Le Thé des Ecrivains

He was of the greyish-grizzly type, the type who moved his lot around much. He was reading his newspaper, aloof and evasive, not a least bit encouraging.

He was telling her how she ought to concentrate on her work, that things weren’t easy these days and that there was no end to love even when it was dead. What if that girl was the new Françoise Sagan? The new queen of frivolous novels!

She would have torn social conventions to shreds with her pen. Instead of the fifties, she could have written about the love stories of the end of 2006. She would have taken a pen name, like Sagan, born Françoise Quoirez in 1935. She would have chosen the name of a princess, like the princess Sagan of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. She would have been Lamia Palatine for posterity. Just like Sagan, she would have had a style both naive and vulnerable, but also jerky and off beat. She too would have sold more than a million copies of her first novel: Goodbye Happiness and five hundred and fifty thousand for the second one. In that one, she would have inspired herself of the greyish grizzly to depict her own teenage love. He would have been Luc, her official boyfriend’s uncle. She would have written A Certain Smile 2 without excessive sentimentality. She would have been provocative and daring. She would have shown just how cynic and absurd ordinary couples could be... She would have known how to be both tender and ferocious, she could have been moving in her chimerical quest for well-being. But no. Nothing at all. No critics would ever destroy her and then shower praise upon her. She would never shock established order. Françoise Giroud, if she’d still been alive, would never say of her that, just like Sagan, she was an irritating and authentic writer. No one would call her Lamia Palatine: the sweet little monster. She would never have the opportunity to learn to love the easy life, fast cars, gaming and cocaine... There you have it. She would never be a sort of Lolita Pille, or better yet a Lamia Palatine, because she had doubts and because she saw just how her dream was being crushed by her bloke.

Who, by the way, wore a ring on the finger of his left hand. Whereas she didn’t.