The life you had imagined: From Imperial Vienna to Hollywood, the mystery of Empress Elisabeth of Austria's secret daughter

By Nelly ALARD

 In October 1930, a young actress named Elissa Landi, touted by Fox Studios as the next Greta Garbo, sets foot in Hollywood. She has talent, striking looks and a mysterious background : her mother, Karoline Zanardi Landi, has always claimed to be the hidden daughter of E

• Language: English
• Publisher: Out In The World Press
• Release date: Jun 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781915919748

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THE LIFE YOU HAD IMAGINED

OTHER BOOKS BY NELLY ALARD

In French :

LE CRIEUR DE NUIT, Editions  Gallimard, Prix Roger Nimier 2010

MOMENT D’UN COUPLE, Editions Gallimard, Prix Interallié 2013

LA VIE QUE TU T’ÉTAIS IMAGINÉE, Editions Gallimard

In English :

COUPLE MECHANICS (with Adriana Hunter), Other Press

NELLY ALARD

THE LIFE YOU HAD  IMAGINED

A novel

Translated from the French by Grace Mc Quillan

and approved by the author

©Copyrighted Material – All rights reserved

This book has been published in French by Gallimard in 2020

The author is sole owner of the rights in English language

For translations in other languages please contact : [e-mail]

To my One and only One

My dearest Friend

My own beloved

Mother

To my children

It’s time to start living the life

You had imagined.

Henry James

GENEALOGICAL TREES

Elisabeth’s family

Genealogical tree

Elissa’s family

Genealogical tree

PART ONE

Marie, Marie and Marie

1

Hollywood, 1932

A morning in springtime. Sun rising over the immensity of the city, the thousands of houses in rows, and the unyielding perpendicularity of avenues where twenty years ago the fields of orange and lemon trees and pastureland had stretched for miles. Twenty years ago, when Griffith, DeMille, and the others decided to plant their cameras here, just here, beneath the blazing California sun, somewhere near the intersection of Vermont and Sunset. Twenty years and their Hollywood is already gone, for adventure has made its exit from the modern world. There is not a single acre of new territory to discover on the planet, every inch of land on every continent has been staked out, claimed, and greedily held by some flag-waver: this land is mine, and even though I have no use for it you can’t have it, unless you’re willing to pay the right price. Even the tiniest patch of land is now for sale, the gigantic real estate sign on Mount Lee proclaims it, in letters nine yards wide and fifteen yards tall with four thousand twenty-watt bulbs that blink as night falls. First Holly, then Wood, then Land. Mulholland and his aqueduct have won the water war, Hollywood has been annexed, the lemon tree fields that once separated it from Union Station by a good dozen miles are gone, by now the City of Angels supplies one quarter of the planet with oil, and from up here in the hills not far from Griffith Park, the city stretches as far as the eye can see, all the way to the Pacific Ocean and its fringe of white foam.

A horse is galloping, sweat beading on his chest, hooves pounding the dry earth, trampling the scrawny ragweed bushes and sending stones rolling. This horse is stir-crazy − when’s the last time he was let out of his box? Elissa wonders. I promise he’s been ridden every day, ma’am, I swear, said Rick as he handed her the reins. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Easy, Darkey, easy, careful not to break your rider’s bones, she’s rather valuable, you know; think about all of those insurance guys, careful Darkey, don’t you understand how precious your rider is? Of course not, because you didn’t read yesterday’s newspapers.

Elissa Landi, dramatic stage and screen actress, authoress and member of the Austrian nobility,  today won the most coveted role of the season as Mercia, in Cecil B. DeMille’s spectacular romance The Sign of the Cross, according to an announcement from the Paramount Studios.

DeMille selected Miss Landi after interviewing hundreds of applicants for the role, studying performances of actresses in fifty-three feature pictures, and viewing one hundred and fourteen screen tests. The search for Mercia is said to have been one of the most exhaustive ever made in Hollywood.

Miss Landi, borrowed by Paramount from the Fox Studios, to whom she is under contract, will appear opposite Fredric March, who is to portray Marcus Superbus, while Charles Laughton will play the Emperor Nero.

Elissa Landi is ideally suited for the difficult role of Mercia, DeMille said, because she combines mysticism and sex appeal with the pure and the wholesome. There is the depth of the ages in her eyes, today in her body and tomorrow in her spirit.

Miss Landi triumphed on Broadway last year in A Farewell to Arms, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway. She is the daughter of Countess Zanardi Landi of Austria. She was educated by tutors in England and has already published two novels − she’s currently working on a third one.

DeMille will finish casting for The Sign of the Cross over the next few days and plans to begin filming in early July.

The horse comes to a halt at the top of the hill. Dripping with sweat, legs trembling, ears perked up, he listens to Elissa’s familiar voice. There, my gorgeous, there you are, good boy, look at that beautiful sun rising over the ocean. The depth of the ages in her eyes. She laughs at the pompousness of the words – God, she’s so spoiled. Her life strikes her as a series of triumphant and perfectly modulated musical scales, while so many other people’s lives seem so flat, every day endlessly repeating the one before like an interminable sequence of arpeggios. London, Broadway, Hollywood. Such happiness and such luck that she is overwhelmed, and her heart, already beating heavily from the ride, starts to pound violently in her chest. For it was not always this way, heaven knows, and who would have guessed when she was a child of five, a barefoot little girl on the streets of Vancouver whose mother gave French and piano lessons to make ends meet? What a journey. And what had she done to deserve this? Nothing, nothing or so very little. A matter of pure chance, probably. An arrangement of the Zodiac on the day she was born. A voice, a figure, iron health, good skin, a mass of chestnut hair, and sharp wit. Intelligence is  an asset, whatever the world may say. It is good to be vibrant and alive, it is so good to laugh; it is so good to be young and successful. In the distance she sees a plane taking off, probably for New York, and she marvels at the intrepid travelers oblivious enough of the danger to be its passengers. Louise Brooks, she’s heard, took a plane last year, shortly after the airline opened. Louise Brooks. One of the many stars who have been knocked down by the advent of talking pictures, a cataclysm that had proved worse than an earthquake, an industrial revolution that left half the people living off of the film industry in this city unemployed, but has opened the doors of the studios to Broadway actors, to people like her.

The plane is now just a small dot on the horizon. The heat is beginning to rise, and horse and rider slowly head back to the ranch over hills that have become so familiar after twenty years of serving as the backdrop for countless westerns, silent one- or two-reelers at first, and a godsend for penniless cowboys like Rick − five dollars for a day of work; talk about a dream job.

And there he is, good old Rick, coming out from behind the wooden barn.

He looks at her out of the corner of his eye.

Was everything to your liking, ma’am?

Just perfect, Rick. Darkey is in great shape.

Poor Rick. He’d be so happy if she broke her back on a rock. She can tell. The expression in his eyes oozes with regret and resentment over his finished career, now that knowing how to ride is no longer all it takes to star in a movie, and Rick is back to being just a ranch hand. He’s become so fat that one  wonders how his horse can still carry him. He is bald and badly shaven, with a double chin and rolls of flesh down the back of his head. What can one dream of, Elissa wonders, when one can’t help but notice the absurdity of one’s own appearance, in a city where nothing − except money − is more important than images, printed on celluloid film and projected on a giant screen. Ugly and poor, you are among the damned. But maybe Rick doesn’t even feature in his own dreams, maybe there also, he’s just an observer, surrounded by gods and goddesses, like a stranger in the land of the fairies.

Now Elissa is driving her Ford convertible full throttle along the sinuous roads that are still called canyons even though they are lined with luxury properties tucked away like invisible fortresses. Galloping, or driving fast, are her usual remedies for boredom on days like this when she has not been called to the studio but still gets up at dawn out of preference and habit. She turns right onto Sunset and as she drives down the unending boulevard that stretches on for over twenty miles to the coast, she thinks about the chapter in her new novel she’ll write tonight. Every neighborhood she passes is a change in scenery. West Hollywood with its restaurants shaped like hot dogs or donuts, its faux Tudor cottages and miniature imitation French castles. The huge palm trees in Beverly Hills that line its residential streets, so tall that you can only see the trunk; the wide sidewalks, always deserted. Bel Air is an abrupt and impenetrable forest of deciduous trees bounded by the road, and hidden in this forest are the fabulous palaces belonging to the new world monarchs: movie stars. The sky is infinitely blue, and the closer one gets to the coast everything becomes brighter, the air sparkles with specks of sand, the sun illuminates every detail of this backdrop like a film projector, making the shiny chrome trim on the automobiles gleam. At the Amalfi Drive intersection she turns off of Sunset, takes the winding road up the hill, and suddenly you could be on the French Riviera, somewhere between Monaco and Nice. The vegetation is lush and Mediterranean, the ocean a deep blue, and the air fragrant with sweet lemony perfume. She pulls past the gate of 1515 Amalfi Drive and parks in front of the beautiful Spanish house she bought a few weeks ago to live in with her mother Karoline, Countess Zanardi Landi. Before going up to her bedroom on the second floor to change − she’s still wearing her horse clothes: riding boots, a tight sweater tucked into high-waisted riding pants − she takes a quick glance at the small desk in the entrance hall where Mildred, the young girl who works as her secretary, is sorting through the mail brought from Fox the night before. Fan letters are the most reliable measure of a movie star’s popularity. Elissa receives more and more each day from all over the world: outside of the United States, the Philippines and Spain are the countries most heavily represented, closely followed by Italy with letters from Milan and Genoa. A few letters from Shanghai or India once in a while. Today, Mildred tells her, there is even one from the Soviet Union. From England, almost nothing − from Austria and France, the same. A few from Scandinavia. From Germany… Mil hands Elissa a small blue envelope sealed on the back with a pink stamp featuring Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Elissa’s brow furrows. She examines the postmark: Augsburg. She grabs a letter opener, slices the envelope open, and reads quickly down to the signature. Then she sits down and rereads the letter several times. Mildred looks at her and begins to worry.

Is something wrong?

Elissa doesn’t answer, then finally lifts her gaze. There is a strange expression on her face that Mil has never seen before.

Where is Karoline?

Mildred points with her chin to the open window. Outside, standing on a path in the garden below, a straw hat on her head and a pair of pruning shears in her hand, Countess Zanardi Landi is busy cutting giant dahlias for a bouquet. She looks happy as a lark, just like every day since her arrival in California. Elissa stands and goes to the window, filled with tenderness, wondering about the best way to share the news with her. Her mother. Her best friend, her ally, her confidant. Karoline is a tall and strong woman whose beauty has been ruined by the excess weight that is now a constant threat to her health. She has a heart condition. Too much joy could kill her. How can Elissa tell her, without provoking a fatal state of shock, that today her life’s battle has come to an end? That this little envelope in Elissa’s hand contains the proof she had given up hoping for, the evidence that will shut the mouths of all the people who have been dragging her through the mud for so many years, accusing her of being an imposter? There is a kind of taut thread connecting mother and daughter at all times; the slightest vibration that troubles one of them instantly reaches the other, and from ten yards away Karoline can feel Elissa’s eyes on her. She straightens up, smiles at her daughter, and lifts her armful of red dahlias a little so Elissa can admire her harvest. Elissa blows her a kiss and motions for her to join her inside the house.

Or maybe not.

Maybe, instead, Elissa walks out of the house under the arched entryway and goes to Karoline, down the path lined with cypress trees that leads to the gazebo with a colonnade, still holding the precious envelope in her hand. From here, the view of the Pacific Ocean is spectacular and the Santa Monica Mountains appear as wild as they did on the first day of Creation. And it is here, arms full of dahlias and a straw hat on her head, in the gardens of this little Californian palace that today is Steven Spielberg’s property, that Karoline hears the incredible news from Elissa’s lips: the official, indisputable recognition of her imperial birth.

2

In biographies of Elisabeth of Austria, the story of the Sassetot child,  when mentioned at all,  is at most allotted a footnote at the bottom of the page. There, the authors mention casually that in 1914 a certain Karoline Zanardi Landi published a book in London entitled The Secret of an Empress in which she claimed to be the empress’ secret daughter, born into the world surreptitiously during a hunting trip in Normandy and raised by her mother in secret, away from the Austrian court. They quickly dismiss the matter by adding that upon examination and beyond a shadow of a doubt, this book is nothing but a web of vulgar lies. Occasionally, as a curiosity, it is also mentioned that the daughter of this Countess Zanardi Landi achieved some celebrity as an actress in the 1930s, under the name Elissa Landi.

On a subject of such great importance, I am not the kind of girl who settles for footnotes.

Ever since I was a child, Elisabeth of Austria has held a very special place in my life. I refused early on to refer to her as Sisi in order to set myself apart from all the little girls who knew her only through the corny movies starring Romy Schneider, which in Europe play on television every year at Christmas, and their adaptations in the Rouge et Or children’s literature collection. I, unlike them, had read Le vrai visage de Sissi  (The True Sisi) and Adieu Sissi (Farewell, Sisi) by Michel Manoll in the Super Mille collection − which, I would like to point out, had been written for young adults − and already had an understanding of the tragic dimensions of her life. For that reason and from then on, I referred to her only as Elisabeth. In addition to being the source of my first literary sorrow (she died at the end of Manoll’s books), she was also responsible for my first erotic thrills. Sitting on a shelf in my grandparents’ house back in the seventies was a copy of a romance novel by a certain Anne Mariel, Les Nuits secrètes de Sissi (Sisi’s Secret Nights), in which Elisabeth and Franz Joseph’s wedding night serves as the pretext for a raw and detailed account that I devoured in secret with unmentionable excitement.

It was perfectly natural, then, that the first trip I took when I turned eighteen was to Corfu, an island the empress loved above all else and the place she had chosen to build Achilleion, the palace of her dreams. My visit to this palace, which Henry Miller described as the worst piece of gimcrackery (he had) ever laid eyes on, and which is at the very least a testament to Sisi’s pronounced taste for kitsch, didn’t shake my fascination with this enigmatic figure in the slightest. The following year I decided to recover from my first broken heart in Vienna. After visiting Elisabeth’s apartments at the Hofburg and Schönbrunn Palace, I went to pay my respects at her tomb in the Imperial Crypt and later went to visit her heart, which is stored nearby at the Augustinian Church. As my trip came to an end, I simply couldn’t bear the idea of leaving without paying tribute to her insides, but I came to bitterly regret this decision when, down on all fours inside a narrow tunnel in the catacombs with a guide telling me to look to my left at the urn draped in a tricolor ribbon that contained the viscera of the Eaglet, Napoleon II, I was overcome by an attack of claustrophobia that almost made me pass out.

It’s not my fault the Habsburgs are all buried in separate pieces.

While I was in Vienna I picked up a German edition of Count Corti’s biography of Elisabeth that dated from 1934 and had not, at the time, been translated into French. It was then (in a little footnote at the bottom of the page) that I discovered the story of the Sassetot child.

The following year I passed the entrance examination and was admitted to the prestigious National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, in Paris.

3

In my earliest memory, I am on stage.

I am four or five years old and a member of the little rabbits ballet group. We are the youngest students in the dance school. Today is the end of year recital for our families. My mother has spent hours sewing rabbit ears onto a hat and a tail in the shape of a pom pom onto my leotard. The choreography has us entering in single file and I am last in line. But as soon as we are all on stage, the order of the line reverses and I am the one who leads the dance. What made me pull away from my classmates just before going on stage? Now I’m alone in the wings, lost in the dark. I hear the first measures of the music accompanying our ballet, but I can’t find my fellow dancers. I am alone. Lost. In the dark. I start to cry. On stage everyone is in a panic. The line of little rabbits has turned around but the girl who now finds herself at the head of the line doesn’t know the rest of the steps. The rabbits scatter erratically on stage and the dance stops. In the wings I am sobbing, hiccupping, no one can get me to calm down. As a last resort and to console me, after the big girls perform their ballet and the recital has ended, the director of the school, Yvette Maguérès, who is also its star dancer, takes me by the hand and brings me with her to greet the audience. I wipe my tears and find myself under the glow of the footlights. The light is blinding; there are sounds of applause, bravos, and wreaths of flowers for Yvette. Someone kindly hands me a bouquet. I take it and curtsy the way I have been taught to. The flashes of cameras crackle. I probably smile. But deep inside I know I don’t deserve this triumph, and that it’s all a sham.

4

I often feel as though I am enveloped by thick veils, taking part in some interior masquerade: disguised as an empress, Elisabeth confided to her Greek teacher, Konstantin Christomanos.

Just like her, in real life, I always had the impression that I was playing a role.

Turning acting into a career, by the way, didn’t solve my problem at all: from then on, I simply had the impression that I was pretending to be an actress. As soon as I entered the Conservatory, I also became painfully aware of the importance of physical appearance, a concern that until then had been completely foreign to me. I began suffering from an eating disorder, which, along with horseback riding, was another thing the empress and I had in common − Elisabeth featured prominently in a book that was published around that time entitled Les Indomptables, figures de l’anorexie (The Untameable: Figures of Anorexia) − but it did not prevent my career from appearing to take off in dazzling fashion. Not only had I passed the very selective entrance examination, I had also found an agent, and in the months that followed I was hired for a major role in a television movie and a play directed by an avant-garde director in a large Paris theater. In June, by one of those coincidences that are so crucial to every acting career, I met the American director who would eventually ask me to star in two of his films and open the doors of Hollywood for me.

I met him in the most unoriginal way possible, at a dinner party thrown by a mutual friend. I had hardly introduced myself when he declared with great assurance that I was going to become a major movie star – he could feel those things right away and had never been wrong. I instantly liked him very much. He invited me to lunch, and two days later I was standing at the Hôtel La Trémoille reception desk. The Hollywood Director – his name was Henry Jaglom – said to come up to his room and I complied without the slightest hesitation. Just as I was getting ready to knock, the door opened and a bearded mass with a piercing gaze blocked my path for a moment before moving aside to let me in and walking off down the hallway. I had just run into Orson Welles.

5

Where did my passion for the nineteenth century come from? I was nostalgic for a world I had never even known. As soon as I had grown too old for fairytales, I had discovered Balzac. All I dreamed about were hackney cabs and crinolines. I loved the horses, the castles, the Haussmannian apartments. Very few things made by men were beautiful to me if they were less than a hundred years old, and I searched everywhere for traces of this sunken world, furious at the injustice of being born a century too late. At the time I met Henry, I was living in a building that according to the Historical Dictionary of the Streets of Paris had been built on the site of what used to be Jacques Necker’s private town house. I enjoyed imagining that little Germaine − the future Madame de Staël − had slept in her bed in the very same place I slept in mine. Unless perhaps my bedroom had been the salon where her mother entertained Baron von Grimm, Diderot, and d’Alembert. Everywhere I looked I saw the ghosts of a vanished past, living in my imagination all day long.

Out of Balzac’s entire Human Comedy, my favorite character was Esther Gobseck, the actress/harlot in The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans/A Harlot High and Low. Each time I passed rue Montorgueil − which was almost every day, since I lived in the Sentier neighborhood near the Conservatory − I would lift my eyes to the engraved inscription indicating that a certain store had once been a restaurant called the Rocher de Cancale, where according to Balzac, young and pretty courtesans used to flirt with old and wealthy barons Nucingen, with a pinch of regret for this bygone era – from that, it should be obvious that I never set out to be a model of virtue. I’m therefore not ashamed to admit that finding myself unexpectedly face to face with Orson Welles − ORSON WELLES! − in addition to Henry’s own personal charm, did enter somewhat into the irresistible attraction I felt for him from then on. When he had to return to the U.S. after a few days of platonic romance, he had no problem getting me to promise that I would come and spend the summer with him. Shortly after that, I received a FedEx envelope from America and opened it feverishly: inside was my ticket to Hollywood.

6

On my return from Vienna I had dropped off the list of books featured in Corti’s bibliography with a secondhand bookseller. Every now and then he would call to let me know that he’d gotten his hands on one book or another, many of which, upon reading, consisted of a rather unpalatable lyricism of highly relative documentary value. My interest in Elisabeth was on the verge of waning when a book published in 1913 entitled My Past - The Tragedy at Mayerling landed in my mailbox one day. The cover specified that the author of this work was "Countess Marie Larisch, née Baroness von Wallersee, niece of Empress Elisabeth of Austria and daughter of Duke Ludwig Wilhelm in Bavaria."

Like Karoline Zanardi Landi’s book, My Past was the subject of a small note at the bottom of a page in Corti’s biography of Elisabeth. In it Corti mentions that "Baroness Wallersee’s book, a curious mixture of truths, lies, and heinous innuendos, cannot be taken as a reliable source even though its author did live for a time in the empress’s private circles. I obviously was incapable of untangling fact from fiction in it, but I did find the portrait Elisabeth’s niece painted of her aunt more nuanced, more vibrant, and, if I’m honest, more convincing than the hagiographies I had been reading up to that point. As for the heinous innuendos, the story written by this young girl who had been raised in the countryside before entering the service of her beautiful aunt the empress bore all the marks of sincerity. Under this young woman’s pen, Elisabeth became a captivating creature, often sarcastic and highly unpredictable, blowing hot then cold, someone who enjoyed shrouding herself in mystery and  adored double entendres and other statements heavy with subtext: In marriage, distraction always comes from the outside, or, Putting on an act, my child, is the sad lot of those who wear a crown." Admitted into Elisabeth’s inner circle at the age of sixteen, Marie described the secret missions her aunt took pleasure in bestowing upon her, sending her riding across the Hungarian puszta dressed as a boy in the middle of the night to bring a letter to one of her suitors. More or less forced by Elisabeth into a marriage of convenience because: "If you want to stay with me, Marie, you risk finding yourself in a delicate situation for a young girl. Only a married woman can be the chaperone I need ", Marie Wallersee, who by then had become Countess Larisch, was later assigned the sensitive task of recopying the empress’s private journal, which Elisabeth wanted to have printed in secret for posterity. In that journal Marie had discovered the explanation for all of the empress’s disturbing behaviors and the confirmation of her romantic liaisons, first with a Hungarian prince named Esterhazy, then with an English gentleman who had been assigned to her as her pilot during fox hunts, Captain Bay Middleton.

It all seemed somewhat outlandish.

But not nearly as much as the story of her romantic relationship with Fritz Pacher, an unknown man Elisabeth met at a Mardi Gras masquerade ball she attended incognito wearing a yellow mask, according to Marie. Using the pseudonym Gabriella, Elisabeth had maintained a romantic correspondence with Pacher that lasted her entire life, an unlikely anecdote that Count Corti had been forced to confirm years later after meeting Fritz Pacher himself and reading the aforementioned correspondence, which was indisputably authentic. Which did not prevent Corti − a sore loser − from calling Marie Wallersee an inveterate liar even though she had told the story first – and the story was true.

In a subsequent book published in 1936, Marie Wallersee went even further. She claimed that in 1882 the empress summoned her to the Sassetot château in Normandy to take the love child Elisabeth had recently given birth to − under the guise of a riding accident − and bring the baby back to Vienna. Corti was quick to point out that between her first book, in which she made no mention of this birth, and her second opus roughly twenty years later, Marie Wallersee had no doubt had plenty of time to read Karoline Zanardi Landi’s Secret of an Empress and was, in this later work, merely confirming Karoline’s version of events, giving herself away by committing the same error in dating the birth: the only trip the empress is known to have taken to Sassetot was in the summer of 1875. Nevertheless, I was seized by doubt. In spite of Corti, I felt inclined to take Marie’s side. Nothing to be proud of, really: I was perfectly aware that my desire to believe in Elisabeth’s extra-conjugal adventures and the resulting birth didn’t stem so much from a noble aspiration to historical truth as from the rather inglorious impulse that makes all of us enjoy a little gossip. With her books, Marie Wallersee had tapped into something that would become the goldmine of twentieth century celebrity journalism: betrayal by one’s entourage. In 1932 Wallersee discovered an article in a German newspaper about Karoline’s daughter, actress Elissa Landi, and wrote to the American newspapers via Fox confirming the star’s imperial heritage. She then took up her pen to get in touch with the Sassetot child − in other words her cousin, if the story was true − Countess Zanardi Landi.

Hence, the small blue envelope from Augsburg that Elissa is holding in her hand in Spielberg’s garden.

I am looking at it as I write these lines.

As for the stamp with Elisabeth’s portrait that seals the envelope, if we look more closely… Hold on. Why would stamps featuring the Empress of Austria be circulating in 1932 in the Weimar Republic, when the Nazis had just won the legislative elections and Hitler would be in power the following year? Above the portrait of Elisabeth, whose eyes do look a little smokier than we’re used to, a name is printed: Lil Dagover.

An actress.

The stamp had been issued for the release of an Adolf Trotz film called Elisabeth von Österreich, in which Lil Dagover plays the role of the empress.

Cinema is never very far away in this story.

7

After travelling for over twenty hours, a connecting flight in Atlanta, and more hours spent waiting in customs, at the end of which a suspicious immigration officer bombarded me with intrusive questions, I arrived in Los Angeles, dazed with fatigue. Henry  was waiting for me at the airport. At my request and before anything else, he took me to see a sunset on the beach in Santa Monica, thus allowing me to keep a promise to the child I had been, who had stood in front of the poster featuring a Pacific sunset hanging on her bedroom wall and taken a solemn oath never to lead the same calm and sedentary life her parents had. To me, who until then had known only the beaches of Brittany, this postcard sunset with glowing palm trees represented the height of exoticism, the unknown, the far-off. I didn’t know what else I wanted, nor did I want to know it. What I did know, more or less, was what I didn’t want: ordinary lives seemed like a bore to me. I wasn’t so much dreaming of love as I was of glory. I wasn’t interested in happiness. More than anything I wanted my life to surprise me; I wanted adventures, accidents, and journeys. That day, as I watched that enormous red disc sink into the ocean, Henry holding my hand in his, in a state of euphoria augmented by my extreme fatigue, I thought I was off to a good start.

Disappointment didn’t take long to arrive. It soon started to become painfully clear that our love story wouldn’t last. Henry and I were some twenty years apart, which was part of the problem, but it was hardly the only one. We were opposites in every way: I came from a family of modest means, his parents were immensely wealthy. I was too conventional, he was too eccentric. I was unsure of myself, he was brimming with arrogance. Both of us were atheists, incidentally, but he was Jewish and I was not. Et cetera, et cetera. The list of our differences was so long that what was most astonishing was the mysterious alignment of the stars that had attracted us to one another in the first place. For of course it was love I was hoping for on this first trip to California. I may have fancied myself as following in the steps of Rastignac, the ambitious, unscrupulous fellow in The Human Comedy, I may even have thought, deep inside, that an actress is always  −  according to a well-established tradition and to varying