Patrick Modiano - Pedigree - A Memoir

Return to Thônes in drab March. The bishop of Annecy paid a formal visit to the school. We kissed his ring. Speeches. Mass. And I received a letter from my father that the canon Janin never opened and that, if it had had any basis in reality, would have been the letter of a model father to his model son: “May 2, 1962. My dear Patrick, We should tell each other everything with complete honesty; it’s the one and only way to keep from becoming strangers, as sadly happens in too many families. I’m glad you’ve confided in me about the problem now facing you: what you’ll do later on, what direction to take in life. You’ve explained to me, on the one hand, that you understand diplomas are necessary to obtain a good position, and on the other, that you need to express yourself by writing books or plays and would like to devote yourself fully to this. Most of the men who have enjoyed the greatest literary success, apart from a few rare exceptions, had been brilliant students. You can cite as many examples as I can: Sartre would probably never have written some of his books if he hadn’t pursued his studies through an advanced degree in philosophy. Claudel wrote The Satin Slipper when he was a young embassy attaché in Japan, after graduating with top honors from ‘Sciences Po.’ Romain Gary, who won the Prix Goncourt, is another alumnus of ‘Sciences Po,’ and a consul in the United States.” He wanted me to become an agricultural engineer. He considered it an up-and-coming profession. If he attached so much importance to schooling, it’s because he himself hadn’t had any and was a little like those mobsters who send their daughters off to be educated by the “sisters.” He spoke with a slight Paris accent — the accent of Cité d’Hauteville and Rue des Petits-Hôtels and also the Cité Trévise, where you can hear the fountain murmuring in the silence beneath the trees. Once in a while he used slang. But he could inspire trust in potential investors, for he looked like a pleasant, reserved fellow, tall and soberly dressed.

I took my baccalaureate exam in Annecy. This would be my only diploma. Paris in July. My father. My mother. She was in a revival of Les Portes claquent at the Daunou. The ersatz Mylène Demongeot. The Parc Monceau, where I read newspaper articles about the end of the Algerian War. The Bois de Boulogne. I discovered Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. I was happy when I walked the streets of Paris by myself. One Sunday in August, in the southeastern part of town — Boulevard Jourdan and Boulevard Kellerman, a neighborhood I’d later come to know so well — I learned from a news dealer’s display about Marilyn Monroe’s suicide.

The month of August in Annecy. Claude. She turned twenty that summer of 1962. She worked for a dressmaker in Lyon. Then she became a “temp” model. Then, in Paris, a full-time model. Then she married a Sicilian prince and went to live in Rome, where time stops forever. Robert. He scandalized Annecy by loudly proclaiming himself a “queen.” He was a pariah in that provincial town. That same summer of 1962, he was twenty-six. He reminded me of Divine in Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. When very young, Robert had been the boyfriend of the Belgian baron Jean L. during the latter’s stay at the Hôtel Impérial Palace in Annecy — the same baron whose shill my mother had known in Antwerp in 1939. I saw Robert again in 1973. One Sunday evening, in Geneva, we were driving in his car across the Pont des Bergues, and he was so drunk that we nearly toppled into the Rhone. He died in 1980. His face bore the marks of a beating and the police arrested a friend of his. I read about it in the papers: “The real death of a larger than life character.”

A girl, Marie. In the summer, she took the bus in Annecy, as did I, on Place de la Gare, at seven in the evening after work. She was going home to Veyrier-du-Lac. I met her on that bus. She was barely older than I and already working as a typist. On her days off, we would rendezvous at the small beach in Veyrier-du-Lac. She read Maurois’s A History of England. And photo comics that I’d buy for her before joining her on the beach.

The kids my age who spent time at the Sporting or the Taverne, and who are now gone with the wind: Jacques L., called “the Marquis,” the son of a milicien who’d been shot for treason in August 1944 at Grand-Bornand. Pierre Fournier, who carried a knobbed walking stick. And those who belonged to the generation of the Algerian War: Claude Brun, Zazie, Paulo Hervieu, Rosy, La Yeyette, who had been Pierre Brasseur’s mistress. Dominique the brunette with her black leather jacket passed beneath the arcades, and they said she lived “off her charms” in Geneva … Claude Brun and friends. A gang of vitelloni. Their cult film was The American Beauty. Returning from the Algerian War, they had bought secondhand MGs. They took me to a “floodlit” football match. One of them had bet he could seduce the prefect’s wife inside of two weeks and take her to the Grand Hôtel in Verdun, and he’d won; another was the lover of a rich and very pretty woman, the widow of a local notable, who in winter frequented the bridge club on the first floor of the Casino.

I used to take the bus to Geneva, where sometimes I saw my father. We had lunch in an Italian restaurant with a man called Picard. In the afternoons, he held appointments. Curious Geneva of the very early sixties. Algerians spoke in low voices in the lobby of the Hôtel du Rhône. I would walk around the historic part of town. They said that Dominique the brunette, on whom I had a crush, was working in a nightclub at 58 Rue Glacis-de-Rive. On the way back, the bus crossed the border at sunset, without stopping for customs.

In the summer of 1962, my mother came through Annecy on tour, playing in Sacha Guitry’s Ecoutez bien, messieurs at the Casino, with Jean Marchat and Michel Flamme, a typical blond “good-looking boy” who wore leopard-print bathing briefs. He took us for refreshments at the bar of the Sporting. A Sunday walk along the Pâquier gardens with Claude when the holidays were over. Autumn already. We walked past the prefecture, where a girlfriend of hers worked. Annecy turned back into a provincial town. In the Pâquier, we came across an old Armenian, always on his own; according to Claude, he was a wealthy businessman who gave lots of money to girls and paupers. And Jacky Gérin’s gray automobile, with body by Allemano, circled slowly around the lake for all eternity. I will keep on reciting these moments, without nostalgia but in a rush. It’s not my fault if the words jumble together. I have to move quickly, before I lose heart.

That September, in Paris, I started at the Lycée Henri-IV, in the preparatory classe de philosophie , as a full boarder, even though my parents’ apartment was only a few hundred yards from the school. I’d been living in dormitories for the past six years. I had known harsher discipline in my other schools, but I had never been as miserable as I was at Henri-IV. Especially at the hour when I watched the day students leave by the main porch and fan out into the streets.

I don’t remember my fellow boarders very well. I seem to recall three boys from Sarreguemines who were prepping for the Ecole Normale Supérieure. A Martinican in my class was usually with them. There was another student who always smoked a pipe, and constantly wore a gray smock and carpet slippers. They said he hadn’t been outside the school walls in three years. I also vaguely recall my bunkmate, a small red-haired kid, whom I spotted from afar two or three years later, on Boulevard Saint-Michel, in a private’s uniform in the rain … After lights out, a watchman came through the dormitories, lantern in hand, to make sure every bed was occupied. It was the fall of 1962, but also the nineteenth century and, perhaps, a time still farther in the past as well.