Pétronille Read online

  “Pétronille!” I exclaimed, surprised.

  “What, did you think I was stalking you?”

  “No. Thank you for dealing with the photographer. What did you do to him?”

  “I told him what I thought. He won’t bother you again.”

  “You sound like a character in a Michel Audiard film.”

  “If I write to you, will you still answer?”

  “Of course.”

  She shook my hand and vanished into the night. I went down into the Métro, enchanted by our encounter. Pétronille seemed worthy of the Shakespearean contemporaries she was studying: bad boys who were always ready for a fight.

  In this instance, my acquaintance with the letter writer’s appearance did not adversely affect our correspondence. As I reread the letters of that dark, aging philosopher, Pétronille Fanto, the knowledge that they had been written by a pugnacious little boy with sparkling eyes gave them incredible piquancy.

  A thought occurred to me: might Pétronille be the ideal comvinion? Yet I could not just come straight out and ask her what she might be like as a drinking companion. So I wrote to thank her for getting me out of an awkward situation, and invited her for a drink at Le Gymnase. I set a date and a time. She accepted by return mail.

  Le Gymnase is a seedy café where I often go simply because it is located a hundred yards from my publisher’s. I’ve always found this downmarket place extremely likeable—it is the archetypal Parisian bistro. On the counter you’ll find a basket full of croissants, and one of those little round racks with hard-boiled eggs. The regulars are just as you would imagine, engaged in friendly arguments at the zinc.

  It was the first Friday in November, at six in the evening. I got there first, as I always do: I am biologically incapable of not showing up at least ten minutes early. I like to get the feel of the ambient crowd before I devote myself to one person in particular.

  While I tend to dress up like a Martian pagoda for my signing sessions, in this instance I was wearing my everyday black work duds: a long black skirt, an ordinary black jacket, and my black ruff, without which I would not be who I am—I staunchly support the return of the ruff, yet despite my fame I have never managed to win a single person over to my cause. Pétronille Fanto, as on the previous occasion, was wearing jeans and a leather jacket.

  “I’ll have a coffee,” she said.

  “Are you sure? Why don’t we have something a bit more festive?”

  “A half-pint of beer, then.”

  “I was thinking of champagne.”

  “Here?” said Pétronille, opening her eyes wide.

  “Yes. It’s fine here.”

  She looked all around, as if she’d missed something.

  “Okay, then, here.”

  “Don’t you like champagne?”

  “Me, not like champagne?” she said indignantly.

  “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “Have you ever tried the champagne here?”

  “No. This will be the opportunity.”

  “Do they even have any?”

  “With the exception of the station buffet in Vierzon, there is champagne to be had everywhere in France.”

  Pétronille motioned to the waiter.

  “Do you have champagne?”

  “Yup. Two glasses?”

  “A bottle, please,” I said.

  Pétronille and the waiter looked at me with newfound respect.

  “I have some Roederer Brut,” he said. “Sorry, no Cristal. Will that do?”

  “Fine, provided it’s chilled.”

  “But of course,” he replied, shocked.

  France is that magical country where at any time even the lowliest tavern knows how to serve a fine champagne at an ideal temperature.

  While the good man was preparing our order, Pétronille said, “Do you have something to celebrate?”

  “Yes. Our acquaintance.”

  “You shouldn’t. It’s not that important.”

  “Not to you—I can see why. But to me it is.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “It’s the beginning of a friendship.”

  “If that’s where you’re headed…”

  “I hope so, in any case.”

  The waiter came back with two champagne flutes and a bottle in an ice bucket.

  “Shall I open it?”

  “Allow me,” said Pétronille.

  She casually popped the cork on the Roederer and filled the glasses.

  “To our friendship!” I said solemnly.

  The Roederer had that flavor which Imperial Russia attributed to French luxury: my mouth filled with the taste of happiness.

  “Not bad,” said Pétronille.

  I observed her. She shared my exaltation. I appreciated the fact that she wasn’t trying to act blasé.

  The waiter brought some peanuts, which indicated a strange sense of values. You might as well listen to the “Chicken Dance” while reading Turgenev. To my relief, Pétronille didn’t touch them.

  I have a tendency to drink quickly, even when it’s excellent. It’s not the worst way there is to honor a good drink. No champagne has ever faulted me for my enthusiasm, which absolutely does not reflect a lack of attention on my part. If I drink quickly, it is also so that the elixir doesn’t have time to get warm. And not to hurt its feelings: the sparkling wine must not get the impression that my desire is lacking in urgency. Drinking quickly does not mean guzzling. Just one sip at a time, but I do not keep the magic potion in my mouth for long: I tend to swallow it when its icy edge is still almost painful.

  “You should see your face,” said Pétronille.

  “It’s because I’m concentrating on the champagne.”

  “You look weird when you concentrate.”

  I got her talking. With the help of the champagne, she confessed that her dissertation was on a play by Ben Jonson.

  She had spent the last two years in Glasgow, where she had taught French in a secondary school. While she described her life in Scotland, a grim expression spread over her face: I concluded that she’d been in love there, and that it had ended badly.

  I refilled our glasses. As the bottle emptied, we went back in time. She had grown up in the Paris suburbs. Her father was an electrician, her mother, a nurse at the hospital for the Paris transport system.

  I was staring at her with the dumb admiration common to people of my sort when they meet a genuine proletarian.

  “My father used to spend Sunday morning selling L’Humanité at the market.”

  “You’re a communist!” I exclaimed enthusiastically: I had indeed found a rare pearl.

  “Don’t get carried away. My parents are communists, and I’m on the left, but I’m not a communist. I guess you’re pretty upper-class, right?”

  “I’m from Belgium,” I said, to curtail the investigation.

  “Yeah. That’s okay, I get you.”

  She held out her flute for me to fill it.

  “You’re like me, you can knock it back,” I said.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Nothing! I just like to drink with people who share my passion.”

  “Why don’t you just say that you think it’s fun to go slumming.”

  I looked at her closely, wondering if she was serious.

  “Are you going to start up with the class struggle and dialectical materialism?” I asked. “When I invited you, I didn’t know the first thing about your background.”

  “Your caste senses these things.”

  “I am not obsessed with ‘these things,’ as you put it.”

  The tension was rising. Pétronille must have realized, and she calmed down.

  “In any case, we’ve found common ground,” she said, indicating the bottle with her chin.

  �
��Indeed we have.”

  “My parents like a good champagne. Not often, but we do drink it. A German invented communism, and the Russians put it into practice, and those are both countries that know how to appreciate good champagne.”

  “I was born in an embassy, so that’s as good as being born in champagne.”

  “So you don’t even notice what’s exceptional about it anymore.”

  “Oh, you’re wrong there. I’ve known splendor in my life, but misery, too. Do you often write to authors?”

  “You’re the first and so far the only one.”

  “To what do I owe the honor?”

  “You make me laugh. I heard you on the radio. I didn’t know who you were but I couldn’t stop laughing. You were talking about how to milk a whale. And you said that you slip the word ‘pneu’—as in a rubber tire—into every one of your books. I read them all just to make sure, and you weren’t lying.”

  “Which just goes to show that I give people serious reasons to read me.”

  “I liked your books. They touched me.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, thank you.”

  I wasn’t just being polite. When someone likes my books, I am sincerely happy. Coming from the mouth of this strange gamine who terrorized photographers and hobnobbed with Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the compliment was all the more enchanting.

  “You must be used to it.”

  “I never get used to it. And besides, you’re not just anyone.”

  “I suppose you’re right. I’m difficult. I’ve tried to read contemporary authors, and I just get bored with them.”

  I tried to persuade her that she was wrong, and began to sing the praises of a multitude of living authors.

  “None of them can hold a candle to Shakespeare,” she said.

  “Nor can I.”

  “You invite your readers to drink champagne, that’s different.”

  “You had no way of knowing that. And besides, I don’t do it with all my readers.”

  “I should hope not. I’ll keep an eye on you.”

  I laughed, not altogether sincerely, because I thought she really might. She must have read my thoughts because she added, “Don’t worry, I have far more important things to do with my life.”

  “I am sure you do. I would love to hear about them.”

  “You’ll see.”

  Tipsiness helping, I could imagine her brilliant exploits: stealing the Crown Jewels on behalf of Scottish workers, or staging ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore at the Comédie-Française.

  Pétronille must have had a certain flair for drama, because at that very moment she got to her feet.

  “We’re out of champagne,” she said. “Why don’t we go to the Montparnasse cemetery, it’s at the end of the street.”

  “Excellent idea,” I said. “We’re bound to run into somebody interesting.”

  We hadn’t reckoned with the early closing of Paris cemeteries in winter: the gates were shut. We headed back the other way along the Rue Huyghens toward the Boulevard Raspail. We must have gone about halfway when Pétronille informed me that she was going to urinate there on the spot, between two parked cars.

  “Can’t you wait until Le Gymnase?” I protested. “We’ve only got another thirty yards or so to go.”

  “Too late. Cover me.”

  Panic. What was I supposed to do? It was dark, with thick clouds. You couldn’t see fifty feet ahead of you on the sidewalk on the Rue Huyghens. In this atmosphere straight out of Macbeth, I was supposed to protect the privacy of this young person who, for reasons that partially escaped me, had read all my novels.

  I listened out for any footsteps; all I could hear was the sound of a pee that seemed determined never to stop. My heart was pounding. I prepared my speech, in the event a passerby came our way: “Forgive me, sir, madam, my friend has had to answer an urgent call of nature, she won’t be long, I do hope you won’t mind waiting for a second, please?” What effect would my words have? I never got the chance to find out, because the little ditty came to an end a few seconds later; Pétronille reappeared.

  “That’s better,” she said.

  “I’m delighted to hear it.”

  “Sorry, it was the champagne.”

  That will teach me to serve Roederer to a street urchin, I thought, as we headed toward the Vavin Métro station, where we would go our separate ways. Pétronille must have sensed that the incident had put me off a bit, because she didn’t say “see you soon.”

  Alone again, I took myself to task. Was it really so terrible to pee between two parked cars? Why was I acting as if I’d been traumatized? To be sure, no one in Japan would ever behave like that. But that was precisely why I had left the Land of the Rising Sun to come to France, because I appreciated the sense of freedom here. “You’re just an old fussbudget,” I thought.

  The fact remains that I did not get back in touch with Pétronille. The years went by and I gave no further thought to my search for a drinking companion. That was my way of remaining loyal to my acquaintance of an evening.

  October, 2001. I was browsing through the new books in a Paris bookstore when I came upon Honey Vinegar, a first novel by one Pétronille Fanto.

  I gave a start and grabbed the book. On the back cover was written: “An insolent debut novel by Pétronille Fanto, 26, a specialist in Elizabethan literature.” There was a little black-and-white author photograph: she hadn’t changed. I smiled, and bought the book.

  I have a very particular protocol when reading. I have learned that to ensure the highest degree of absorption, I must read lying down, preferably on a soft cozy bed: the farther I vanish from any physical self-awareness, the better I merge with the text. And so it was in this case.

  I read Honey Vinegar in one sitting. Pétronille—the nerve of it!—had revived the theme of Montherlant’s The Girls: a bestselling author receives letters from female readers who have fallen in love with him, and replies with a mixture of voracity and weariness. The similarity went no further, for while Montherlant’s Costals emerges victorious from the confrontation, Fanto’s Schwerin is thoroughly devoured by the maidens.

  Montherlant, from the height of his long career as a bestselling author, wrote from experience. Pétronille, on the other hand, had launched into her topic as a debut novelist. What could she possibly know about the behavior of female readers? But this paradox would have been totally uninteresting were it not for her talent: not only was she bold, she also—and above all—showed real mastery where language and narration were concerned.

  Better still: it was clear that she had an exemplary assimilation of culture. Here was an author who had read everything, and not just recently; she was well beyond the stage where one might feel the need to flaunt one’s knowledge in front of others. Proof of this, the debt she owed Montherlant seemed so obvious to her that she made no reference to him whatsoever—and this in an era where young people her age hardly read him at all anymore.

  Such supreme elegance is bound to disappear. Four or five years ago, a reader in her twenties wrote and accused me of plagiarism. Derisively, my sly reader explained what she had found: according to her, one sentence in my novel Hygiene and the Assassin had been lifted word for word from Cyrano de Bergerac: “I may use them on myself with a witty turn of phrase, but I will not allow other people to use them.” “And you did not reference it…” she concluded, with an accusatory ellipsis. More fool I, I answered the young woman and confidently expressed my belief that half the planet must know where the quotation came from. She immediately wrote back to inform me that she was the only student in her year in liberal arts who recognized the quote, hence my defense was unconvincing. Which just goes to show that in this day and age a desire to eschew priggish pedantry is tantamount to premeditated theft.

  Her youth notwithstanding, Pétronille had earned her position among the ranks of congenia
l authors. I was glad of this, and I immediately penned an enthusiastic letter, which I sent to her through her publisher’s good offices. I soon received a reply inviting me to a signing. On the designated date and time I made my way to a cozy bookstore in the twentieth arrondissement called Le Merle Moqueur.

  I absolutely love to go to other authors’ book signings. For once I don’t have to do the work. Moreover, I love to watch how my colleagues go about it. There are some who are rude and hardly look at the reader while they are signing, or who keep their cell phone wedged between ear and shoulder and refuse to interrupt their telephone conversation. There are some who get it over with quickly, and then others who are even slower than I am—I recall one adorable Chinese fellow who was the despair of all the booksellers because he spent half an hour with each reader, first thinking, then “signing” the calligraphic inscription each reader inspired in him. Some authors go too far, or behave obsequiously, not to mention the ones who chat up the women. It’s endlessly entertaining.

  In Pétronille’s case, the most notable thing was the attitude of the readers. They all stared at her with disbelief when they saw that she was the author. Like four years ago, she resembled a fifteen-year old boy. Such a juvenile air made her debut novel all the more improbable.

  Her manner with people was one of frank courtesy—the best. I recalled how she had peed on the sidewalk of the rue Huyghens and now I saw the event differently: no doubt Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson would have done the same. And what could be more chic than the manners of Shakespeare’s contemporaries? Pétronille actually did have something roguish about her, which she would have shared with those great authors, many of whom died before the age of thirty in senseless tavern-leaving brawls. How much classier could you get?

  When it was my turn, she said, “Amélie Nothomb at my book signing: all right!”

  I handed her Honey Vinegar.

  “A real treat,” I said.

  “So did you bring the champagne?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t think.”

  “Pity. I’ve got a Pavlovian reflex with you now: every time I see you I develop the most incredible craving for Roederer.”