“I no longer believe in Heaven/I go my way/I am eternal/Until tomorrow”, sings Thomas Dutronc on his new album, “Eternals until tomorrow”. This sentence resonates beautifully all the way to the clinic room where Françoise Hardy receives us. Impossible to see in her face with its untouched beauty that she has come from very far away. On her wrist, a bracelet like those put on newborns bears the name of Dutronc, her forever husband, despite the vagaries of love.
On his bedside table, the best-seller of the moment, “The Discreet Charm of the Intestine” (ed. Actes Sud): “It was a friend who knows me well who gave it to me, it’s the “story of my life, my suffering since always”, explains Françoise Hardy, who is treating Malt’s lymphoma. The singer also devours her favorite authors, “Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Modiano, whom I knew very young. I no longer remember under what circumstances I was responsible for ensuring that he fed well! »
She watches animal documentaries on television. “Their concerns are not very far from ours: to eat, to procreate and to die! » She disappeared from the media after the release of her rant book “Unauthorized opinions…” (ed. Équateurs). We find it light as a feather. We don’t want to talk about politics or taxes, but love and songs. With her outspokenness, she opens up and remembers. Meeting with Françoise Hardy full of grace, enthusiasm and verve: the one we love.
SHE. – The first question we want to ask you is: how are you?
Francoise Hardy. – It’s all my fault! Imagine that I was invited to Laurent Ruquier’s show to talk about my book and I was sitting next to little Louane, who couldn’t stop coughing. As I am naturally worried and at that time we were only talking about the flu, I went for a quick trip to the American Hospital. There, I slipped in the shower, my head hit the floor, and from there, the black hole. I woke up three weeks later.
SHE. – What do you remember?
F H – It was nothing ! According to some doctors, I was done for. There was even one who pushed for me to leave in peace. I almost had the ideal death, because dying without being aware of it is really the dream!
SHE. – Has being a survivor given you new desires?
F H – I really felt like I had done everything I was capable of, that I had nothing left to give. Today, I have this reprieve, and I tell myself that there must be a reason, which I intend to discover.
When, physically, things are not going well, it affects my morale
SHE. – At the beginning of the year, when your book “Unauthorized Reviews…” was released, we felt you were tired. You seem more optimistic today, don’t you?
F H – When, physically, things are not going well, it affects my morale. I have lived alone for fifteen years, and I live very well, because, from a certain age, solitude is freedom. Becoming dependent again, needing to ask for even the slightest glass of water, it’s annoying.
SHE. – What is paradoxical about you is that you are very modest and, at the same time, you describe your health concerns in detail, why?
F H – It’s true that, in my second chapter, I went hard. One of my close friends told me: “You don’t realize, you are an icon, you can’t say that!” » But I’ve never paid attention to my image and it’s not at my age that I’m going to start. I found it interesting to introduce people to this world of charlatans, this crazy person who put his hand in my vagina for a good quarter of an hour or this other who made me grow a bump on my forehead for forty-eight hours.
I only thought about love, everything else bothered me!
SHE. – Jean-Marie Périer told us about you: “I have never seen a woman so beautiful who found herself so ugly. » Where do these complexes come from?
F H – I have to admit that a few years ago a fan sent me photos of myself when I was younger, and I realized I had something. Not all the time, but when I was well lit and well made up. I was lucky to arrive at a time when androgynous body shapes became fashionable.
SHE. – Did you realize what you were causing?
F H – Frankly no, because success and my first love happened to me at the same time. And I only thought about love, everything else bothered me!
SHE. – You didn’t benefit from the success?
F H – Really not, the photos were annoying, even with Jean-Marie. He had to invent stratagems to make me laugh. He had a fairly stocky assistant, with a long Pinocchio-like nose, who was very nice in fact. To make me smile, Jean-Marie said to me: “Imagine Gilbert naked on a horse! »
My great joy was going to the studio, I felt at home there
SHE. – What happened to the famous Paco Rabanne dress in which you posed?
F H – One day I put it in a trash bag and threw it away! All that didn’t matter to me, I was entirely focused on my loves, and my songs were inseparable from them. I recounted my anxieties, my emotions there. My great joy was going to the studio, I felt at home there. We are cut off from the whole world, we don’t know if it’s day or night, and suddenly a song cogitated in solitude is born. Each time it was a miracle.
SHE. – Were you friends with Sylvie Vartan or Sheila?
F H – We weren’t really friends, but we did a lot of things together, we traveled a lot. Sheila was completely sequestered, so we couldn’t see her, I was closer to Sylvie, because we are both mother hens, always worried about our offspring.
Unfortunately had a miscarriage
SHE. – You wrote that the only time in your life when your body didn’t make you suffer was when you were pregnant!
F H – But yes, I had a perfect complexion, magnificent hair, not a single nausea, and what’s more, Thomas was born very quickly. He had made himself desired, and he was very desired. When he was 5, I was pregnant again, we were very happy, but unfortunately I had a miscarriage.
I told Thomas that I was a little sad because his little sister had left, and, at the age of 5, he said to me: “But why are you sad? I’m not sad! » He was delighted because he was very exclusive and he took a dim view of the arrival of a rival. Since I never had a good relationship with my sister, I told myself that things were probably better that way.
SHE. – Precisely, regarding your childhood, you believed for a long time that your parents were divorced, when in reality your mother had had her two children with a married man. When did you discover it?
F H – I don’t know, but it’s true that I was aware of not being within society’s standards. It was already very frowned upon to be the child of divorcees.
