Un pedigree

A fine provenance: Hélène Rochas, with whom Modiano was on close terms.

This “queen of perfumes,” with a passion for white flowers, presided for five decades over literary afternoons and society evenings at her garden apartment on rue Barbet-de-Jouy, where postwar Tout-Paris — from Cocteau to Dalí — passed through, later succeeded in more recent years by friendships with Françoise Sagan, Juliette Gréco and Patrick Modiano.

“I am writing these pages as one draws up a report or a curriculum vitae, for the record, and no doubt to be done with a life that was not mine. The events I will recount up to my twenty-first year, I lived in transparency — that process by which landscapes scroll past in the background while the actors remain motionless on a studio set. I would like to convey the impression that so many others have felt before me: everything went by in transparency, and I was not yet able to live my own life.” Before publishing Pedigree, two preliminary versions of this autobiography had appeared under the title Ephéméride. Through a kind of split identity, the adult author recounts his childhood and adolescence with a terrible dryness, as though they belonged to someone else. A sort of hetero-autobiography, it provides a set of keys with which to decipher all of Modiano’s other books, revealing the autobiographical element hidden within each of them.