WHEN TO PROVOKE IS TO LIVE

In a recent interview, Jane Birkin described her first date with Serge Gainsbourg. They met on the set of the 1969 movie ; he was 40, she was 22. “He barely spoke to me and I thought him terribly arrogant and unkind,” she recalled, “so the director suggested we go out for the night. We went to dinner, then to a club, where I dragged him onto the dancefloor. He trod all over my toes, and I realised that under the rashness and the mauve shirt, he was devastatingly unsure of himself, and that made him terribly intriguing. Then he whizzed me off to the Rasputin club, where he made all the musicians play Sibelius’s while he threw 100-franc notes at them, saying, ‘’ — ‘They’re prostitutes, like me’. Then we went off to another club where all the men were dressed up as ladies, to my amazement, kissing Serge on the forehead and saying, ‘’. His father had been a cabaret musician, and they’d all known him since he was tiny, and obviously thought he was a darling. By then