Ten years after the death of Françoise Sagan, in 2014, her son, Denis, took Match to the Équemauville manor. He remembered the clicking of the typewriter at night. Hours lost “talking,” as she said. Of art or of an atomic war which terrified her. She spoke quickly. The words jostled, symbols and symptoms of a life ahead of thought. Bare foot on the floor. Writing the settings wore him out; perhaps because she loved the blur of asphalt and the trail of plane trees so much. The “great waltz of moments” punctuated by Brahms and Barbara in the “Jaguar a little long” and the “Aston a little heavy”.
The legend begins with a twist. Françoise Quoirez is expelled from college for hanging a bust of Molière. Little executioner of classicism, she suffered the same fate at the Convent of the Birds for “lack of spirituality”. She does Hattemer classes and skips school with Florence Malraux, writing for laughs in a blue notebook. “On this unknown feeling whose boredom, the sweetness obsess me…” She is 18 years old, will graft her freedom and a new cult beginning to literature. She writes Sagan, Princess of Proust, her story of a flippant and lying young woman.
“Writing,” she said, “is like walking in an unknown and delightful country. » Here, at her work table, in 1957, the year she published “Dans un mois, dans un an an”.
Paris Match / © François Pagès
On January 21, 1958, during a dinner at Maxim’s between Annabel Schwob de Lure (future Madame Buffet) and the dancer Jacques Chazot, after the premiere of her ballet, “Le rendez-vous missed”.
Paris Match / © Jack Garofalo
In his books, cruelty sets in and death lurks. In his life too
With his naive cynicism, “Hello Sadness” earned him a million readers. She is offered glory and the choice between two roles: scandalous writer or bourgeois girl. She is neither. “My only solution, and I am very happy about it, was to do what I wanted to do: party.” She gets drunk, distills in “Un Certain Smile” and “Des Yeux de Silk” her fluid music, without fluff, this inimitable sensation of lazy impulse, with her “little thoughts that are icy and slippery like fish”. In his books, cruelty sets in and death lurks. In his life too. Saganesque: definition of a world always on the edge.
She defies the laws of gravity, crashes a Jaguar XK140 in Rue de Courcelles. Then, in 1957, an Aston Martin DB2 at 150 km/h on the road to Milly. His friends Bernard Frank, Voldemar Lestienne and Véronique Campion are ejected. Sagan, double skull fracture, broken pelvis, receives extreme unction. She survives, drowns the pain in drugs. Before heroin and cocaine, Palfium makes it lose its edge but not its bite. In “Toxique”, a diary of her detox treatment published in 1964, she wrote about this synthetic opiate called “875”: “Too bad it is not a date in the history of France, I would know.” She recounts the “incessant little calculation” of weaning, always with these easily false outbursts: “My heart is beating.”
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At the wheel of the Jaguar XK120 roadster that she bought with the rights to “Hello Sadness”. A lover of racing cars, in April 1957 she had an accident which almost cost her her life.
Paris Match / © Michou Simon
With Jean Seberg (right). In August 1957, on the set of “Hello Sadness”, directed by Otto Preminger.
Paris Match / © Claude Azoulay
In a Parisian café, in March 1960, the year of the publication of his play “A Castle in Sweden”.
Paris Match / © Philippe Le Tellier
She was 23 when she went green. That of Normandy, also that of carpets where fortune shimmers. In 1958, she played 8 at the Deauville casino, pocketing 8 million old francs which allowed her to buy the Breuil manor, where friends passed by, where horses crossed the living room… A refuge where she pursued light work and nonchalant in emergencies, when money is lacking. She tried her hand at theater and cinema, she wrote for Chabrol and for herself. With the same seriousness, the same camouflaged ferocity. And this misunderstanding which sticks to her pen: she is confused with her idle and worldly characters. We reduce it to its equipment.
She cherishes “everything that is black, everything that loses you, and therefore allows you to find yourself”
She recounts it in her novel-essay “Des bleus à l’âme”, in 1972. Two decades hidden behind “this delicious mask, a little primary, of course, but which corresponds to obvious tastes for me: speed, sea, midnight, everything that is bright, everything that is black, everything that loses you, and therefore allows you to find yourself. Under the veil of legend, Sagan hides a writer for whom imagination counts more than truth, a soul so generous that she loses her means, an artist committed against the Algerian war, the death penalty and for the right to abortion. A survivor.
At age 24, in August 1959, in the mansion she had just purchased. She enjoys working outside.
Paris Match / © Pierre Vals
In 1963, her son, Denis, whom she had with the American Robert Westhoff, took his first steps under the eyes of his horses, in the Breuil manor, in Équemauville, near Honfleur.
Paris Match / © Philippe Le Tellier
In the early 1990s, she was hounded by the taxman and grief. The one who was briefly married to two men, the publisher Guy Schoeller and the artist Robert Westhoff, the father of her son, loses the love of a life: Peggy Roche. But she will continue to oppose grace to pain. There will be Ingrid, the companion of recent years, and this regenerating crusade against conformism and snobbery, which even made her write a song for Johnny in 1996: “Quelques cris”. She wrapped hers up in charming formulas. Even in her journal “Toxique”, when her heart cried out for relief, she preferred the muffled rage of a verse to cries: ““Ah how slow life is and how violent hope is.” Ah, how beautiful Apollinaire is.”
In April 1992, Sagan sat at a table with filmmaker Costa-Gavras (left), President François Mitterrand and actress Isabelle Huppert.
SIPA / © VILLARD
Gambling was one of his many addictions. Here, at her home, on February 8, 1993, with her friends, including businessman and journalist Marc Francelet (right) and writer Bernard Frank (left).
Paris Match / © Manuel Litran
In 2014, Denis Westhoff and his daughter, Joyce, 7 years old, in Équemauville, where he returned for the first time ten years after the death of his mother.
Paris Match / © Vincent Capman
