I returned to Avenue Montaigne accompanied by Seb to drop off my contract and pick up my book and my comp cards. It was Vladimir who greeted me with a wink and pointed to the wall of photos behind him: in the midst of all those other faces, I spotted mine. It took me a moment to realise that this girl, who looked every inch a model like all those girls in the magazines, was actually me. What a strange feeling it was! It was as if I could recognise my outer shell, while knowing perfectly well that it wasn’t me inside. I sensed it was going to take me a while to get used to my new image: of me the model …
The book made an even bigger impression, when I saw Sergei’s photos for the first time. The sexy girl in the oversized shirt was me! The one whose breast was peeping out a bit (I wouldn’t be showing that one to my father), the gentle dreamy one in front of the mirror, the one with the killer look … All of them were me. On the comp card, slipped into the back of the book, it said: ‘Victoire Maçon Dauxerre, 5'10", 33–23–34, brown hair, blue eyes’, complete with the smart Elite logo.
I left feeling a bit dazed, with my comp cards and contract in my bag. A month previously, I was a totally stressed-out girl about to take the entrance exam for Sciences Po, and a month later, I was a totally stressed-out girl who everyone thought was a super-sexy woman and who was on her way to New York fashion week.
The night before we left for Marseille, I went to the cinema with my parents to see Picture Me, a documentary by Sara Ziff, an American model who had filmed her life over the course of a year. She recounts the happy times – the fashion shows, the adorable designers, the incredible hotels – but also the harsh side of this profession: the endless waiting at the castings, the occasional cruelty of the people who dress you, style your hair and do your make-up, the rivalry between the girls, the disjointed lifestyle, the jet-lag, the pressure and the feeling of being treated like an object, or sometimes worse than an object.
As I came out of the cinema, a man came up to me: ‘Excuse me, Mademoiselle. Have you ever thought of becoming a model?’ I was so taken aback that I didn’t know what to say! He introduced himself, said that he worked for a major agency and that, if I was interested, he would be happy to … I laughed as I told him that I had just signed with Elite. ‘I’m out of luck, they were quicker off the mark than me! I wish you a wonderful career.’
In the car on the way home, my parents spoke very frankly: the film clearly showed that it was a profession that could be very brutal. They stressed that I should never forget that I had a free choice and that I could decide what I wanted to do and what I didn’t want to do. That I should never put up with people treating me badly. That they would always be there for me, and that I could call them at any time of the day or night. ‘Well, preferably in the daytime, actually.’
Dad was trying to make light of it, but deep down inside I could feel something electric rousing itself in the pit of my stomach. The same thing that had stopped me sleeping before the Sciences Po exams. In fact, it was something I’d been familiar with for virtually my whole life. It was a stabbing anxiety that implanted itself in my guts and then wouldn’t let go. The same anxiety that had made me ill at primary school, that had stopped me returning to secondary school and that demanded that I be the best at everything all the time, so that people would choose me, love me and stick with me.
It was that bastard fear. That evening, I felt it stirring within me. And I realised that it would be my sole companion when I set off for New York.
Three Apples a Day (#ulink_6194e944-8013-5690-99dc-a399ff5bc247)
Mum, Léopold, my grandparents and I left for Marseille. Dad was due to join us the following week, while Alexis had decided to go to the Bayonne festival with his friends instead. And so there we were on holiday in a pretty villa and the only thing on the agenda was to enjoy ourselves and each other’s company. Well, not quite, because I did have a bit of ‘holiday homework’. For a start, Seb and Flo had both insisted that I swot up by reading the fashion magazines and taking note of the postures and faces of the models and the names and styles of the designers, the make-up artists and the hairstylists. That way, I’d get a better idea of what was expected of me. Then I had to practise walking according to Évelyne’s instructions: relax the facial muscles and the shoulders, think about my fingers in order to avoid the Playmobil arms, move my pelvis smoothly, focus on keeping straight, stare into the middle distance (for the killer look) and put one foot in front of the other like a big old horse. I performed all this by the edge of the pool, which made for a perfect catwalk, but only on the shady side to avoid getting tanned.
Finally, I had to continue to lose weight so that I could easily get into that famous size 4, which I hadn’t even known existed before being spotted by Elite. Up until that point, I’d managed things impeccably: three apples a day, carefully selected on the basis of their appealing colour and appetising shape. Before each meal, I picked out a pretty plate and laid out the contents of my unchanging menu on it with ever-increasing artistry: in a mosaic, in a fan shape or cut into little dice or thin slices, all to be savoured slowly, biting into them and chewing well before swallowing. I also drank a few coffees, but not too many, and a lot of Pepsi Max (because it tasted better than Diet Coke and the bubbles made you feel full). I didn’t drink anything else at all. For the first three days, I felt a bit hungry, but nothing I couldn’t handle. And in the days that followed, I began to feel lighter and lighter and stronger and stronger, like a sportswoman pulling off a good performance. In the space of a week I had already lost nearly 2 kilos. Losing weight was quite easy, in actual fact!
But things began to get a bit complicated in Marseille. As I had nothing else to do but think about what lay in store for me, Flo’s voice started to echo around incessantly in my head: ‘Like that, you’ll never get into the clothes.’ This was just around the time that I was beginning to get fed up with apples. Sometimes I replaced them with other fruits, but how could I know what their exact calorie content was? Did half a melon or a punnet of strawberries contain more or less than an apple? On top of that, I had constant stomach ache. I didn’t realise initially that eating nothing but raw fruit could cause these symptoms. I thought that it was the anxiety, because my fear had flooded into the vacuum and silence of the holidays, as if I’d opened the taps on a big pipe and a nasty, heavy anxiety was bubbling up inside me. And I had to fight hard to avoid drowning in it.
The results from Sciences Po finally came through: I’d failed. The doors to the other colleges were also beginning to close: I called Fénelon, Henri-IV and Louis-le-Grand to see if I could potentially postpone my starting date by a year. They said that I couldn’t, but that there was nothing to stop me from reapplying the following year. This time, the die was really cast: I had no choice but to succeed in the path that fate had set me on.
If I screwed up in New York, I’d have nothing to fall back on.
Since I wasn’t all that intelligent, the only option left to me was to be beautiful. I’d signed with Elite, and so I was going to be the best model in town. Impeccable, beyond reproach, utterly in keeping with what was expected of me. I was going to lose even more weight, learn to walk perfectly and do everything to ensure that my skin was an immaculate white. I was going to stack absolutely all the odds in my favour so that I would have a meteoric, explosive and dazzling career, because this was now my destiny, and it was up to me to grasp it by the horns.
So long as I managed to ‘get into the clothes’, obviously.
When, for the second day running, the scales stubbornly continued to read 52.9 and refused to go any lower, which they had been doing regularly since I’d started my diet, I cracked. I opened up to Mum, who always looked trim and sublime, no matter what. I’d never really broached the subject with her till then and she’d been watching me eating my fruit day after day without uttering a word. Naturally she did everything she could to reassure me: she told me that I was very beautiful, that I was already decidedly thinner than when they’d chosen me and that there was nothing to get worked up about, because I still had another month in which to lose that inch around the hips.
But I did go back onto the internet to look for some info on diets. All the websites talked about ‘plateaux’ – those times when, even if you stick strictly to your diet, your weight remains constant instead of dropping. If only I could have done a bit of sport, that would doubtless have helped me to get past the plateau, but all sport was forbidden. I did, though, permit myself a few lengths of the pool and I went to buy my fruit on foot so that I could get a bit of exercise – but only at the end of the day when the streets were in the shade.
It was the first time in my life that I hadn’t spent the summer at La Baule. Every year from the year dot we’d always got together there with my grandparents. I loved their cute little house, nestling in a garden awash with lavender and a stone’s throw from the beach. Granddaddy would take us shrimping and there was the smell of the sea and the seaweed. At teatime we would stuff ourselves on niniches, those long soft lollipops in all the colours of the rainbow, and large slices of brioche with redcurrant jelly, which was Nan’s speciality. Or else a nice slice of buttered bread copiously smeared with rillettes. Granddaddy was a real food lover! When I was 10, they stopped renting that house and took a large seafront apartment instead.
I was the one who first noticed that Granddaddy was trembling. I remember it very well: it was the year I turned 13. I’d decided to interview him about his life story, because I admired him and I wanted to know everything about him. For several hours every day, he spoke into my microphone about his childhood and his youth. After studying at the École des Arts et Métiers, his dream had been to become a master glazier or else an art teacher and to take over the stained-glass workshop that his great-uncle had bequeathed him. But his grandmother had been firmly set against it. And so he set aside his dreams of being an artist and became an engineer and surveyor instead, always telling himself that once he retired he would take up painting, for want of stained glass. He drew wonderfully well, perfectly even. But when he finally did have the time for it, his hands began to tremble. In the space of a few months, his Parkinson’s had put paid to his drawing.
That summer, Granddaddy had been too ill to enjoy the beaches of La Baule. And that was why we were now in Marseille, in this large, comfortable, one-storey house where he could get around more easily.
The more the days went by, the worse I felt. I was afraid of what lay in store for me, of not being up to it, of being separated from my family. And seeing Granddaddy in this state made me really sad. I loved him so much and I think we were very much alike in many ways. He knew about anxiety too and the fear of not being where you ought to be. Of passing the important things by, of not doing what you should have been doing, of missing out on the essential things, of failing in life.
As my father wasn’t there, I slept with Mum. Right up against her to draw in her odour and her body warmth and to imprint the memory for when I was all alone over there and missing her terribly. I already knew that I would miss her dreadfully. Unbearably, even. I had no idea how I was going to get by without her and without the rest of them.
Even in the middle of the Marseille summer, tucked up in Mum’s bed, I was starting to feel cold all the time.
Yùki (#ulink_ec2dad3f-5b2d-51fe-a013-1d12f4b1bc0e)
I missed Sophie, but I didn’t dare ring her – I’d cancelled all the plans we’d had for July and we hadn’t seen each other for ages. And what would I have said to her if I did ring her? That I was stressing out about the idea of going to work in New York, the city that I had been dreaming of for ever? That I wasn’t sure if I wanted to become a supermodel, something that all the girls of my age dreamed about? That I was afraid of not being able to put one foot in front of the other on the catwalk and that I would have to make do with eating fruit while I was living out the dream? She had her own dreams of studying and becoming a journalist – what would she make of my little existential crises?
Fortunately, Léo was on hand to listen to me. Even though he was much younger than me, I’d always shared a lot with him. Whereas Alexis put me on edge with all his emotional stuff and intimate questions, Léopold listened to me very attentively and responded with tenderness and common sense. He would often say: ‘You tell me about so many things that I’ll be able to become a psychiatrist and I won’t even have to study for it!’ He was so cute when he explained to me that I was beautiful now and so there was just no way that, suddenly overnight, I wouldn’t be beautiful any more. That I was too clever not to make a success of my new life. That I looked perfectly slim to him and he couldn’t see what the problem was. That he was convinced that I would be taken on for all the fashion shows. And above all else, that I shouldn’t worry, because what with Skype and texting and emails, we’d be able to speak to each other every day and they would always be with me. Nothing could separate us from each other, not even the 3,500 miles and the big time difference. ‘And you know what, Vic? We really are all so proud of you. Not everybody has a supermodel for a sister. And at Elite, to boot!’
Dad eventually joined us. I did my best not to spoil the atmosphere, but I just couldn’t shake off my anxiety. Happily, the scales finally deigned to drop again: I was slowly closing in on 51 kilos. So much so that Dad asked me if I was contemplating starting to eat a bit of meat and vegetables again. I think he just didn’t get it. He’d always loved Mum and thought she was the most beautiful woman ever, but it had never occurred to him to wonder how she managed to stay so slim. The fact was that she had the appetite of a sparrow. I’d only ever seen her picking at food, never really eating. There was just no chance of her ever putting on weight. And in fact when Dad looked like he was going to insist on the meat and vegetables, she told him not to worry.
As the thing that scared me the most was the idea of being away from my family, I asked my parents to buy me a cuddly toy that I could take everywhere with me and would make me feel like I had them with me everywhere too. While they went off to look for one, Léo and I gave some thought to the name we could give it. As a lover of Asian culture, he explained to me that Japanese first names had actual meanings and so we went on the internet to have a look. That was a lot of fun. We ruled out Suki, which means ‘love’, Fuku, which means ‘luck’ but which didn’t sound very appealing, and Kasoku, which means ‘family’. In the end, we opted for Yùki, with an accent on the u. That means ‘courage’. Léo said, ‘That way, your courage will never fail you.’ Leo really was so sweet and he was right, too: courage was exactly what I needed.
My parents returned with a cute little white rabbit, all soft and gentle, and I immediately adopted him. I sprayed Yùki with Mum’s perfume and from that point on he never left my side.
We headed home from Marseille, Alex rejoined us, we packed our bags and we set off to the States.
The American Dream (#ulink_5fe2f2fd-552d-577a-b5a5-6103be0ca2ef)
I left on my own a few hours before the rest of them on a different plane, because Silent had taken care of my return ticket. At the end of our family trip, I’d fly to New York from Los Angeles to get straight down to work and they would return to Paris. All of which meant that I was travelling with Air France and had been upgraded to business class like a star! I wondered if this was a foretaste of the new life that awaited me. The armchair that became a bed was a delight, as were the billion options available on my personal in-flight computer and the little complimentary beauty set. True luxury! And just as miraculous was the adorable air hostess who seemed to find it perfectly normal that I turned down my three-star meal in favour of fresh fruit.
I was in a bizarre state: both worried and excited, detached and nervous, grown-up and childlike. It was the beginning of adulthood for me, but I don’t know what I would have done without Yùki there to comfort me.
I got a yellow cab to the hotel. Wow! New York! It was like being in a film, and not in the audience but on the screen: the taxi and all the smells, the car horns, the swarms of people all sweating profusely, Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan skyline … I was in New York, New York! I was sure I was going to love it here.
As soon as my parents and brothers caught up with me, we began to explore every corner of the city. It was all set to be a dream holiday: New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, the five of us together and staying in incredible hotels. We’d been talking about it all year long and were so looking forward to it. And yet, though I didn’t want to admit it, I was having trouble keeping up. I was absolutely knackered, almost certainly because of the jet-lag, which I just couldn’t get over. And also because of that crazy month of July spent running around every which way, fretting over what choices I should make and what I was going to become, worrying about Granddaddy and trying to come to terms with my failure to get into Sciences Po.
And because of the fear, this constant nagging fear.
Traipsing around New York with the boys and Mum and Dad, I couldn’t help thinking that in a fortnight’s time I’d be here again, but all on my own. Central Park, the Guggenheim, the MoMA, Tribeca, Ground Zero, Broadway, the Rockefeller Center and the Statue of Liberty: everything that I’d always dreamed of was there within my reach, at my feet. Initially, it astounded me and then, all of a sudden, it overwhelmed me: I felt like I was losing my grip on the cliff face and that I was going to fall, and go on falling for ever. I didn’t say anything to them about it so as not to ruin their trip.
One great thing here, though, was that the calories were marked on every item of food you bought. That way, I knew more or less what I was doing and it made up for the fact that I couldn’t weigh myself, because there weren’t any scales in the hotel rooms. I tried not to think about it too much. On the day I left Paris, my hip size was 35 inches and I weighed a teeny bit over 51 kilos. I absolutely had to lose at least one more kilo, but two or three would really set my mind at rest …
Just a stone’s throw from our hotel, there was an enormous store: Victoria’s Secret. Mum knew that it was my dream to work for them. Who knew, perhaps in the not too distant future I would be one of their brand ‘angels’? In the meantime, she took me there to treat me to some lingerie. I chose a very pretty black lace ensemble featuring a discreet little pink bow. A ‘size 0’ pair of knickers, which presumably corresponded to a size 34, and a 32A bra. It might have been bad news for me that I’d gone down two cup sizes, because personally I was fond of my breasts, but it certainly wasn’t bad news for fashion week (I had of course noticed that many of the girls on the catwalks were flat-chested). I hadn’t had my period either that month, no doubt on account of all the stress, but I wouldn’t have minded it continuing that way – at least I wouldn’t have that to worry about at work.
On the food front, Dad was starting to get annoyed. He was getting more and more insistent that I should eat some meat or fish and some vegetables. It drove me mad – that was my problem, not his. And if I’d started eating just like that, without being able to weigh myself, I’d have ballooned before I knew it. It was out of the question and so, as a compromise, we agreed that I’d eat out with them every other meal rather than all the time. So half the time I let them go off and have lunch or dinner while I found a nice piece of fruit or a low-calorie salad to eat on my own in peace and quiet, without having to endure my father scrutinising the contents of my plate all the time. You had to know what you wanted in life. He had been the first to encourage me to sign that contract and it was too late now to back away from the consequences.
When we turned in for the night, I cuddled up to Alex. All three of us slept in the same room – Alex and me in the double bed and Léo in the single bed. My brother didn’t say anything, but I knew he could tell that things weren’t OK. And I’d fall asleep clutching Yùki tightly and trying to convince myself that it would pass.
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