The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles: A Memoir by Françoise Hardy

By Françoise Hardy

“I was for a very long time passionately in love with her, as I’m sure she’s guessed. Every male in the world, and a number of females also were, and we all still are.” —David Bowie

“Françoise was the ultimate pin-up of most hip bedroom walls, and I know for a fact that Brian Jones and Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and many other pop stars were desperately interested in having Françoise Hardy become their girlfriend in some way.” —Malcolm McLaren

Françoise Hardy is best known in Europe for originating the famed “Yé-Yé” sound in pop music which began a cultural scene in the early 1960s. Her teenage success grew as she became a much-photographed fashion model and actress. Adored for her shy beauty and emotional songwriting, she sang hit songs in French, Italian, and German. In The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles, she bares her soul and tells the truth of her relationships, fears, and triumphs as well as the hard-won wisdom carved from a life well-lived.

This unusually-titled memoir has sold millions of copies in its French, German, Italian, and Spanish editions in recent years. This first English-language release is expertly translated by Jon E. Graham. The book contains dozens of images in addition to Hardy’s intimate recollections of her upbringing and career.

Françoise Hardy, an accomplished songwriter and lyricist also collaborated with accomplished songwriters such as Leonard Cohen, Serge Gainsbourg, and Patrick Modiano. Both her early pop work and later material in a complex and mature style helped generate a dedicated cult following. Both her husband, Jacques Dutronc, and son, Thomas Dutronc, are respected musicians in France.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Feral House
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781627310734

Françoise Hardy

Françoise Hardy -- at the beginning of her career, at least -- covered more stylistic ground and owed more debts to pop/rock than she's given credit for. Immensely popular in her native France, the chanteuse first displayed her breathy, measured vocals in the early and mid-'60s. Her (mostly self-penned) recordings from that era draw from French pop traditions, lightweight '50s teen idol rock, girl groups, and sultry jazz and blues -- sometimes in the same song. The material is perhaps too unreservedly sentimental for some (in the French tradition), but the songs are invariably catchy and the production, arrangements, and near-operatic backup harmonies excellent, at times almost Spector-esque. Fans of Marianne Faithfull's mid-'60s work can find something of a French equivalent here, though Hardy's material was stronger and her delivery more confident.

Book preview

One

I WAS BORN at nine thirty in the evening during an air raid alert. It was on January 17, 1944, at the Marie-Louise Clinic at the top of Rue des Martyrs,¹ in the Ninth Arrondissement of Paris, where Jean-Philippe Smet² had been born a few months earlier. My mother often told me that I cried every night during my first month of life, but she had never come to comfort me. She was proud of herself for never giving in to what she felt were my whims. She boasted that after a month I understood and stopped crying. Today I believe what I understood was this: the more you cry out, the more you are ignored. You must hold your tears back and never ask anything of anyone.

But how can I hold this against my mother? She was only twenty-three years old and thought she was doing the right thing. She probably also believed she was doing a good thing by surrendering to her desire to have a child, made even keener by a recent abortion. She was not even truly in love with my father, a married man, who enjoyed a much higher social status. She most likely believed that he would make a good father, or at least be able to ensure his children’s material comforts.

Their meeting was both banal and colorful. My mother’s exceptional beauty attracted even more attention because she was five foot eight, which was not all that common in the forties. Captivated from the first moment he saw her in the street, my father decided to follow her. My mother quickly spotted him and thought it would be funny to force him to march double time from the Gare Saint Lazare to the Gare du Nord keeping up with her. After an hour, she could not help laughing at his perseverance and this broke the ice.

But how different they were from each other! First there was their age: twenty years separated them. Next was their social status: my father was from a large, middle-class family that had moved to Blois from their native Normandy, where my father managed an adding machine company. He and his brothers—an admiral, a Jesuit priest³, a doctor, and a printer-publisher—had all completed their education and taken music lessons. For her part, my mother was the youngest of three daughters whose parents were low-level bank employees who only read the newspapers and had a poor command of the French language. They lived on Rue de Tilleul in Aulnay-sous-Bois in a small bungalow made of burrstone surrounded by a garden. Here they raised their three girls, living hand-to-mouth. Their oldest daughter, the chubby Suzanne, married the first man who would have her, Louis, a milling machine operator. She followed him to Blanc-Mesnil, where they had nine children in quick succession and barely enough to feed them. Marie-Louise, who had a more delicate constitution, contracted tuberculosis during a time when it was hard to treat, and people treated its victims as if they had the plague. She came to Paris to pursue her desire to be a painter. It was here she joined the Communist Party. Despite the foul weather and even though she was spitting up blood, she would hand out copies of the party paper, L’Humanité, every Sunday outside of churches. Her mother’s narrow-minded Catholicism was likely no stranger to the radical nature of a political ideal, and she never questioned her daughter’s commitment. The youngest, my mother Madeline, left as soon as she got her diploma to find work in the capital, partially to escape the stifling family environment.

The biggest gap between my parents, though, concerned their feelings for each other. My father was madly in love—maybe it was a mid-life crisis—while my mother merely felt flattered that a man of his standing would be interested in her. I have to say that she never received much affection from her own mother who, lacking her beauty and physical appearance, was unable to recognize herself in her daughter and constantly made cutting remarks that were no joy to hear, like: Who does she think she is? or Wherever did she come from? This was all my mother needed to believe she had been born from a much more godlike creature than this mocking woman she barely resembled, and she constructed a persona for herself in which individualism, independence, and pride formed the dominant traits, masking a terrible emotional void. Shortly before she died in 1991, my mother confided to me that she did not fear death at all, as she had been wishing for it since she had been very young.

My grandmother’s hostility also targeted the male sex with equal ferocity. To hear her talk, all men were bastards who only wanted to sleep with young women. This was quite ironic, as she had been expelled from the convent by a mother superior who did not glimpse the slightest trace of any religious vocation in her. Get married, my child, she recommended. Jeanne Millot married Alexandre Hardy, a sufficiently pure and honest man who never cheated on her. As the bashful lover of this voluptuous redhead who would prove to be egocentric, narrow-minded, frigid, and emasculating, my grandfather was continuously rebuffed, especially whenever he made an effort to show his clumsy affections. He eventually took refuge in total silence, caring for nothing anymore but his chicken coop and garden, while compensating for his amorous frustration by reading romance magazines like Intimité and Nous deux. In her defense, my grandmother lost her own mother at an early age and was then sent away to a boarding school by her overwhelmed father. He would remain the only person my grandmother ever truly cared for and she called him my own papa until the end of her life.

My grandfather only spoke to me once, in 1962, when I had been suddenly thrust into the spotlight. As I was about to leave, standing on the doorstep of the small house he had built with his own hands, he suddenly asked me, Are you happy, at least? I would never go back to Aulnay, and I find it hard to contain my emotions when I speak about it. What affection in those simple words! And how strange to hear them from the mouth of a man who had repressed his own feelings for so long that he seemed to have become indifferent to everything.

When my mother became pregnant again in the autumn of 1944 despite herself, my father categorically rejected the idea of another child, which was hardly encouraged by the difficulty of the times and the irregularity of their situation. After she weighed the pros and cons, she decided to keep it. Michèle was born on July 23, 1945, and my mother, who was working part-time as a bookkeeper’s assistant and barely making ends meet, sent her off to my grandmother’s while she was still a baby. Because of this, a bond was forged between the two of them for which I would pay the price. On second thought, we both paid the price.

My mother was never able to spend a single night with a man. Only one time before she died did she ever mention her frigidity, but she was never able to connect it to the way she was compelled to toughen herself to compensate for her emotional isolation. One night when my father was caught by surprise by the curfew that was in effect during the Occupation, he knocked on the door to the two-room apartment he had rented for her at 24 Rue D’Aumale, and she refused to let him stay. She justified this by her belief that the bond they shared had been made unbreakable by having children together. But after four years of treating the father of their two children quite poorly, she was dumbfounded to learn that he was cheating on her. What tricks did she use to discover her rival so that she could show her the photo of their two little girls? The woman was so outraged that she immediately broke off her relationship with my father. He was so incensed that he took a sudden and irreversible dislike for my mother. They only spoke to each other on the telephone after that, and with great formality.

My sister and I spent our childhood and adolescence in a vacuum that consisted of the house in Aulnay and the small apartment in the Ninth Arrondissement where no visitors ever came—except once in a great while a rejected suitor, Jean Isorni, the brother of the famous lawyer Jacques Isorni⁴. Then starting in the fifties, and more frequently, there was Gilbert von Giannellia, an Austrian baron who worked at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and spent his free time at the racetrack, where he lost his last dime. He was probably the only man with whom my mother had ever fallen in love, and she became so beautiful and proud. But he would also ask for money from her when she did not have a single penny to spare, and I would often see her hang up the phone in tears after one of these demands. I began taking a dim view of this man whom my mother had made my sister’s godfather. He vainly tried to get into my good graces by saddling me with the detestable nickname of Framboise [raspberry]. To my great relief, he and my mother never lived together.

I loved my mother passionately and exclusively as I had no one but her to love, and I was the first person for whom she had ever felt deeply. My sister did not even inspire in me the tenderness people are supposed to feel for younger children, because of my confused desire to have our mother for myself alone, and because I was given the restrictive responsibilities of an older child even though our age difference was only a year and a half. The gap between Michèle and I would widen later on. She would make my mother hit the roof with her systematic disobedience while I, the sad incarnation of order and discipline, would drive her up the wall. When she was around twenty years old, my sister confided to me that she had only felt fear of our mother, whose strictness scared me, too. Decades after this, my mother admitted that she never felt she had anything in common with my younger sister.

Keeping himself busy feeding his chickens, collecting eggs, pruning trees, watering his vegetables, or reading his mushy magazines, my grandfather seemed to ignore his grandchildren, while my grandmother continued to target me with all her sarcastic remarks. You are going to make your mother weep tears of blood, she would say, or That girl is definitely her father’s daughter! The latter remark inspired me to idealize my father more than he deserved, considering we barely saw him; he was content with only having lunch with us in Aulnay during the Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost holidays. His manners and conversation impressed my grandmother so much that she would suddenly become obsequious in his presence, only to hurriedly badmouth him as soon as his back was turned. For my part, I had a very confused impression of this unknown world inhabited by people who were totally different from the gossips of Aulnay or the cousins of Blanc-Mesnil. People I found even more attractive than my father, who sweetly called me Patchouli and seemed to prefer me to my sister.

Despite my father’s rare visits, which I prized so highly, I always felt huge pangs of anxiety as the vacation days approached. I was already unhappy about the obligation every week to leave after school on Saturday for the Gare du Nord annex, where Michèle and I would catch the train for Aulnay. But this ordeal was softened by the prospect of my mother’s arrival the next day and returning with her to Paris, sometimes in the baron’s car, but most often by train. If we had the time, we would not take the bus and walk home from the station. I can still see the three of us as if it were yesterday, walking down the Rue de Maubeuge to the Rue Saint-Lazare, from where we would turn on to the Rue Taitbout, which took us to Rue d’Aumale. I was at the height of euphoria as I was with my dear mother again and would be with her until the next Saturday, except for the brief intermission on Thursday when my despicable grandmother came to watch us.

However, the activities she forced on us were much more enjoyable in Paris than in Aulnay. As the holidays approached, for example, she would take us to see the lively and spectacular display windows of the Galleries Lafayette or Printemps, which were sources of endless wonder. We would then go up to the floor with the toys, but I most remember the intoxicating fragrances of the main floors of these department stores, where the perfumes and cosmetics were displayed. When the nice weather came, we would walk to the Jardin des Tuileries, with quasi-ritual stops along the way in front of pastry shops where, for want of anything better, we would devour the cakes with our eyes.

The Sundays in summer when my mother would return to Paris without us were so heartbreaking that I would sob desperately once I was alone in bed. I hated Aulnay and the house on the Rue de Tilleul, where I had no one to cling to and which even today still gives me nightmares. My sister and I took turns sleeping in one of the two small, sinister, and poorly heated rooms of the single-story house. As soon as it was dark, I would begin feeling irrationally afraid of things like the door to the subbasement to the right of the bed. I imagined that some malevolent figure determined to murder me in my sleep was standing behind it. The incessant creaking of the floor added to my fear and the furniture all seemed to be signs of some menacing presence. Luckily, the train tracks ran very close by and every time I heard a train coming, I felt temporarily relieved.

Just like in Paris, everything in Aulnay was strictly regulated. First there was the toilet in a small closet that included a sink and much later a shower, but no lock on the door. Starting when I was ten years old, my grandmother had the infuriating habit of bursting in when I was stark naked. I took this as evidence of an unhealthy curiosity on her part, so I began washing with one hand while keeping the door shut with the other, to keep her out. Later in life, I wondered if it was my grandmother’s inhibiting voyeurism or the unconscious desire to not resemble her in any way that would explain my absence of curves, for which she never failed to criticize me. She was equally vigorous in shaming me about my fat belly, which was abnormally swollen by the beans and lentils she served us every week as well as by the repressed emotions and extreme tension, which kept my stomach tied in knots. I still have a stinging memory of the gathered skirts she had gone to the trouble of making for my sister and I on her sewing machine. My skirt was a hideous bright yellow and she had livened it up with a horrible pleat. She said it was to conceal my disgrace, but it only made it stand out.

In the morning, we had to make our bed, then dust the legs of the dining room table, the chairs, the buffet, and the sideboard. It was also our job to set the table, to dry the dishes, and, in season, trim the beans and shell the peas. But these trivial chores were much less depressing than the visits to Blanc-Mesnil with our grandmother and the bike rides through Aulnay with our grandfather, or playing jacks, hopscotch, Pope Joan⁵, checkers, or rocking horse, or who knows what, which I was forced to play with my sister and this or that cousin. Time just seemed to drag on endlessly because all I cared about was my mother’s return. I would count the interminable hours that separated us, longing only to hide in a corner and read, therefore escaping all the things I couldn’t stand doing. My congenital inaptitude to care even remotely about what interested or amused others was translated into a crushing feeling of loneliness that would, ironically, fly away whenever I managed to isolate myself with a book. This practically sums up my whole life: a life lived by proxy, more virtual than real, a life not so distant from that of my grandfather, after all.

During meals, my grandparents listened religiously to the news on the radio. Children were not permitted to speak, had to keep their hands on the table, sit up straight, and would have to go without dessert if they did not eat every last crumb of their bread or clean their plates. Because times were hard, the electricity was not turned on until it was impossible to see, and the lights would be turned off again as quickly as possible. I also remember that my sister and I had to attend mass on Sundays and pray by the side of our beds before going to sleep. I was a very pious young girl, so I prayed to God every night to bring my mother and father back together, as my grandmother stupidly insisted although she knew full well it was a lost cause.

I do have a few shining memories of my life in Aulnay-sous-Bois. They revolve around the rose bushes that climbed along the stone walls and smelled so good, just like the privet flowers looking out onto the street. These memories bring back the colored eggs, candies, and trinkets that were hidden on Easter Sunday in the boxwood hedges, which my sister and I would excitedly set off to find. Another remnant of a lost paradise appears regularly in my dreams: the cherry tree. It grew the darkest, fleshiest, sweetest, juiciest cherries, which I think are the best I’ve ever eaten in my entire life. Not to mention the tomatoes, whose exceptional succulence I only realized later, enhanced by the taste of freshly picked chervil. At the end of spring or the beginning of summer, I cannot recall exactly, we would gorge ourselves on the red and golden currants, and the gooseberries, that were overflowing the garden. Around September, we would go to glean potatoes in a field between Aulnay and Gonesse. Stretching out as far as the eye could see, it gave me the exalting impression of suddenly opening the clogged suburban horizon, and I was amazed that we were allowed to gather all the potatoes we could find without being asked for anything in return. I have to confess that my grandmother almost seemed nice to me when her house filled with the fragrance of apricot preserves and gooseberry jelly, and even more so when she began kneading the dough for the crust of her simple but delicious apple tart. Watching her knead and then roll out the dough, and then smelling the tart baking in the oven, gave me so much joy I could hardly wait to do it again as soon as possible. Even today, baking brings me indescribable pleasure.

My grandparents skimped and saved so much on their modest retirement that they were among the first to be able to afford a television. What a major disruption! In one fell swoop, the outside world entered their dismal house thanks to a magic box from which we could hardly tear our eyes away. We were petrified at the thought of it being switched off when it was on, and we burned with impatience for it to be turned on when it was off. Alas, just as I was never allowed access to most of the books locked away in the library next to the dining room, my sister and I were not allowed to watch television at night, and we would go to bed, our hearts heavy. We were only given permission to watch on Sunday afternoons, when we would watch the films of John Wayne or Cary Grant, or the comedies of Fernandel, or shows of coming attractions that gave us tantalizing previews of all the movies I would have loved to see.

Brightened up by my mother’s precious kisses bestowed after lunch and dinner, the rhythm of life on the Rue Aumale was set by our school schedule and the even stricter one imposed by my mother, who was convinced people worked better in the morning than in the evening. She would send us to bed at seven thirty, when we were not at all sleepy, and she would wake us up to do our schoolwork when we were still fast asleep at six in the morning. In the evening, to kill boredom, Michèle and I would play in the darkness pretending to be the lady and the shopkeeper, trying to make as little noise as possible. She was named Madame Cafetier and I was Madame Desvents. She was a baker and I was a dairywoman, and this gave rise to endless exchanges, which we found totally enthralling, on the price and quality of baguettes, cakes, butter, and cheese. This was still during the days when you bought milk with a milk can, which I loved to fill up at the creamery right next to the Rue de la Rochefoucauld, where I might have run into Jean-Philippe Smet, who lived on the neighboring street of Rue de la Tour-des-Dames. The young Jacques Dutronc⁶ grew up not far from there, at 67 Rue de la Provence, and it is very likely that our paths crossed without knowing it in the Square de la Trinité, where both of us took our first steps. In 1944, my mother—who had taken me there for some fresh air—was caught in a gun battle and threw herself over my carriage to protect me from the bullets.

Sometimes I would swap my fictional dairywoman activity for that of a perfume seller—because of the ground floors of the large department stores—or a news dealer, because of my favorite magazine, Mireille, whose arrival I waited for impatiently each week. My favorite comic strip was called The Orphan Girl of the Circus, and its heroine was a flying-trapeze artist, which gradually led me to higher ambitions. Having no trapeze, I devoted my free time to practicing acrobatic routines with my sister, commandeered for the occasion. While we thought they were spot on, they terrified my mother. These achievements surprise me all the more when I recall that I always was quite clumsy. Among other things, I fell down the stairs and had so many other accidents that I was awarded the nickname Mademoiselle Boom

My addiction to my mother had me watching impatiently for her return home from the office at six thirty sharp. Because she was so punctual, the slightest delay distressed me. I would immediately imagine that she had been hit by a car while crossing the street and would have a hard time chasing that obsessive thought away until, after minutes that seemed like hours, I finally heard her key in the door. Similarly, the few times she asked us to eat lunch at school because she was catching the flu, I was less upset at having to endure the nightmarish atmosphere of the school cafeteria than tortured by the thought that she was sicker than she was letting on. Despite her strong constitution, she seemed extremely fragile to me, and the fear of losing her tormented me throughout my childhood.

My mother would bleed herself dry every year to give her daughters a dream Christmas. I still get emotional when I remember the Christmas Eves when she brought us to the midnight mass at the Trinité Church, after making mysterious preparations in the room she occupied next to ours. The mass was way too long, but our state of excitement at the thought of what was waiting for us at home kept us awake. Once she stepped inside, we still had to wait patiently a few minutes before the door would open on a scene of absolute wonder. There was the fragrance wafting from the Christmas tree, the garlands, the candles, and the presents placed in front of the fireplace next to the shoes we had left there. We were not at all frustrated by getting only one present because we had carefully selected the one we had longed for most. I loved dolls and remember one in particular, a cute swimmer in soft plastic, which could pee. I baptized it with the name George, because of Georges Guétary, a charming singer with whom I was infatuated. Clasping it tightly on the road between the station and the house in Aulnay, on which we were scurrying in the cold night with our grandparents, who were taking us to their house after the sacrosanct Christmas lunch at the Rue d’Aumale, eased the grief I felt at the end of the holiday, which plunged me back into a hostile world far from the only person I loved and who loved me.

I switched from aspiring trapeze artist to ballerina. We only went to the movies once a year, after Christmas lunch. This was how I saw the Ballet Russe film of Romeo and Juliet with the star dancer Galina Uulanova. This movie was a revelation that dazzled me as much as it tore me apart. From then on, every time I felt the shock of beauty I felt torn between the enthusiasm that drew me to it and the impotence that nailed my feet to the ground. In whatever form it appears, beauty has always been an overwhelming glimpse of divine nature for me. Inaccessible yet familiar by its sheer obviousness, it reveals the void we unknowingly try to fill. Hanging only by a thread, fragile and ephemeral in its form, beauty echoes the tragic aspect of the human condition, which it sublimates and justifies.

The dance slippers I had been dreaming of were my Christmas present when I was twelve years old. My choice was the austere work shoes, which I thought were more realistic than the satin slippers. From then on, as soon as I finished my lessons and homework, I would wreck my toes dancing on point while trying to imitate the graceful positions of Ulanova. When I was twenty-five and money was no longer a problem, and I had some extra time, I decided to take classical dance courses in a studio next to the Champs-Élysée Theater. I was quickly discouraged by the difficulty of the exercises and the physical pain. I thank heaven I was not given the possibility to commit sooner and more seriously to a path for which I was not made.

Everything concerning my father was even more strictly regulated than the rest, and I quickly realized that my sister and I had to be discreet. It was essential that no one in his circle knew, if not of our very existence, at least of the family bond between us. On vacation, for example, it was forbidden to send him postcards or write our names and address on the back of an envelope. For a while my father was the owner of a stationery store on Rue Saint-Lazare, where we were sometimes allowed to go during the short break for lunch. For as long as I can remember, stationery stores have always fascinated me. On my way home from school, I would systematically stop in front of the one on Rue la Bruyère, where I was unable to tear my eyes away from the pens, notebooks, notepads, and other magical objects. So having access to the shop and backroom of my father’s stores amounted to entering the cave of Ali Baba. He allowed us to carefully look at the greeting or birthday cards, and examine the pencils, erasers, rulers, kits, and, the height of happiness, leaf through the large albums in which we found the sequels to our favorite comic strips.

In both Paris and Aulnay, reading was my favorite pastime. The two stories The Lady with the White Face⁷ and The Little Mermaid⁸ marked me for life. The profound reason for this only came to me years later. A story is all the more overwhelming when, despite its universal qualities, it helps cultivate a personal difficulty. Both of these stories deal in their own way with love that is mad, masochistic, and impossible. Suffering fills the open wound. The wound is the sin and suffering is the answer, says The Dialogues with the Angel.⁹ Isn’t it staggering that a child would spontaneously focus on something that illustrates the unconscious wound that will draw her like a magnet her entire life toward situations and individuals capable of triggering the suffering that responds to it? It is as if something inside her already knew who she was and what tone her life would take …

I detested school. My father wanted his daughters to attend a religious school, so our entire schooling was with the Trinitarian sisters who taught at 42 Rue La Bruyère, a five-minute walk from where we lived. This is most likely where the feeling of shame that has tormented me non-stop since I was a child took root. Everything fell into place: the social status of my parents who I naively believed were divorced, which at this time and in this kind of place was still viewed as deplorable but more acceptable than being a natural child. Then there were the good sisters’ constant complaints that my father was generally a year behind in his payments, and the various differences with the other girls. First was the age gap, because they had me skip a grade, why I don’t know. This is where I probably got the chronic impression I’ve had ever since of never being ready. Next was the financial gap that allowed me to see that I was less well-dressed than my schoolmates with my bargain-basement skirts, which I had to wear until they were threadbare. Most importantly, there was the awkwardness I described earlier of an introvert who did not share other peoples’ interests and was never able to fit in. I eventually reached the point of habitually hiding in the school chapel to escape the insurmountable ordeal of Dodgeball—which I was sure to cause my side to lose—not to mention the small cliques that formed and from which I felt excluded. The good sisters thought I was showing signs of an early religious vocation. They saw a sensible, hardworking, and solitary young girl, who preferred praying to playing. This was all it took to make me their pet and widen the gap between me and the others even more.

My grandmother planted the idea in my head early on that my mother was sacrificing herself to raise my sister and I. The least I could do in exchange for her trouble was to obey her and work hard at school. My good results gave her the impression that I was gifted but the truth was that I was pushing myself in everything and was constantly stumbling over the difficulties I had in understanding and memorizing. From my earliest class, the twelfth, it felt like a nightmare every time my teacher called on me to recite a lesson, or worse, go to the blackboard. I was already paralyzed at the thought of performing in public. I regarded singing class and its vocal exercises with dread, which is quite ironic given my later choice of profession. I was therefore the only student to sign up for the elective course in Greek that was given at this same time. This language held no appeal whatsoever to me, but it still enhanced my prestige among my teachers and my mother. Misunderstandings have a long life. No one realized how miserable I was at school or that I was tolerating my ordeal in silence so that my mother would be pleased with me. Her excessive delight over what she most often mistakenly saw as one of my achievements quickly began to bother me. Little by little I realized that she was unconsciously giving me the responsibility of giving her reasons to be proud—a pride she desperately needed to compensate for the disappointments of her personal life. In the end, my mother’s illusory overestimation contributed as much to my discomfort as my grandmother’s humiliating criticism. I could not recognize myself in either one.

Several memories stick out from my school years. The first is my First Communion, during which I was given a lot of pious pictures. It was the custom to give them away after the ceremony to family and friends. I was dying to give one to Agnes, a girl in my class I secretly admired but dared not approach. Once the great day had arrived, I gave her my favorite image with all the clumsiness that characterizes me in general but breaks all records every time I attach too much importance to something or to someone. The next day I spotted that picture at the bottom of the class wastepaper basket. This was my first broken heart and it more or less foreshadowed all that were to follow.

Next was my Solemn Communion.¹⁰ Back then—before wearing an identical white alb was made mandatory for each girl—the department stores offered a large selection of long embroidered robes, each more luxurious than the last, with an assortment of veils. My father must have spent quite a bit because he bought me the robe that seemed more beautiful than all the rest. I was quite proud about exhibiting it in the small school chapel filled with white lilacs, lilies, and hydrangeas, wearing the Swiss watch I had been dreaming of for months on my wrist. (It was customary to give people their first watch on the day they received communion.) Despite my mystical bent, the religious aspect of the ceremony was not on center stage for me. This was accentuated by the fact that every time I attended mass, I would begin to experience a physical discomfort that forced me to rush out and find a place to lay down. This was the only fly in the ointment of this beautiful May Sunday. It is called space sickness and I experienced it systematically at mass. Perhaps my blood pressure was already a bit low, which the obligation to not eat beforehand hardly helped.

Mademoiselle Rès, the French professor for the fourth grade¹¹, was in the habit of putting on a play from the classic repertoire with her students. The year I was in her class, she opted for Corneille’s Le Cid, and gave me the role of the Infanta. This unexpected responsibility shook me up from top to bottom. But when, after several rehearsals, it was decided that I would play the role of Chimene, my joy and trepidation knew no bounds. I must have been thirteen then, and this was a major event. We performed the play at the Cinema des Agriculteurs in front of an audience consisting primarily of the students’ parents. Oddly enough, I remember less the stage fright that made me sick and the performance itself than the sorrow that overwhelmed me after the curtain fell. After the elation of the last few weeks, my life had suddenly lost its zest. From there, it was a casual step for my mother and I to imagine I had ambition, but as with classical dance, it fell short. It was not ambition; it was simply the great regret that ensues when the party is over, coupled with the desire to extend it one way or another.

The baron Gilbert von Giannellia convinced my mother that her daughters should learn German and spend their summer vacations with an Austrian family to better grasp this difficult language. From mid-July to the end of August, my sister and I spent seven or eight weeks with Frau Welser, whose house, Plumeshof, was difficult to reach but sat in the very center of a meadow surrounded by fir trees. It was extremely picturesque, with its white walls, red tile roof, and green shutters with the little hearts carved into them. From the hill on which the house was perched, there was a view of Innsbruck Valley on one side and the village of Natters on the other, and the majestic mountains that overshadowed them in every direction.

We took the Orient Express each year to Innsbruck. After she brought us to the Gare de l’Est, my mother would get us settled in the sleeping car where we would spend the night, watched over from afar by the conductor in whose care she had entrusted us. When the train began to move, and her long silhouette gradually disappeared, my despair touched bottom and I would have given anything to stay in Paris with her. My loathing for travel and vacations quite likely comes from this and our forced stays in Aulnay.

Once in Plumeshof, I waited for the postman’s arrival every day in hopes of a letter. My heart weighed a ton when there was no mail, but it was worse when it came without the expected letter. Despite their trivial nature, my childhood heartbreaks were so deep that every separation I had to endure as an adolescent and later as an adult would devastate me similarly.

Hedwig Welser, who we called Aunt Heidi, had lost her husband and eldest son in the war. She lived modestly on her widow’s pension, raising her youngest son Gunni, who was my age, and her daughter Gertrud, who was a little older. The older son, Kurt, who was over six feet tall and had a booming laugh, lived in town with his future wife, Lilo, an extremely beautiful blonde with blue eyes. On Sundays, Lilo would put on a Tyrolean costume, each piece of which thrilled me: the flowered apron knotted at the waist, the embroidered blouse with its short, puffy sleeves, the jerkin that extended the skirt and highlighted the chest … I had daydreams about the traditional green felt hat adorned with a feather. I eventually acquired one long after this, but I do not remember exactly when or how.

We were still little when we first stayed with the Welsers, who did not speak a word of French and called me Franziska. Over years of listening to their whispered conversations, which I understood in bits and pieces, I discovered that Kurt and his people did not accept the annexation to Italy of what they still called the southern Tyrol. I even guessed that Kurt was part of a terrorist organization that committed attacks intended to make the two Tyrols one again. I learned of his death shortly after we stopped going to Plumeshof. Officially, he had fallen while hiking in the mountains, but I could not help wondering if his premature death might not be linked to his illegal activities. Could his