Pedigree: A Memoir

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Nineteen sixty-three. Nineteen sixty-four. The years blend together. Days of indolence, days of rain … Still, I sometimes entered a trancelike state in which I escaped the drabness, a mixture of giddiness and lethargy, like when you walk the streets in springtime after being up all night.

Nineteen sixty-four. I met a girl named Catherine in a café on Boulevard de la Gare, and she had the same grace and Parisian accent as Arletty. I remember the spring that year. The leaves on the chestnut trees along the elevated metro. Boulevard de la Gare, its squat houses not yet demolished.

My mother got a bit part in a play by François Billetdoux at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu: Comment va le monde, môssieu? Il tourne, môssieu … Boris Vian’s widow, Ursula Kübler, was also in the cast. She drove a red Morgan. Sometimes I went to visit her and her friend Hot d’Déé in Cité Véron. She showed me how she used to do the “bear dance” with Boris Vian. It moved me to see the complete set of Boris Vian’s records.

In July, I took refuge in Saint-Lô. Idle afternoons. I frequented the town library and met a blonde. She was spending her holidays in a villa in the hills of Trouville, with her kids and dogs. During the Occupation, when she was fourteen, she had lived at the Legion of Honor school in Saint-Denis. A “schoolgirl of old boarding-schools.” My mother wrote me: “If you’re happy there, it would be best if you stayed as long as possible. I’m living on practically nothing, and this way I can send the rest of the money I owe Galeries Lafayette.”

In September, in Saint-Lô, another letter from my mother: “I don’t think we’ll have any heating this winter, but we’ll manage. So I need you, my son, to send me all the money you have left.” At the time, I made a modest living by “brokering” used books. And in still another letter, a hopeful note: “The coming winter surely won’t be as harsh as the one we’ve been through …”

I received a phone call from my father. He had enrolled me, without asking, in advanced literature courses at the Lycée Michel-Montaigne in Bordeaux. He was, he said, “in charge of my schooling.” He made an appointment with me for the following day, at the cafeteria of the railway station in Caen. We took the first train for Paris. At Saint-Lazare, the ersatz Mylène Demongeot was waiting for us and drove us to the Gare d’Austerlitz. I realized that she was the one who had insisted on my exile, far from Paris. My father asked me to give the ersatz Mylène Demongeot, as a token of reconciliation, an amethyst ring I was wearing, a parting gift from my friend, the “schoolgirl of old boarding schools.” I refused.

At the Gare d’Austerlitz, my father and I caught the train to Bordeaux. I had no luggage, as if I were being kidnapped. I’d agreed to leave with him in hopes of talking things over between us: it was the first time in two years we’d been alone together, other than those furtive meetings in cafés.

We arrived in Bordeaux that evening. My father took a room for the two of us at the Hôtel Splendide. The following days, we went to the shops on Rue Sainte-Catherine to buy my necessities for the school year — of which the Lycée Michel-Montaigne had sent my father a list. I tried to convince him that all this was pointless, but he stuck to his guns.

One evening, in front of the Grand Théâtre, I started running to try to lose him. And then I felt sorry for him. Again I tried to talk things over. Why was he always so eager to get rid of me? Wouldn’t it be simpler if I just stayed in Paris? I was too old to be shut up in boarding schools … He didn’t want to hear it. So then I pretended to give in. As before, we went to the movies … The Sunday evening before school began, he brought me to the Lycée Michel-Montaigne in a taxi. He gave me 150 francs and made me sign a receipt. Why? He waited in the taxi until I had disappeared through the front door of the school. I went up to the dormitory with my suitcase. The boarders treated me as a “new kid” and forced me to read aloud a text in Greek. So I decided to run away. I left the school with my suitcase and went to have dinner at the restaurant Dubern, on Allée de Tourny, where my father had taken me on the previous days. Then I took a cab to the Gare Saint-Jean. And a night train to Paris. There was nothing left of the 150 francs. I was sorry not to have seen more of Bordeaux, the city of The Unknown Sea; not to have breathed in the scent of pines and their resin. The next day, in Paris, I ran into my father on the stairs in our building. He was stunned to see me. We would not speak to each other for a long time after that.

And the days and months passed. And the seasons. Sometimes I’d like to go back in time and relive those years better than I lived them then. But how?

I now took Rue Championnet at the hour of the afternoon when the sun is in your eyes. I spent my days in Montmartre in a kind of waking dream. I felt better there than anywhere else. The metro stop Lamarck-Caulaincourt, with its rising elevator and the San Cristobal midway up the steps. The café at the Terrass Hôtel. For brief moments, I was happy. Get-togethers at 7 P.M. at the Rêve. The icy handrail on Rue Berthe. And me, always short of breath.

On Thursday, April 8, 1965, judging from an old diary, my mother and I didn’t have a cent. She forced me to go ring at my father’s door and demand some money. I climbed the stairs with a leaden heart. I’d intended not to ring, but my mother was glaring up at me from the landing, eyes and chin tragic, foaming at the mouth. I rang. He slammed the door in my face. I rang again. The ersatz Mylène Demongeot screamed that she was going to call the police. I went back down to the third floor. The police came for me. My father was with them. They made both of us climb into the Black Maria parked in front of the building, under the dumbfounded eyes of the concierge. We sat on the bench, side by side. He didn’t say a word to me. This was the first time in my life I found myself in a police van, and as it happened, it was with my father. He had already been through this before, in February 1942 and in the winter of 1943, when he’d been picked up by the French inspectors of the Jewish Affairs police.

The Black Maria followed Rue des Saints-Pères, then Boulevard Saint-Germain. It stopped at a red light in front of the Deux Magots. We arrived at the police station on Rue de l’Abbaye. My father pressed charges with the superintendent. He called me a “hooligan” and said I’d come up to his place to “make trouble.” The superintendent declared that the “next time” he’d keep me there. I could tell my father would have been perfectly content to leave me at that police station once and for all. We returned together to the Quai de Conti. I asked why he’d let the ersatz Mylène Demongeot call the police and why he’d pressed charges. He said nothing.

That same year, 1965—or perhaps 1964—my father demolished the inner staircase connecting the two floors, and the apartments were separated for good. When I opened the door and stood in the small room filled with rubble, I found some of our childhood books, along with postcards addressed to my brother that had remained on the fourth floor, there among the debris, torn in pieces. May and June. Still in Montmartre. It was nice out. I was at a café on Rue des Abbesses, in the springtime.

July. Night train, standing in the corridor. Vienna. I spend a few nights in a seedy hotel near the Westbahnhof. Then I hole up in a room behind the Karlskirche. I meet all sorts of people at the Café Hawelka. One evening, I celebrate my twentieth birthday with them.

We sunbathed in the gardens of Potzleinsdorf, and also in a little shack in a working-class allotment near Heiligenstadt. The Café Rabe, a gloomy beer hall near the Graben, was always empty and you could listen to songs by Piaf. And still that slight giddiness mixed with lethargy, in the summer streets, as if after a sleepless night.

Sometimes we went up to the Czech and Hungarian borders. A large field. Watchtowers. If you walked in the field, they would fire at you.

I left Vienna at the beginning of September. Sag’ beim Abschied leise “Servus,” as the song goes. A passage by our Joseph Roth calls to mind the city I haven’t seen in forty years. Will I ever see it again? “You had to grab these shy, fleeting evenings before they disappeared, and what I liked best was to catch them in the parks, the Volksgarten or the Prater, and then to savor the last sweetest lingering of them in a café, where they seeped in, gentle and mild, like a fragrance …”

Night train in second class, at the Westbahnhof, Vienna to Geneva. I arrived in Geneva at the end of the afternoon. I caught the bus for Annecy. In Annecy, night had fallen. It was pouring. I was broke. I went into the Hôtel d’Angleterre on Rue Royale, with no idea how I’d pay for a room. I no longer recognized Annecy, which that evening was a ghost town in the rain. They had demolished the old hotel and derelict buildings near the station. The next day, I ran across some friends. Many had already left for military service. That evening, I thought I saw them pass by in the rain in uniform. As it turned out, I had fifty francs left. But the Hôtel d’Angleterre was expensive. During those few days, I had gone to the Collège Saint-Joseph in Thônes to visit my old literature teacher, Father Accambray. I had written him from Vienna, asking whether they might hire me as a proctor or assistant teacher for the coming year. I think I was trying to avoid Paris and my poor parents, who had given me no moral support whatsoever and had left me with my back to the wall. I’ve found two letters from Father Accambray: “I’d love it if the school year could start with you as a teacher in our house. I’ve spoken with the Superior. The teaching staff is full, but there could possibly be some movement before the end of August, which I hope will happen so that you can join us.” In the second, dated September 7, 1965, he writes: “The teaching schedule on which I’ve been working these past few days clearly shows, alas, that we have more than enough staff for the 1965–66 school year. We simply can’t offer you any work, even part-time …”

But life continued with no clear sense of why at a given moment you found yourself with certain individuals rather than others, in certain places rather than others, and whether the film was in the original language or dubbed. These days, all that remain in my memory are brief sequences. I enrolled in the Faculty of Literature to prolong my military deferment. I never went to classes and was a phantom student. Jean Normand (alias Jean Duval) came to live at Quai de Conti for several months, in the small room that had once contained the inner staircase connecting the third and fourth floors. He worked in a real estate office but was persona non grata in Paris. That’s something I would learn later. My mother had met him around 1955. Normand was twenty-seven then and had just served time in prison for burglary. As it happened, he had committed some of those burglaries, while still very young, with Suzanne Bouquerau, the woman my brother and I lived with in Jouy-en-Josas. He must have gone back to jail since then, as he was in Poissy prison in 1959. He made some basic restorations to the dilapidated room and I’m sure he gave my mother money. I was very fond of this Normand (alias Duval). One evening, he quietly left a hundred-franc bill on the mantelpiece of my room, which I discovered only after he’d gone. He drove a Jaguar, and the following year, at the time of the Ben Barka Affair, I read in the papers that they’d nicknamed him “the tall man with the Jaguar.”

An incident, from 1965 or ’66: It’s ten o’clock at night and I’m alone in the apartment. I hear heavy footsteps upstairs, at my father’s, and the crash of furniture being knocked over and windows being smashed. Then silence. I open the door to the landing. Coming from the fourth floor, two stocky fellows who look like thugs or plainclothes cops hurtle down the stairs. I ask them what’s going on. One of them makes an authoritarian gesture and tells me sharply to “go back inside.” I hear footfalls in my father’s apartment. So he was there … I’m tempted to phone him, but we haven’t seen each other since our trip to Bordeaux, and I’m certain he’ll hang up. Two years later, I ask him what happened that night. He claims not to know what I’m talking about. I believe that man could have worn down ten examining magistrates.

That autumn of 1965, on evenings when I had a few five-franc bills bearing the likeness of Victor Hugo, I patronized a restaurant near the Lutèce theater. And I hid out in a room on Avenue Félix-Faure in the 15th arrondissement, where a friend was storing a ten-year collection of Paris-Turf: he used them to make arcane statistical calculations for his bets at Auteuil and Longchamp. Pie in the sky. And yet I remember finding my bearings in that Grenelle neighborhood, thanks to those razor-straight backstreets that flowed down to the Seine. Sometimes I’d take a taxi very late at night. The ride cost five francs. At the edge of the 15th arrondissement, the police often checked for minors. I had altered the birthdate on my passport to give myself legal age, transforming 1945 into 1943.

Raymond Queneau was kind enough to receive me on Saturdays. Often, at the beginning of the afternoon, we’d return from Neuilly along the Left Bank. He told me of a walk he had taken with Boris Vian to a dead-end street that almost no one knew, at the far end of the 13th arrondissement, between the Quai de la Gare and the Austerlitz train tracks: Rue de la Croix-Jarry. He recommended I go there. I’ve read that the times Queneau was happiest were when he wandered around in the afternoon, thinking up his articles about Paris for L’Intransigeant. I wonder whether those dead years that I’m invoking here are worth it. Like Queneau, I was really myself only when I could be alone in the streets, seeking out curiosities like the Asnières dog cemetery. I had two dogs at the time. Their names were Jacques and Paul. In Jouy-en-Josas, in 1952, my brother and I had a dog called Peggy, who got run over one afternoon on Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne. Queneau was very fond of dogs.

He told me of a western that depicted a fierce battle between the Indians and the Basques. The presence of Basques had struck him as very odd and very funny. I finally tracked down the film: it’s called Thunder in the Sun. The synopsis indeed says that it’s about Indians versus Basques. I’d like to see this film in memory of Queneau, in a revival house they’ve forgotten to tear down, in some obscure corner of the city. Queneau’s laugh. Part geyser, part rattle. But I have no talent for metaphor. It was simply Queneau’s laugh.

Nineteen sixty-six. One evening in January, Quai de Conti. Jean Normand comes home around eleven o’clock. I’m alone with him in the apartment. The radio is on. They announce the suicide of Georges Figon in a studio on Rue des Renaudes, just as the police were breaking down the door. He was a protagonist in the Ben Barka Affair. Normand turns pale and makes a phone call, reads someone the riot act, quickly hangs up. He explains that he and Figon had had dinner together not an hour before and that Figon was an old friend, since their school days at the Collège Sainte-Barbe. He doesn’t tell me that they had served time together in Poissy, as I found out later.

And minor events slip by, slide off you without leaving much trace. You feel as if you can’t yet live your real life, as if you’re a stowaway. Of that fraudulent existence, I still recall a few scraps. At Easter, I came across a magazine article concerning Jean Normand and Ben Barka’s murder. The article was headlined: “Why haven’t they questioned this man?” A large photo of Normand, with the caption: “He has hatchet features that look like they were cut with a jackhammer. His name is Normand, but he goes by Duval. Figon called him ‘the tall man with the Jag.’ Normand, or Duval, had known Georges Figon for years …”

That spring, I sometimes stayed at the home of Marjane L. on Rue du Regard. Her apartment was the meeting place for a gang of individuals who circulated aimlessly among Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Montparnasse, and Belgium. Some, who had already discovered psychedelia, used it as a stopover between trips to Ibiza. But one might also run into a certain Pierre Duvelz (or Duveltz): blond, mid-thirties, mustache, and glen plaid suits. He spoke French with a distinguished, international accent, displayed military decorations on his lapel, and claimed to have been in officer candidate school at Saint-Maixent and married to a “Guinness heiress.” He placed phone calls to embassies. He was often with a moronic-looking nonentity who doted on him, and he boasted of his love affair with an Iranian woman.

Other shadows, among them a certain Gérard Marciano. And so many more besides, whom I’ve forgotten and who must have died since then, violently.

That spring of 1966 in Paris, I felt a change in the atmosphere, a variation in climate that I had already sensed in 1958, at age thirteen, and again at the end of the Algerian War. But this time, there was no major event occurring in France, no tipping point — or else I’ve forgotten. Moreover, to my shame, I couldn’t tell you what was happening in the world in April 1966. We were emerging from a tunnel, but as for what tunnel it was, I haven’t a clue. And that breath of fresh air was something we hadn’t experienced in previous seasons. Was it merely the illusion of twenty-year-olds who always think the world began with them? The air felt lighter to me that spring.

Following the Ben Barka Affair, Jean Normand stopped living at Quai de Conti and vanished mysteriously. Around May or June, I was summoned by the vice squad and told to report to an Inspector Langlais. He questioned me for three solid hours in one of their offices, amid cops coming and going, and typed up my answers. To my amazement, he told me that someone had accused me of being a drug user and dealer, and he showed me a mug shot of Gérard Marciano, whom I’d met once or twice on Rue du Regard. My name was apparently in his address book. I said I didn’t know him. The inspector made me show him my arms to check for needle tracks. He threatened to search Quai de Conti and Avenue Félix-Faure, but apparently he didn’t know about Rue du Regard — which surprised me, since the abovementioned Gérard Marciano used to frequent that apartment. He let me go, warning that I might have to come back for more questions. Sadly, they never ask you the right ones.

I alerted Marjane L. about the vice squad and Gérard Marciano, who never showed his face again. Pierre Duvelz, for his part, got himself arrested a few days later in a gun shop, while trying to buy or sell a revolver. Duvelz was a crook, with an arrest warrant out for him. And I committed a bad deed: I stole Duvelz’s wardrobe, which had remained behind at Marjane L.’s and contained some very elegant suits, and I swiped an antique music box belonging to the owners of the apartment Marjane L. was renting. I found a secondhand goods dealer on Rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul and sold him the lot for five hundred francs. He told me he came from a family of scrap merchants in Clichy and that he’d been tight with Joseph Joinovici. If I had any other items to get rid of, just call. He gave me an extra hundred francs, evidently moved by my shyness. The following year, I would make restitution for that bad deed. I used my first author’s royalties to repay the theft of the music box. I would gladly have bought Duvelz a few suits, but I never heard from him again.

Let’s be honest to the bitter end: In 1963, my mother and I had sold to a Pole we knew, who worked at the flea market, the four practically new suits, along with shirts and three pairs of shoes with pale wood shoe trees, that my father’s friend Robert Fly had left in a closet. He, too, like Duvelz, favored glen plaid suits and had disappeared overnight. We were flat broke that afternoon. Just barely the few coins the grocer on Rue Dauphine had given me for the bottle deposit. At the time, a baguette cost forty-four centimes. After that, I stole books from private individuals or libraries. I sold them because I needed the money. A first printing of Swann’s Way, published by Grasset; a first edition of Artaud inscribed to Malraux; signed novels by Montherlant, letters from Céline, a “table of the royal military houses” published in 1819, a clandestine edition of Verlaine’s Femmes and Hombres, dozens of Pléïade volumes and art books … From the moment I started writing, I never again committed another theft. Now and then, my mother, though she never stopped putting on airs, might also filch a few “luxury” items and leather goods from the shelves of the Belle Jardinière or other department stores. She was never caught in the act.

But time is growing short, the summer of 1966 is upon us, and with it what they called being “of age.” I took refuge in the neighborhood around Boulevard Kellermann, and I hung out at the nearby Cité Universitaire, with its large lawns, restaurants, cafeteria, cinema, and resident students. I made friends with Moroccans, Algerians, Yugoslavians, Cubans, Egyptians, Turks …

In June, my father and I reconciled. I went to meet him many times in the lobby of the Hôtel Lutétia. But I realized he did not have my best interests at heart. He tried to persuade me to enlist before my draft number came up. He would see to it himself, he said, that I was stationed in the Reuilly barracks. I pretended to acquiesce so that I could get some money out of him, just enough to spend my last holidays as a “civvy”: you can’t turn down a future soldier. He was convinced I’d soon be in uniform. I would turn twenty-one and he’d finally be rid of me. He doled out three hundred francs, the only “pocket” money he ever gave me. I was so delighted with this “bonus” that I would gladly have promised to join the Foreign Legion. And I thought of his mysterious compulsion always to push me away: schools, Bordeaux, the police station, the army …

Leave as soon as possible, before autumn and the barracks. July 1, early morning, Gare de Lyon. Second-class train car, packed. The holidays had just begun. I spent most of the trip standing in the corridor. Nearly ten hours to reach the Midi. The train skirted the seashore. Les Issambres. Sainte-Maxime. Fleeting impression of freedom and adventure. Among the reference points of my life, summers will always matter, even though they ultimately all blend together because of their eternal noon.

I rented a room overlooking the small main square of La Garde-Freinet. It was there, at an outdoor table of a café-restaurant one afternoon, in the shade, that I started writing my first novel. The post office across the square was open only two hours a day, in this village of sunlight and somnolence. One evening that summer, I turned twenty-one, and the next day I was supposed to take the return train.

Back in Paris, I kept out of sight. August. In the evenings, I went to the Fontainebleau cinema on Avenue d’Italie, or to the restaurant La Cascade on Avenue Reille … I gave my father a phone number, Gobelins 71–91. He called at nine in the morning. I let the alarm ring and slept until two in the afternoon. I continued working on my novel. I saw my father one last time, in a café on the corner of Rue de Babylone and Boulevard Raspail. Then there was this exchange of letters between us: “ALBERT RODOLPHE MODIANO 15 QUAI DE CONTI Paris VI, August 3, 1966. Dear Patrick, In case you decide to act according to your whims and disregard my decisions, the situation will be as follows: You are twenty-one years old; you are therefore an adult and I am no longer responsible for you. Consequently, you may no longer count on me for any assistance or support of any kind, whether material or moral. My decision regarding you is simple and nonnegotiable, and you can accept it or not: you terminate your deferment before August 10 in order to enlist in November. On Wednesday morning, we had agreed to go to the Reuilly Barracks to terminate your deferment. We were supposed to meet at 12:30; I waited for you until 1:15 and, true to your usual practice as a dishonest and ill-bred youngster, you neither showed up for our meeting nor even took the trouble to call with an apology. I can tell you that this is the last time you’ll have the opportunity to show me such cowardice. You therefore have a choice: you can have your own way, entirely and definitively renouncing my support, or you can comply with my decision. It’s up to you. Whichever you choose, I can state categorically that life will teach you once again that your father was right. Albert MODIANO. PS — I will add that I expressly convened the members of my family, whom I informed of the situation and who completely agree with me.” What family? One he had rented for the occasion?

“Paris, August 4, 1966. Dear Sir: You are aware that in the last century, the ‘recruiting sergeants’ used to get their victims drunk before enlisting them. The haste with which you tried to drag me to the Reuilly barracks reminded me of that system. Military service offers you a splendid opportunity to be rid of me. The ‘moral support’ you promised me last week will now be taken over by the corporals. As for ‘material support,’ it will be redundant, as I will have room and board at the barracks. In short, I have decided to act according to my whims and disregard your decisions. My situation will therefore be as follows: I am twenty-one years old, I am an adult, you are no longer responsible for me. Consequently, I will no longer count on you for any assistance or support of any kind, whether material or moral.”

Today, I regret writing him that letter. But what was I to do? I didn’t hold it against him; moreover, I’ve never held anything against him. I was merely afraid of finding myself prisoner in some barracks in the East. If he’d known me ten years later — as Mireille Ourousov had said — there wouldn’t have been the slightest problem between us. He would have enjoyed talking literature with me, and I could have asked him about his financial dealings and mysterious past. And so, in another life, we walk arm in arm, not hiding our meetings from anyone.

“ALBERT RODOLPHE MODIANO 15 QUAI DE CONTI Paris VI, August 9, 1966. I’ve received your letter of August 4th, addressed not to your father but to ‘Dear Sir,’ in whom I must recognize myself. Your bad faith and hypocrisy have gone too far. It’s the Bordeaux business all over again. My decision regarding your enlistment in the military in November was not made lightly. I considered it indispensable not only that you get a change of scenery, but also that you conduct your life by discipline rather than whimsy. Your insolence is contemptible. Your decision has been duly noted. ALBERT MODIANO.” I never saw him again.

Autumn in Paris. I continue working on my novel, in the evenings, in a room in one of the huge apartment buildings on Boulevard Kellermann and in the two cafés at the end of Rue de l’Amiral-Mouchez.

One evening, and I wonder why, I found myself with some people on the other bank of the Seine, at the home of Georges and Kiki Daragane, the woman for whom I’d run away from school at age fourteen and a half. She had been living in Brussels at the time and my mother would have her over at Quai de Conti. Since then, some science-fiction writers from Saint-Germain-des-Prés and a few artists from the Panic Movement had been buzzing around her. They must have been courting her, and she granting them her favors, under the placid eye of her husband. Georges Daragane was a Brussels industrialist and a pillar of the Café du Flore, where he remained ensconced on a bench from nine until midnight, no doubt recapturing the youth he’d lost in Belgium … Kiki and I talked about the past and the already distant time of my adolescence, when, she told me, my father would take me in the evening to the restaurant Charlot, “the seafood king” … She retained a fond memory of my father. He’d been a charmer, before taking up with the ersatz Mylène Demongeot. Nathalie, the airline stewardess he’d met in 1950 on the Paris-Brazzaville flight, later told me that when he was hard up, my father took her to dinner not at Charlot the seafood king but at Roger’s Fries … I shyly asked Georges Daragane and Kiki to read my manuscript, as if I were not in their apartment but in the salon of Mme and M. de Caillavet.

Perhaps all those people, whom I met during the 1960s and never saw again, are still living in a kind of parallel world, impervious to time, with the same faces as back in those days. I was thinking of this a short while ago, on a deserted street, in the sun. “You are in Paris with the examining magistrate,” as Apollinaire said in his poem. And the magistrate shows me photos, documents, evidence. And yet, my life — that wasn’t exactly it.

The spring of 1967. The lawns of the Cité Universitaire. The Parc Montsouris. At noon, the workers from the SNECMA aviation plant gathered at the café on the ground floor of the building. Place des Peupliers, on the afternoon in June when I learned they’d accepted my first book. The SNECMA plant at night, like a huge cargo ship run aground on Boulevard Kellermann.

One June evening at the Théâtre de l’Atelier on Place Dancourt. A curious play by Audiberti: Coeur à cuire. Roger worked at the Atelier as stage manager. The evening of Roger and Chantal’s wedding, I had dined with them in the small apartment of someone whose name I don’t remember, on that same Place Dancourt where the light shimmers from the street lamps. Then they had driven away toward the outer suburbs.

That evening, I felt unburdened for the first time in my life. The threat that had weighed on me for so many years, kept me on edge, had dissolved in the Paris air. I had set sail before the worm-eaten wharf could collapse. It was time.