A French Novel

Me (wiping the powder from the bonnet of the car with my scarf): ‘We are not everyone else, Commandant. We’re WRRRRITERS. OK?’

Policeman (brutally grabbing my arm): ‘Boss, the apprehended individual tried to destroy a piece of evidence!’

Me: ‘Hey, hey, easy does it, Mr Officer Sir, no need to break my arm. I liked it better when you carried me.’

Poet (with vehement head movements intended to express human dignity and the pride of the misunderstood artist): ‘Liberty is an impossibility …’

Policeman: ‘Can’t you get this guy to shut up?’

Poet (convinced he is convincing, articulating every syllable, one finger raised like a tramp muttering to himself in the métro): ‘The Powers That Be need aaartists to ssspeak truth to power.’

Policeman: ‘Are you playing the fuckwit with me?’

Poet: ‘No, because you’d be sssure to win.’

Policeman: ‘Well, now, I think that warrants a little time in the cells! All right, boys, bang them up!’

Me: ‘But … my brother is being awarded the Légion d’honneur!’

We were levitated into the wailing two-tone car.

I don’t know why, but I immediately thought of a scene from The Gendarme of St Tropez (1964), where Louis de Funès and Michel Galabru run after a group of nudists on the beach to paint them blue. We used to watch it as a family every spring in Guéthary, in the living room that smelled of wood fires, floor polish and Johnnie Walker on the rocks. Another reference would be Pellos’s comic strip Les Pieds nickelés en plein suspense (1963), but I couldn’t work out which of us was Ribouldingue, and which was Filochard.

I had already been in the back of a police car once, during the Paris Salon du Livre in March 2004. I had tried to go up to President Chirac to give him a T-shirt emblazoned with the face of Gao Xingjian. The Chinese were the guests of honour at the Salon that year, but the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature, a Chinese dissident living in exile in France and a naturalised Frenchman, had been bizarrely ‘forgotten’ by the organisers. Here, too, muscular arms had lifted me off the ground; here, too, I had found the experience somewhat mind-blowing. I have to admit, I was lucky that time: one of the guys carrying me got a reassuring message on his walkie-talkie.

‘Don’t beat him up, he’s famous.’

That day, I thanked God for my notoriety. They released me after an hour, and the following day my brief incarceration made the front page of Le Monde. One hour spent banged up in a police van in order to seem like a fearless defender of human rights offered an excellent ratio of physical pain to media benefit. This time, they were going to lock me up for a little longer, for a cause that was significantly less philanthropic.

8

THE ORIGINAL RAKE

Why Guéthary? Why does my only childhood memory constantly bring me back to the red and white mirage of the Basque Country, where the wind swells sheets pegged to washing lines like the sails of a motionless ship? I often think: That’s where I should have lived. I would be different; growing up there would have changed everything. When I close my eyes, the sea at Guéthary dances beneath my eyelids, and it’s as though I were opening the blue shutters of the old house. I gaze out of that window and tumble into the past; suddenly, I see us again.

A Siamese cat is scampering out of the garage door. We head down to the beach, me, my brother Charles and my aunt Delphine, who is the same age as us (she is my mother’s youngest sister), with buttered ginger cake wrapped in tin foil, rolled-up beach towels under our arms. Along the way, my heart beats faster as we come to the train tracks, for fear of having an accident as my father did in 1947 when he was my age. He was carrying a kayak, one end of which was clipped by the San Sebastian train and he was dragged along the tracks, bleeding profusely, his hip ripped open along the metal rail, his skull fractured, his pelvis crushed. Ever since, there has been a sign at the crossing advising walkers: ‘Warning, one train may hide another.’ But my heart is also beating faster because I hope we might see the girls who man the level-crossing barrier. Isabelle and Michèle Mirailh had golden skin, green eyes, perfect teeth, denim dungarees cut off at the knee. My grandfather didn’t approve of us hanging around with them, but it’s not my fault if the world’s most beautiful women are socially disadvantaged; that is surely God trying to re-establish some semblance of justice here on earth. It hardly mattered anyway, since they only had eyes for Charles, who looked straight through them. They would light up as he passed – ‘Hey, there’s the blond Parisian boy’ – and Delphine would proudly say, ‘So you remember my nephew?’ He walked ahead of me down the hill towards the sea, a golden prince with indigo eyes, a boy so perfect in his polo shirt and white Lacoste Bermuda shorts walking towards the beach in slow motion, his polystyrene body-board sticking out under his arm, amid the burgeoning terraces of hydrangeas … then the smiles of the girls would fade as they saw me trotting along behind, a tousled skeleton with uncoordinated limbs, a sickly clown with incisors broken in a game of conkers in the Bagatelle gardens, knees crusted with purple scabs, a peeling nose, clutching the latest contraption to come free with Pif Gadget. It was not that they were repulsed by my appearance, but when Delphine introduced me, their eyes were elsewhere: ‘And, er … this is Frédéric, his little brother.’ I blushed to the tips of the jug ears that stuck out from my blond mop. I couldn’t bring myself to speak, paralysed with shyness.

I spent my whole childhood struggling not to blush. If someone spoke to me, scarlet blotches appeared on my cheeks. If a girl looked at me, my cheekbones took on a garnet hue. If a teacher asked me a question in class, my face flushed purple. Out of necessity I had perfected techniques to hide my blushes: retying my shoelace, turning round as though there were something fascinating behind me, setting off at a run, hiding my face behind my hair, taking off my jumper.

The Mirailh sisters, sitting on the low whitewashed wall by the edge of the train track, swung their legs in the burst of sunshine between summer showers while I did up my laces, breathing in the damp earth. But they paid me no heed: I thought I was beet red, but in fact I was transparent. Thinking back about my invisibility still makes me angry, it filled me with such terrible sadness, such loneliness and bewilderment! I bit my nails, I had a terrible complex about my protruding chin, my elephant’s ears and my skeletal thinness, which made me the butt of taunts at school. Life is a vale of tears, there’s nothing to be done: never in my life did I have more love to give than I did on that day, but the girls who manned the barrier wanted none of it, and my brother was not to blame if he was better-looking than me. Isabelle showed him a bruise on her thigh: ‘Look, yesterday I fell off my bike, see there? Here, touch it, ow! not too hard, you’re hurting me …’, while Michèle tried to charm Charles by leaning back, her long black hair streaming, her eyes closing like those dolls whose eyes shut when you lie them down and open again when you sit them up. Oh my fair damsels, if you but knew how little he cared about you! Charles was fretting about the game of Monopoly we would pick up again that night, about his mortgaged houses on the rue de la Paix and the avenue Foch; even at the age of nine he lived the life he does today, with the world at his feet, the universe bending to his conqueror’s whims, and in that perfect life there was no place for you. I can understand your admiration (we always want what we cannot have), because I admired my triumphant elder brother as much as you did, I was so proud to be his younger brother I would have followed him to the ends of the earth – ‘Oh brother who art dearer to me than the brightness of day’ – and that’s why I don’t resent you; quite the opposite, I am grateful to you: if you had loved me from the first, would I ever have written?

This memory came back to me spontaneously: when you are in prison, childhood floats back to the surface. Perhaps what I took for amnesia was merely freedom.

9

A FRENCH NOVEL

All four of my grandparents were dead before I was truly curious about their lives. Children take their own immortality for a generality, but their parents’ parents pass away without giving them time to ask all their questions. By the time when, having become parents themselves, children finally want to know where they came from, the graves no longer answer.

Between the two world wars, love reasserted itself; couples came together; I am a distant result of those couples.

Sometime around 1929, the son of a doctor in Pau who had hacked off a number of legs at Verdun attended a recital at the Conservatoire Américain in Fontainebleau, where he was doing his military service. A widowed singer (born in Dalton, Georgia) by the name of Nellie Harben Knight was performing Schubert lieder, arias from The Marriage of Figaro and Puccini’s famous ‘O mio babbino caro’ wearing a long white dress trimmed with lace – at least I hope so. I found a photo of Nellie wearing that dress in an edition of the New York Times dated 23 October 1898, which states: ‘Her voice is a clear, sympathetic soprano of extended range and agreeable quality.’ My great-grandmother with her ‘clear soprano’ was accompanied on her tours by her daughter Grace, who well deserved her Christian name. A willowy blonde girl, with blue eyes permanently fixed on her piano keys, like the heroine of a Henry James novel, she was the daughter of a colonel in the British Army in India who died in 1921 of Spanish influenza: Morden Carthew-Yorstoun met and married Nellie in Bombay, having earlier served in the Zulu War in South Africa, with Lord Kitchener in the Sudan, and having led a New Zealand regiment, the Poona Horse, during the Boer War with Winston Churchill under his command. The soldier from Pau managed to catch the eye of this orphan of intriguing ancestry, and later to hold her hand during some frenzied waltzes, foxtrots and Charlestons. They discovered they shared the same sense of humour, the same love of Art – Jeanne Devaux, young Béarnais’s mother, had been a painter (she had notably painted a portrait of Marie, wife of the poet Paul-Jean Toulet, in Guéthary), a profession almost as exotic as that of a singer. The young man from south-west France suddenly became an ardent music lover who regularly attended the soirées at the Conservatoire Américain. Charles Beigbeder and Grace Carthew-Yorstoun met up whenever he was on furlough; he lied about his age: born in 1902, at twenty-six he should have been long since married. But he loved poetry, music and champagne. The prestige conferred by his uniform (Grace, after all, was a soldier’s daughter) did the rest. Young Grace never returned to New York. The couple were married at the town hall of the 16th arrondissement on 28 April 1931. They had two boys and two girls; the second son, born in 1938, was my father. On the death of his own father, young Charles inherited a spa in Pau: the ‘Sanatorium of the Pyrenees’. It was a vast property of nearly two hundred acres (forests, copses, meadows, gardens) rising to a peak among the hills of Jurançon, at an altitude of 335 metres. As in The Magic Mountain, a well-to-do clientele in dinner jackets contemplated the spectacular sunsets over the central Pyrenees and, to the north, the expansive vista over the town of Pau and the Gave valley. It was hard to resist the call of the forests of mature pines and oaks, where children could gambol freely before being packed off to boarding school – in those days, parents did not raise their children themselves, and, as we will later see, that’s still true to some extent. Charles Beigbeder resigned from his position as a solicitor with no regrets and took my grandmother to breathe the healing air of Béarn, where she could yell at the servants to her heart’s content and forge bonds with the local British community. With money from his wife and his mother, my grandfather invested in my father’s business. Soon our family owned a dozen sanatoriums in the region, renamed ‘The Health Spas of Béarn’, and my grandparents acquired the Villa Navarre, a superb house in Pau in the English cottage style, where Jean-Paul Toulet, Francis Jammes and Paul Valéry were regular visitors (family legend has it that the author of Monsieur Teste wrote his correspondence very early in the morning; the butler, whose name was Octave, used to grumble at having to wake at 4 a.m. to bring him his pot of coffee). A Catholic and a militant royalist, Charles Beigbeder looked like Paul Morand and was an assiduous reader of the far-right journal Action française, something which did not prevent him being elected president of the Cercle Anglais (exclusively male, it was, at the time, the most elegant club in Pau; he organised literary salons there). In the 1950s the family inherited a villa on the Basque coast, Cénitz Aldea (meaning ‘Near Cénitz’ in Basque) in Guéthary, a little village that had been fashionable since the Belle Époque. Tuberculosis did much for the fortunes of my family, and I have no hesitation in saying that the discovery of streptomycin by Selman Waksman around 1943 was an absolute catastrophe for my inheritance.

During the period we now call the interwar years (as though these young people could have anticipated that their post-war was also a pre-war), life was more austere in the great houses of the verdant Périgord. A countess who, as we know, had lost her husband in the second Battle of Champagne found herself alone at Quinsac, living in the château of Vaugoubert with two girls and two boys. In those days, Catholic war widows remained sexually faithful to their dead husbands. And of course, their children were called upon to sacrifice themselves. The two girls looked after their mother, something she encouraged in them – they did so for the rest of their lives. As for the two boys, they were automatically enrolled at the French military academy of Saint-Cyr, where an aristocratic ‘de’ in one’s name was highly regarded. The elder boy agreed to marry an aristocratic girl who was not really his choice. Sadly, she quickly cuckolded him with a swimming instructor: the young man was heartbroken at being so poorly rewarded for his docility. He filed for divorce; in retaliation, his mother disinherited him. The younger brother, too, suffered misfortune: posted to the garrison at Limoges, he fell in love with a ravishing commoner, a dark-haired girl with blue eyes who danced atop pianos (problem number one), and whom he impregnated out of wedlock (problem number two). Their union had to rapidly be formalised: the marriage of Comte Pierre de Chasteigner de la Rocheposay and the ravishing Nicole Marcland, known as Nicky, took place on 31 August 1939, in Limoges. The date was ill-starred: the very next day, Germany invaded Poland. Bon Papa barely had time to invade Bonne Maman. The phoney war awaited him, in which the Maginot Line proved as unreliable as the rhythm method. Pierre found himself a prisoner. When he escaped, a nun having lent him civilian clothes and false papers, he returned to France to sire my mother. It was then that he learned that he too was to be disinherited, since his mother the countess found it difficult at Sunday Mass to acknowledge this marriage which was beneath her station, despite the fact that it had been celebrated by the local priest in the chapel of her own château. Curious are the customs of the Catholic aristocracy, which entail disinheriting those who are already more or less orphaned. The lineage of the Chasteigners de la Rocheposay goes back to the Crusades (I am descended from Hugues Capet, though I imagine that in this I am one of many), and includes a Bishop of Poitiers, who was ambassador in Rome to Henri II. Ronsard dedicated an ode to one of my ancestors, Anthoine, abbot of Nanteuil. Though written in 1550, these lines remained relevant to me on that fateful night’s stay in January 2008:

As time, so pass the trappings of this world

According to its motion

Life is fleet, and seasons, suddenly unfurl’d

Fast whither to a notion. […]

Like a spring, young children grow

Then blossom in a summer

Surprised by winter they no longer show

What once they were.

Despite the warning given to my great-great-grandfather by ‘the Prince of Poets’, my grandfather was thus sacrificed on the altar of the Great Passion. In love, he made the same choice as the Duke of Windsor had three years earlier, and as Madame Cécilia Ciganer-Albeniz would sixty-eight years later when she married Nicolas Sarkozy: sacrificing château rather than happiness. When the war was over, Pierre de Chasteigner occupied Germany with his whole family for several years, in the Palatinate, then resigned his commission in 1949 so he would not be posted to Indochina. He was thus forced to investigate an activity no one in his lineage had attempted for about a millennium: work. He settled in a Paris apartment with shelves weighed down with volumes of the Bottin Mondain and the erotic works of Pierre Louÿs, on the rue de Sfax, while taking orders from his brother-in-law who ran a pharmaceutical laboratory. These were not his happiest years. When one no longer has the money to live like a king in Paris, one takes one’s wife to the seaside to make a fourth in bridge and more children. Now, Nicky’s father owned a house at Guéthary, of which she had fond memories. The Count and Countess decided to buy a little place there in return for a lifetime annuity to a Madame Damour, who had the good grace to shuffle off this mortal coil with little delay. So it was that the aristocratic military man and his six children moved in to Patrakénéa, directly opposite Cénitz Aldea, the holiday resort of the bourgeois-bohemian, Americano-Béarnais, Beigbeder family. The reader should now begin to understand the strategic importance of this place. In Guéthary, my two families will become friends, and my father will shortly meet my mother.

10

WITH FAMILY

I dreamed of being a free electron, but it is impossible to forever cut all ties with one’s roots. To remember that child on the beach of Guéthary is to acknowledge that I come from somewhere, from a garden, from enchanted grounds, from a meadow that smells of new-mown grass and salt breezes, from a style of cooking redolent of stewed apple and stale bread.

I despise family score-settling, exhibitionistic autobiographies, psychoanalysis masquerading as literature and airing dirty laundry in public. François Mauriac, at the beginning of his Mémoires intérieurs, offers an object lesson in modesty: ‘I will not speak of myself, so as not to oblige myself to speak of you.’ Why do I not have the strength to remain silent? Is it possible to retain a little dignity when seeking to discover who one is and whence one came? I have a feeling that in my quest I will have to embroil many of those closest to me, both living or dead (I have already begun to do so). These people I love who did not ask to be rounded up in a book, as in some police raid. I suppose that every life has as many versions as it has narrators: we each have our own truth; let me make it clear from the outset that this account sets out only my own. In any case, it is not as though I am going to start bitching about my family at the age of forty-two. It so happens that I have no choice: I need to remember in order to grow old. A private detective investigating myself, I reconstruct my past from the scant clues at my disposal. I try not to cheat, but time has shuffled my memories, the way the pack of cards is shuffled before a game of Cluedo. My life is a whodunit in which the balm of memory embellishes by twisting each new piece of evidence.

In principle, every family has a history; but mine was short-lived: my family is composed of people who barely know each other. What is the purpose of a family? To grow apart. A family is the place of non-communication. My father has not spoken to his brother in twenty years. My mother’s side of the family no longer sees my father’s. As children, we see a lot of our family, mostly during holidays. Then parents split up, you see your father less frequently – abracadabra, half the family disappears. You grow up, holidays become less frequent, your mother’s family grow more distant, until you only run into them at weddings, christenings and funerals – no one sends invitations to a divorce. When a nephew’s birthday party or a Christmas dinner is organised, you find some excuse not to turn up: too much fear, the fear that they will see right through you, that you will be observed, criticised, confronted with your failings, recognised for what you are, weighed in the balance. The family brings back memories you had erased, rebukes you for your churlish amnesia. The family is a series of duties, a mob of people who knew you much too young, before you had grown up – and the oldest members are well placed to know that you have still not grown up. For a long time, I thought I could do without it. I was like Fitzgerald’s boat in the last sentence of The Great Gatsby, beating ‘against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’. In the end, I relived exactly what I had hoped to avoid. My two marriages foundered in indifference. I love my daughter more than anything, but I see her only on alternate weekends. The son of divorced parents, I divorced in turn, precisely because I had an allergy to ‘family life’. Why does that phrase sound to me like a threat, even an oxymoron? It immediately conjures the image of a poor, harried man trying to install a child’s car seat in an oval car. Needless to say, he hasn’t had sex in months. Family life is a series of miserable meals where everyone rehashes the same humiliating anecdotes and hypocritical reflexes, where what you think of as family ties are nothing more than the lottery of birth and the rituals of communal living. A family is a group of people who cannot manage to communicate, and yet loudly interrupt each other, irritate each other, compare children’s exam results and the décor of their homes, and scrabble over their parents’ inheritance while the corpses are still warm. I don’t understand how people can think of family as a place of safety, when in fact it triggers extreme panic. I always believed life began the moment one left one’s family. Only then did we decide to be born. I considered life to be divided into two parts: the first was slavery, and one devoted the second part to attempting to forget the first. Being interested in one’s childhood was for the dodderers and cowards. Having spent so long believing that it was possible to eliminate the past, I genuinely thought that I had managed to do so. Until today.

11

END OF AN ERA

The last time I saw Pierre de Chasteigner, that majestic shrimp-fisher with his mane of white hair, was at the Curie Institute, in the 5th arrondissement, in 2004. My grandfather was laid out on a hospital bed, bald, gaunt, unshaven and delirious from the effects of the morphine. The public-alert sirens which go off at noon on the first Wednesday of every month began to wail. He talked to me about his time during the Second World War: ‘Whenever you heard a siren, a bomb exploding, the roar of an aeroplane, it was good news: it meant you were still alive.’

An officer in the French army, Pierre de Chasteigner was wounded in the arm by shrapnel and captured near Amiens in 1940 during the phoney war. Narrowly avoiding the firing squad, he managed to escape using false papers.

‘I should have joined the Resistance, but I was afraid; I thought it was better to go home.’

It was the first time he had raised the subject with me. I suppose he saw his life flashing past; it was a pity he had to wait until he was dying to finally recover his memory. I didn’t know what to say to him. He had lost as much weight as he had hair; his breathing was laboured. Tubes snaked in and out of his body, making alarming gurgling sounds.

‘You have to understand, Frédéric, your uncle and your mother were already born. I had lost my father when I was two months old. It’s hard, growing up without your papa.’

He knew that we had this weakness in common. I avoided the subject. Granny, too, had been an orphan – it’s crazy when you think about it, my paternal grandmother and my maternal grandfather had both lost their soldier fathers. I come from a world with no fathers. My fisher of shrimp with his hollow cheeks went on: ‘I didn’t want to risk inflicting the same fate on my children, so I was a coward …’