TO BE ALIVE AND KNOW IT

FRANCOISE SAGAN AND LA CHAMADE

More than twenty years after her death, Francoise Sagan is largely forgotten, but in her day, hers was a household name. A cartoon by satirist Sempé showed a village shopkeeper giving the weekly order ; a crate of Evian, the same of Beaujolais; a carton of the best-known soap powder; some scratch cards for betting the horses  - "...oh, and four or five Sagans."

Sagan at eighteen.

Sagan was her own best advertisement. She wrecked cars, snorted cocaine, gambled recklessly, slept around with both sexes, and treated the artistic establishment with contempt. "I shall live badly if I do not write,” she said,  “and I shall write badly if I do not live." They let her get away with it. "A charming little monster," chuckled Nobel Laureate François Mauriac.

A rapidly dog-eared French/English dictionary guided me through her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, written when she was my age : eighteen. I fell in love with Cécile (no last name - so cool).  Arrogant but romantic, hard on the outside but as soft inside as a fondant chocolate, she derails the sex life of her playboy father for, as she sees it, his own good. When things go wrong, she shrugs them off - a national trait.  “The French believe that all errors are distant,” says Adam Gopnik, “someone else's fault."

La Chamade, the sixth of Sagan’s twenty novels, dates from 1965. The title means the ruffle of a snare drum that signals retreat but also signifies an excited heartbeat.  I saw the movie version first – called Heartbeat for its brief foreign release. It came out in 1968, the year before my first visit to France, and I succumbed all over again to her Paris, "dark, glowing, seductive" - summed up in an image from that visit: a black Citroën Déesse, chauffeur-driven, pausing at a light on Place St Michel. A woman in silver seated alone in the back seat, eyes closed. Dozing? Doped? Dead? The light changed and the car glided away towards the Seine and into someone else’s narrative.

The Citroen Deesse.

Journalists, publishers, businessmen or just plain rich, Sagan’s characters meet at dinner parties on Coco Chanel's street, rue Cambon, or fashionably remote Theatre Montmartre. Relationships form, break up and re-form in an atmosphere as superficially polite as a minuet. To feel too deeply about something or someone, or to know too much about a subject - and, worse, to show it -  is Just Not Done. Lucile (again no surname),  young mistress of wealthy Charles, hears a piano concerto and wonders "Was it by Grieg, Schumann, or Rachmaninoff? Certainly some romantic, but which one? This uncertainty annoyed her and pleased her at the same time. The only cultural icons she liked were those that she knew by heart, and to those she was very sensitive." To not want to know; to not care…the essence of cool.

The Paris of these people is one the visitor never sees. It has no Eiffel Tower, no Arc de Triomphe, no Center Pompidou. The Arc de Triomphe is l'Étoile - the Star - because of the streets radiating from it, and the Pompidou le Beaubourg, since it occupies a former square of that name.  Sites favoured by tourists are shunned. Documenting a pub crawl, Sagan notes "They went into Harry's Bar, and left it just as fast." How else but with contempt to regard a place that spells its address phonetically for non-French speakers; "Just tell the cab driver 'Sank Roo Da-Noo.' " ?

To live in leafy Neuilly, or the first or second arrondissements, close to the Opéra and the Louvre, or the snobby sixteenth, with its vast 19th century apartments, antique-filled, is important, as is a distinguished name. Lucile is only ever Lucile, Charles  always Charles de Blassans-Lignières, his lineage at least as important as his wealth.

She leaves him for poor but sexy young journalist Antoine, which we know will never work. Sagan maps the failure of their relationship by locations, as one might plan a holiday around the Guide Michelin and Grand Atlas des Vignobles de France. Forced on a wet November day to travel by public transport,  Lucile shelters in "a little booth at the bus stop near Pont d’Alma...jammed with shivering people, sullen and nearly hostile." Her embarrassment is more painful than the wrench of leaving Charles and his house in Neuilly. When she returns, the vehicle of their reconciliation is an invitation-only black-tie concert in a 16th century mansion.  "They're scheduled to be playing that Mozart concerto for flute and harp that you were always so fond of," he coaxes. Here kitty kitty…. 

Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli and Mozart.

More geisha than girlfriend, Lucile is born to be a rich man's darling. Catherine Deneuve in the film version is her perfect embodiment, complaisant, amoral, superbly engineered, the Citroen Goddess made blonde and dressed by St Laurent. Charles (Michel Piccoli) drives her into an affair, never imagining it will last, just as Antoine's preoccupation with his career pushes her back into his arms.  None of this touches her. It's always someone else's fault.

In a key scene, she’s sitting at the bar of a crowded café immersed in William Faulkner's The Wild Palms. A passage inspires her to read it out loud. It’s his  paean to "those fleshly pleasures - eating and evacuating and fornicating and sitting in the sun - than which there is nothing better; nothing to match, nothing else in all this world but to live for the short time you are loaned breath, to be alive and know it."  The dour wage slaves look up from their Croques Monsieurs and burst into spontaneous applause.

Three years later, Paris exploded in what is never referred to as the Student Revolution but Les évenéments – the events - de '68.  The chestnuts along Haussmann's  boulevards were felled and turned into barricades,  while they tore up rue Cambon and used the cobbles  as missiles. “Beauty Is In The Streets” raved the poster of a girl caught in such an instant.

Lucile? Why not? She was always to be found where the cool people were.

I arrived a year too late. Ho hum…

               La Chamade is translated by Douglas Hofstadter as That Mad Ache.