walls with aluminum foil for fear of hidden cameras and microphones; in both winter and summer she remained posted on her balcony to maintain surveillance on the comings and goings around her building, as well as the facing building, where, according to her, the secretary of the publisher she had a mind to marry had tried to shoot at her; she no longer opened her mail, convinced the envelopes contained cyanide; her ex brought her what she needed but had to taste all the foods before her; moreover, she only ate cookies, had lost her teeth, and was terrifyingly skinny; she rinsed everything in the middle of the night, and so forth. The “wild boar” described the hell he had lived through with her when they were together, for example, the way she frequently burst into his office and threatened to commit suicide in front of everyone. He also informed me that she had quickly squandered the considerable sum she had inherited from our father by entrusting it to a swindler who talked about opening an office for psychic readings with her and getting married, but who vanished into thin air as soon as the money was transferred into his account. She no longer worked and had no social security. In short, it was a complete disaster.

The question arose about her returning to France, but I found the very idea of seeing her after so many years and being confronted by her madness—incurable by definition—completely unsettling. At the same time, I assessed the scope of a misfortune that reproduced her earliest conditionings: basically her presence got on everyone’s nerves and no one wanted anything to do with her. It was a Cornelian dilemma.10 I asked my friend Marie-Claire, an exceptional woman who had quit her profession as a lawyer at the age of forty to study medicine and became a specialist in psychiatry. She warned me: because the number of mentally ill people is so large, if the medical authorities feel the family of one is even slightly receptive, they will hurriedly assign them full responsibility for their care. She recommended I do nothing that might get me caught up in a process from which I might never escape. In any event, it was easier to initially treat Michèle where she lived. So it was said, so it was done. She was admitted to hospital by force and returned home following several weeks of treatment. According to the “wild boar,” she had gained weight and was doing better in every way. This hardly reassured me. Paranoid as she was, she would refuse to continue the treatment meant to calm her delusions and everything would need to be done over. The sequence of events proved me right.

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Things continued moving forward on the professional plane. I felt I was writing my best lyrics ever, helped not only by the quality of the melodies of Alain and Rodolphe, and later those of Jean-Noël, but also because my feelings of unease found an outlet. In November 1994, Alain introduced me to the musicians, as well as several young sound engineers, with whom he planned to work. I did not think they were experienced enough. Like Rodolphe, his demos were so fully developed that entrusting the production of their pieces to either individual was a self-evident truth. In December, we traveled to Brussels to meet the director and one of the sound engineers of the famous ICP studio. This first contact left me with mixed emotions. John and Djoum exhibited a quite understandable distrust of me and it was only when I mentioned Virgin that they became more open. But my contract was not yet signed—it would be in three days—and their less than engaging attitude gave me the impression of being a kind of has been. Certain situations or individuals have long cast this image back at me and the unease it sometimes makes me feel does not seem attributable to an excessive self-esteem that would make me particularly sensitive. The simple fact of the matter is that my inner discomfort is so deeply rooted that a careless nothing is all it takes to bring it roaring back to life.

At the beginning of 1995, I was clicking through the television channels when a young man of striking charm and charisma stopped me in my tracks. This was at the end of his interview, but a few seconds was enough to hook me. It was Damon Albarn, the leader of the group Blur, who enjoyed a lot of success in England as well as France. Hard to believe, but no more than a day later I was flabbergasted by receiving a fax saying that the group wanted to do something with me and wondered if I was interested. The next week, Damon Albarn, his bass player Alex James, and his drummer Dave Rowntree dropped by my house. Damon—who I immediately nicknamed “Demon”—wanted to do a new version of his hit “To the End” (“La comédie”) with me and add an actual string section to it. He had been thinking of asking John Barry to write this part and I am still kicking myself, per usual, for having lacked the most elementary presence of mind. John Barry was so famous and a priori so inaccessible that the members of the group did not think it could be done, whereas all it would have taken was for me to talk to Jane, his first wife and the mother of their daughter Kate, to at least make the initial contact possible. I suggested my friend Khalil Charine, a great guitarist as well as an excellent producer whose work I whole-heartedly like, and one month later we were taking the Eurostar together for the first time. To my consternation, the strings were so over the top they made me think of a cake that was indigestible because of too much cream. They were recorded in the mythic studio of Abbey Road and I did my vocals the next day at Maison Rouge Studio under the worst conditions. For some unknown reason, it was impossible to hear the rhythm and I had to sing with only the support of the cloying strings that Damon wanted. The opposite would have been a thousand times better! Furthermore, the mixing was supposed to be done in the same studio whose technical inadequacies Khalil realized immediately, and this annoyed him so much that he began talking about pulling out. I have to say that the recording is not very good overall and that my participation brought absolutely nothing to the song—quite the contrary! But Damon and his acolytes were so proud of it and seemed to attach such importance to my appraisal that I never shared my reservations with them. However, I do not regret the splendid fountain of youth this adventure turned out to be. Damon Albarn, whose slight resemblance to Jacques and Thomas baffled both Khalil and I alike, is a gifted artist and brilliant lad who disarms everyone with his tenderness and charm.

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The recordings for my first Virgin album at ICP were made in several stages during 1995. The studio housed us, and I discovered the comfort of being rid of my domestic chores and not having to think about anything but my work. I got up before the others, who worked into the wee hours, and I am still nostalgic for my solitary morning walks in the neighborhood of ICP. The gardens of the abbey were several minutes away on foot. A few more minutes and I would be in the middle of the woods with squirrels, rabbits, and birds. Still feeling as ill at ease in my head as in my heart, I discovered the calming effect provided by immersion in nature and realized that it was a form of meditation. No matter its source, the harmony implied by beauty has a beneficial effect on hearts in torment.

My professional relationship with Alain, as with Rodolphe, was not always an easy ride. For example, at the time we were recording “La beauté du diable,” Rodolphe realized that there was an extra syllable in one line of my lyrics. I went into my room to find his demo to show that I had respected his melody line, but he wouldn’t drop it, and as it was impossible to change the critical line, the atmosphere became so thick you could cut it with a knife when I begin singing it. When I went to listen to the take, Rodolphe had a long face, and although he is kindness and courtesy personified, I could hear him murmuring, as if to himself: “It’s atrocious!” This was hardly inspiring at that time but despite everything I can barely keep from laughing when I think about it now. Furthermore, I wanted to sing the ends of certain lines in the chorus without enunciating them, which everyone rose up against. But I was sure of what I was doing and during a break, when it was only Djoum and I in the booth, I redid it as I envisioned and have never had cause to regret it.

The piece “Dix heures en été” included a long instrumental bridge. On the demo, Rodolphe had filled it out by playing the melody’s theme with a maxed-out high-pitched guitar, which had a great effect. During the recording sessions, I vainly waited for this magnificent solo. Surprised at its absence I learned it had been omitted. Despite Rodolphe’s opinion, I thought it left an irritating impression of emptiness. I don’t remember how I convinced him to play it, but I can still see him at the console as if he was being tortured, to judge by his grimaces and contortions. It was obviously born with all the pain of an unwanted child!

Rodolphe, as well as the less flexible Alain, hated doing things the same as in their demos. In contrast, when something appears both inspired and effective to me in the first version, I think it is imperative to keep it in the definitive recording. This is a source of discord, or at least endless discussion, between certain producers and me. Furthermore, Rodolphe allows me to vocally stroll about as I please over his loops, whereas Alain, whose tunes are more rhythmic, will not tolerate the slightest deviation on my part. The sessions for “L’Obscure objet” and the “Madeleines” were very demanding as I was unable to properly track the vocals and I do not remember them fondly at all.

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Malcolm McLaren’s album Paris enjoyed a certain success in France, thanks to the title song performed by Catherine Deneuve. In April 1995, when I had already begun recording for Le Danger, all the participants were invited to a party thrown in New York to honor the record’s American release. Jean-Noël’s life was still as rocky as mine (for the same reasons), so I asked him to come with me. As we were arriving in New York, we were caught in a storm. I could see the clouds passing by the plane window at top speed and the air pockets were so powerful that I expected us to be suddenly dropped at any moment into the black waters of the Atlantic Ocean, which were only hundreds of feet below us. If we got out of this plight, I promised myself, I would only fly when it was absolutely essential. There had been a strike by the food service and when we reached the hotel it was too late for lunch. Starving, we wandered around luxurious Fifth Avenue and the neighboring streets in search of food. Finally we found a café that had no customers, where we bought two small cinnamon buns. We had not eaten for a dozen hours and this bun was so delicious that I sometimes still dream of it.

The celebration began around eleven o’clock in a town house with a dense crowd packed on every floor. I briefly lost Jean-Noël and was accosted by a jovial American woman who told me in English that she recognized me. I was flattered, but she immediately added: “You are Françoise Sagan.” I laughingly assured her that I wasn’t, until Jean-Noël loomed up while calling my name. This caused the lady to cry out in triumph: “I knew it!”

When we left this overcrowded place, we had been on our feet for almost twenty-four hours. The temperature outside had dropped considerably and there was no taxi to be found. This gave me an earache that came on during the night. The next day, before getting back on the airplane, we had lunch with Amina, a magnificent singer I had seen perform at New Morning several years earlier, and her companion, the producer Martin Meissonnier. This was a cozy moment and—along with the cinnamon buns—remains the sole justification in my opinion for this whirlwind trip, which was otherwise a perfect waste of time. A special mention goes to the flight commander who began the descent to Roissy much sooner than planned—once the plane had flown past the tip of Brittany—out of concern for my ailing ear, which began feeling better. When I got back to Rue Hallé, I found the CD of “Revenge of the Flowers” in my mail. While my vocals remained, the splendid rhythm over which I sang had been replaced by a vague disco rhythm in the poorest taste. It made me weep with rage. I deeply believe that there is an ideal realization for each song and that when a person has been inspired enough to find it, it should be kept, but Malcolm McLaren belongs to that race of musician-player-doers who cannot help but infinitely multiply the ways to do the same song, so much so they don’t even realize when they totally adulterate it.

The album Le Danger, of which I was quite proud, benefited from excellent press—which had no impact on the sales. I remember that at the time of its release, although I had been given the front page of the newspaper Libération and the Virgin Megastore had plastered posters of my portrait and name on the Champs Élysées, among other things, I was standing in line at the Olympia among the faithful fans who had come to see France Gall when one of her fans addressed me: “We like you a lot, too,” she told me, “It’s too bad you stopped singing.” This shows just how difficult promoting a record has become. Obtaining the radio programming necessary for their work to be discovered has become impossible for most singers. In the “French song” category, if you are not one of the happy few who sell a million albums, the best you can hope for is a few appearances on the radio channel France Inter. To sum up, despite the intensive press, television, and radio promotion to which I had been harnessed for months and months, both in France and abroad, Le Danger was a critical success but a stinging commercial flop.

In the spring of 1996, I returned from Ostend, where the video of “Mode d’emploi” [Operating Instructions], the song chosen to be the first single, had been filmed. My day planner was jam-packed and I went out as little as possible because I was trying to stay in shape. I made an exception on May 20th to celebrate Armande’s birthday with Susi. When I got back home, I listened to my answering machine messages and my hair stood on end: my sister had just arrived at the Gare de l’Est!11 She begged me to buy her an apartment in a desperate tone that broke my heart, but she left no contact information that would allow me to get in touch with her.

I had been in regular contact with the “wild boar” for a year; obviously he could no longer be her sole connection to the outside world. All the less so as she sometimes begged him to marry her and sometimes took him to be an eminent member of the Gestapo. As foreseen, she had stopped taking her medications, thinking they were products intended to poison her. I tried to get a hold of him, but his line was busy and stayed that way for weeks. But I was in no position to criticize him for what I took to be his initiative: as Michèle had begun imagining that the Gestapo would leave her alone if she returned to France, it had likely been very easy for her ex to get this millstone off his neck by sticking her on a train to Paris. I was later told that she had no papers, baggage, or money—not even a coat. Nothing! Except one thing: a one-way ticket with no return.

After a sleepless night, I rounded up the few friends capable of helping me and telephoned the Prefecture of Police. The management of a hotel near the Gare de l’Est contacted me several days later. On the evening of her arrival in Paris, Michèle had managed to stir the pity of a passerby who gave her the funds necessary for a night in a hotel. She had remained there since, holed up in her room without eating, convinced that the Gestapo was at her heels and refusing to speak to anyone but me. I remembered my friend Marie-Claire’s warning and refused to go there personally. What would I have been able to do in any case? Finally, a trustworthy friend advised me to turn to SOS Pyschiatrie. The doctor sent by this service forced open the door to the room, from where he telephoned me. He had just injected Michèle with a sedative, which did not stop her from saying that he had inoculated her with the AIDS virus, as if she was reciting a litany. Given her state, he had her immediately hospitalized at Sainte-Anne.

I left the next day for Berlin and then to Cologne. Other professional trips were planned, between which I had to find a way to salvage the catastrophic video for “Mode d’emploi.” Not to mention the household I had to keep running. I understood the terrible reasons why Michèle had suddenly pinned all her hopes on me, but I did not feel I was in a position to respond as she wished. It was killing me, even if her hospitalization did give me a temporary feeling of peace. “Helping is not a matter of good will,” spirituality teaches us, “but power.”

When I am confronted by a problem that is beyond me, my nature is to seek the quickest solution, even if it means forcing events in order to remove the excessive stress that follows. Much more instinctive, wise, and sensible than me, Jacques is satisfied to go to ground and play dead. Little by little, I realized that his attitude was much more helpful than blindly lashing out. When you don’t know what to do, it is preferable to try to let go while waiting for a decision to come of its own accord—whether from outside or within. Jacques’ arguments in this sense did me great good. In the beginning of July, I joined him in Corsica, where I had not gone for a long time. While I was there I got a call from the doctor who was taking care of my sister. She had broken her femur when falling out of bed and needed surgery. He wanted to arrange a meeting between her, him, and me. I only wanted to speak about Michèle’s problem with a specialist but not in her presence. I explained that to see her in such conditions and after so many years was beyond me. He would have none of it. It was either him and her … or nothing. I would not budge from my position.

I passed through Paris at the end of July before traveling on alone to Japan to promote my album. While there I found a cheerful message on my answering machine from my sister saying that she was impatiently waiting for Jacques and I to come see her at Sainte-Anne. She had forewarned the hospital staff of our imminent visit and the autographed photos we would not fail to hand out. I did not sleep a wink that night and sent her a note, along with the cash she requested, to let her know that I was obliged to be away. On the plane, the simple fact of getting farther away geographically from the site of the problem reassured me a little, even if I was only stepping back to gain more perspective and hope a solution came to me. I landed in Tokyo at the beginning of the afternoon, with two sleepless nights behind me, and went to bed as soon as I got to the hotel, only to reawaken a few minutes later by the sensation that my bed was shaking all over. Tokyo is located in a high-risk area for earthquakes and I was initially quite scared. After a moment I realized that only my lack of sleep and nervousness was the cause: the earthquake was taking place inside me.

It was a Sunday, the business meetings started the next day, and I found myself alone at the other end of the world, in a strange city, but this did not bother me—quite the contrary. I tried to take a short walk outside but abandoned the idea because of the intolerable heat at this time of the year. The air still felt quite heavy when I went out at dusk. From my window I had spotted a temple and decided to climb the outsized steps of the staircase leading to it. The iron gates were closed and I stood and contemplated this mysterious house of worship for several minutes. I felt as if I was on a tightrope when going back down the stairs and took precautions as if I were a little old lady to avoid a nasty slip on the stone steps. The street was poorly lit and in my relief at not having fallen, I failed to see that the sidewalk abruptly changed direction after I had taken a few steps on it. I missed the curb and fell with a crash. I limped back to my hotel with my right foot terribly swollen and painful. By all evidence, this little mishap, which handicapped me for several weeks, was not insignificant and Dr. Dransart of Grenoble, whose books I had yet to read, would have been able to teach me about everything this symbolized. At the time, the only thing that bothered me was its disturbing similarity with my sister’s fall. Perhaps I had reached a turning point in my life that I refused to see. Most likely the nightmarish situation of my sister and my inability to act as she wished had radically transformed me to the point where I had literally lost my footing and could no longer remain standing.

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1   “Couillettes” is a diminutive form of “coquilles,” meaning testicles. A “couillette” is also the measuring cap on liquor bottles—Trans.

2   “Léa’s wolf said Ole”—Trans.

3   Professor Hamburger died in February 1992.

4   The French state film and television school—Trans.

5   Guesch Patti (stage name of Patricia Porasse, born 1946) is a French singer and dancer—Trans.

6   The album that features “Où est-il?” [Where Is He?], “L’éclairage” [The Lighting], “Prisons,” “Et si je m’en vais avant toi” [If I Die Before You], and so on, was called this because of its orange jacket.

7   “Voyez mon agent” means “see my agent” and “volez mon argent” means “steal my money”—Trans.

8   “The Devil’s Beauty,” which is an idiomatic expression for the seductive, dangerous beauty of youth—Trans

9   Dalida (stage name of Yolanda Cristina Gigliotti, 1933–1987) was an Egyptian-Italian-French singer and actress who sold more than 170 million records and was twice awarded the Oscar mondial du succès du disque (the “World Oscar of Recording Success”). Her fame never dimmed following her suicide and she is an iconic figure in France—Trans.

10   A Cornelian dilemma, named after French playwright Pierre Corneille, describes a no-win situation in which someone is obliged to make a choice between two courses of action: either they or the other person will have to suffer from the consequences of the choice made—Trans.

11   Train station in the north end of Paris that handles the trains to and from Germany and other points east—Trans.