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I study English in the mornings puts me up in a kind of broom closet under the stairs. I run away to London. I arrive at Waterloo Station that evening. I cross Waterloo Bridge. I’m terrified at being alone in this city that seems so much bigger than Paris. From a red phone booth in Trafalgar Square, I call my father collect. I try to hide my panic. He doesn’t sound very surprised to learn I’m in London on my own. Hewishes me good luck, in an indifferent voice. At a small hotel in Bloomsbury, they agree to give me a room, even though I’m a minor. But just for one night. And the next day, I try my luck at another hotel, near the Marble Arch. There, too, they look the other way at my being fifteen and give me a tiny room. This was still the England of the Teddy boys and the London where seventeen-year-old Christine Keeler had just arrived from the suburbs. Later, I learned that she worked, that same summer, as a waitress in a small Greek restaurant on Baker Street, right near the Turkish place where I used to eat in the evening before my anxious walks down Oxford Street. “And De Quincey sipping / Sweet opium chaste and poisonous / Brooded on his unhappy Anne …”
    One night in September 1959, with my mother and one of her friends, in the Koutoubia, an Arab restaurant on Rue des Ecoles. It’s late. The restaurant is empty. It’s still summer. The weather is hot. The street door is wideopen. In those strange years of my adolescence, Algiers was an extension of Paris, and Paris was washed by the waves and echoes of Algiers, as if the sirocco blew over the trees in the Tuileries, bringing sand from the desert and beaches … In Algiers as in Paris, the same Vespas, the same movie posters, the same songs in the café jukeboxes, the same Renault Dauphines in the streets. The same summer in Algiers as along the Champs-Elysées. That evening at the Koutoubia, which city were we in? Some time later, they bombed the Koutoubia. One evening in Saint-Germain-des-Prés—or was it Algiers?—they bombed the Jack Romoli menswear shop.
    That autumn of 1959, my mother was in a play at the Théâtre Fontaine. On the Saturday evenings when we could leave school, I sometimes did my homework in the theater director’s office. And I walked around. I discovered the Pigalle neighborhood, less rustic than Saint-Germain-des-Prés, somewhat rougher than the Champs-Elysées. It was there, on Rue Fontaine,Place Blanche, Rue Frochot, that I first brushed against the mysteries of Paris and, without realizing it, began dreaming of a life for myself.
    On the Quai de Conti, two newcomers were living in the apartment: Robert Fly, an old friend of my father’s, who served as his chauffeur and took him everywhere in a Citroën DS 19, and Robert Car, a costume designer my mother had gotten to know on the set of Max Pécas’s film
Le Cercle vicieux
, in which she played the part of a rich and disturbing foreigner, the mistress of a young painter.
    In January 1960, I ran away from school because I was infatuated with a certain Kiki Daragane, whom I’d met at my mother’s. After walking to the hangars of the Villacoublay airfield, then reaching Saint-Germain-des-Prés by bus and metro, I happened to run into Kiki Daragane at the café Malafosse, where Rue Bonaparte meets the quay. She was with some art student friends. They advised me to go back home. I rang at my door, but there was no answer. Myfather must have been out with Robert Fly in the DS 19. My mother was away, as usual. I needed a place to sleep. I went back to the boarding school by metro and bus, after begging a little money off Kiki and her friends. The principal agreed to keep me until June. But at the end of the school year, I was to be expelled.
    On my rare days out, my father and Robert Fly would sometimes take me along on their perambulations. They crisscrossed the Ile-de-France. They met with notaries and