Patrick Modiano: Pedigree: A Memoir

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.