A French Novel. Frédéric Beigbeder
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heart’s content and forge bonds with the local British community. With money from his wife and his mother, my grandfather invested in my father’s business. Soon our family owned a dozen sanatoriums in the region, renamed ‘The Health Spas of Béarn’, and my grandparents acquired the Villa Navarre, a superb house in Pau in the English cottage style, where Jean-Paul Toulet, Francis Jammes and Paul Valéry were regular visitors (family legend has it that the author of Monsieur Teste wrote his correspondence very early in the morning; the butler, whose name was Octave, used to grumble at having to wake at 4 a.m. to bring him his pot of coffee). A Catholic and a militant royalist, Charles Beigbeder looked like Paul Morand and was an assiduous reader of the far-right journal Action française, something which did not prevent him being elected president of the Cercle Anglais (exclusively male, it was, at the time, the most elegant club in Pau; he organised literary salons there). In the 1950s the family inherited a villa on the Basque coast, Cénitz Aldea (meaning ‘Near Cénitz’ in Basque) in Guéthary, a little village that had been fashionable since the Belle Époque. Tuberculosis did much for the fortunes of my family, and I have no hesitation in saying that the discovery of streptomycin by Selman Waksman around 1943 was an absolute catastrophe for my inheritance.
During the period we now call the interwar years (as though these young people could have anticipated that their post-war was also a pre-war), life was more austere in the great houses of the verdant Périgord. A countess who, as we know, had lost her husband in the second Battle of Champagne found herself alone at Quinsac, living in the château of Vaugoubert with two girls and two boys. In those days, Catholic war widows remained sexually faithful to their dead husbands. And of course, their children were called upon to sacrifice themselves. The two girls looked after their mother, something she encouraged in them – they did so for the rest of their lives. As for the two boys, they were automatically enrolled at the French military academy of Saint-Cyr, where an aristocratic ‘de’ in one’s name was highly regarded. The elder boy agreed to marry an aristocratic girl who was not really his choice. Sadly, she quickly cuckolded him with a swimming instructor: the young man was heartbroken at being so poorly rewarded for his docility. He filed for divorce; in retaliation, his mother disinherited him. The younger brother, too, suffered misfortune: posted to the garrison at Limoges, he fell in love with a ravishing commoner, a dark-haired girl with blue eyes who danced atop pianos (problem number one), and whom he impregnated out of wedlock (problem number two). Their union had to rapidly be formalised: the marriage of Comte Pierre de Chasteigner de la Rocheposay and the ravishing Nicole Marcland, known as Nicky, took place on 31 August 1939, in Limoges. The date was ill-starred: the very next day, Germany invaded Poland. Bon Papa barely had time to invade Bonne Maman. The phoney war awaited him, in which the Maginot Line proved as unreliable as the rhythm method. Pierre found himself a prisoner. When he escaped, a nun having lent him civilian clothes and false papers, he returned to France to sire my mother. It was then that he learned that he too was to be disinherited, since his mother the countess found it difficult at Sunday Mass to acknowledge this marriage which was beneath her station, despite the fact that it had been celebrated by the local priest in the chapel of her own château. Curious are the customs of the Catholic aristocracy, which entail disinheriting those who are already more or less orphaned. The lineage of the Chasteigners de la Rocheposay goes back to the Crusades (I am descended from Hugues Capet, though I imagine that in this I am one of many), and includes a Bishop of Poitiers, who was ambassador in Rome to Henri II. Ronsard dedicated an ode to one of my ancestors, Anthoine, abbot of Nanteuil. Though written in 1550, these lines remained relevant to me on that fateful night’s stay in January 2008:
As time, so pass the trappings of this world
According to its motion
Life is fleet, and seasons, suddenly unfurl’d
Fast whither to a notion. […]
Like a spring, young children grow
Then blossom in a summer
Surprised by winter they no longer show
What once they were.
Despite the warning given to my great-great-grandfather by ‘the Prince of Poets’, my grandfather was thus sacrificed on the altar of the Great Passion. In love, he made the same choice as the Duke of Windsor had three years earlier, and as Madame Cécilia Ciganer-Albeniz would sixty-eight years later when she married Nicolas Sarkozy: sacrificing château rather than happiness. When the war was over, Pierre de Chasteigner occupied Germany with his whole family for several years, in the Palatinate, then resigned his commission in 1949 so he would not be posted to Indochina. He was thus forced to investigate an activity no one in his lineage had attempted for about a millennium: work. He settled in a Paris apartment with shelves weighed down with volumes of the Bottin Mondain and the erotic works of Pierre Louÿs, on the rue de Sfax, while taking orders from his brother-in-law who ran a pharmaceutical laboratory. These were not his happiest years. When one no longer has the money to live like a king in Paris, one takes one’s wife to the seaside to make a fourth in bridge and more children. Now, Nicky’s father owned a house at Guéthary, of which she had fond memories. The Count and Countess decided to buy a little place there in return for a lifetime annuity to a Madame Damour, who had the good grace to shuffle off this mortal coil with little delay. So it was that the aristocratic military man and his six children moved in to Patrakénéa, directly opposite Cénitz Aldea, the holiday resort of the bourgeois-bohemian, Americano-Béarnais, Beigbeder family. The reader should now begin to understand the strategic importance of this place. In Guéthary, my two families will become friends, and my father will shortly meet my mother.
10
WITH FAMILY
I dreamed of being a free electron, but it is impossible to forever cut all ties with one’s roots. To remember that child on the beach of Guéthary is to acknowledge that I come from somewhere, from a garden, from enchanted grounds, from a meadow that smells of new-mown grass and salt breezes, from a style of cooking redolent of stewed apple and stale bread.
I despise family score-settling, exhibitionistic autobiographies, psychoanalysis masquerading as literature and airing dirty laundry in public. François Mauriac, at the beginning of his Mémoires intérieurs, offers an object lesson in modesty: ‘I will not speak of myself, so as not to oblige myself to speak of you.’ Why do I not have the strength to remain silent? Is it possible to retain a little dignity when seeking to discover who one is and whence one came? I have a feeling that in my quest I will have to embroil many of those closest to me, both living or dead (I have already begun to do so). These people I love who did not ask to be rounded up in a book, as in some police raid. I suppose that every life has as many versions as it has narrators: we each have our own truth; let me make it clear from the outset that this account sets out only my own. In any case, it is not as though I am going to start bitching about my family at the age of forty-two. It so happens that I have no choice: I need to remember in order to grow old. A private detective investigating myself, I reconstruct my past from the scant clues at my disposal. I try not to cheat, but time has shuffled my memories, the way the pack of cards is shuffled before a game of Cluedo. My life is a whodunit in which the balm of memory embellishes by twisting each new piece of evidence.
In principle, every family has a history; but mine was short-lived: my family is composed of people who barely know each other. What is the purpose of a family? To grow apart. A family is the place of non-communication. My father has not spoken to his brother in twenty years. My mother’s side of the family no longer sees my father’s. As children, we see a lot of our family, mostly during holidays. Then parents split up, you see your father less frequently – abracadabra, half the family disappears. You grow up, holidays become less frequent, your mother’s family grow more distant, until you only run into them at weddings, christenings and funerals – no one sends invitations to a divorce. When a nephew’s birthday party or a Christmas dinner is organised, you find some excuse not to turn up: too much fear, the fear that they will see right through you, that you will be observed, criticised, confronted with your failings, recognised for what you are, weighed