Antoine De Baecque - Truffaut: A Biography

At six oclock in the morning on Saturday, February 6, 1932, Janine de Monferrand gave birth to a son, whom she named Franois Roland. Not even twenty, she had her baby in secret, at a good distance from her familys apartment on rue Henri Monnier, where she still lived. Her parents, Jean and Genevive de Monferrand, had known of her pregnancy for only the last three months. Catholic families frowned upon unwed mothers, and this was particularly so among the Monferrands neighbors and acquaintances in the ninth arrondissement, a quiet, insular, almost provincial neighborhood in the north of Paris. Janine had found sanctuary with a midwife, over half an hours walk from home, on rue Lon Cogniet, near the Parc Monceau. Two days later, the childs birth was registered at the town hall of the seventeenth arrondissement.

The infant was immediately placed with a wet nursefirst in Montmorency, then in Boissy-Saint-Lgerand would only rarely see his mother before the age of three. But after twenty months in obscurity, he at least gained an adoptive father. On October 24, 1933, two weeks before marrying Janine de Monferrand, Roland Truffaut legally recognized the boy, who had been listed as born of an unknown father. Yet the young couples wedding, on November 9, did not put an end to the secrecy regarding the infants existence. Indeed, while the great injustice had been redressed by a man with a noble heart and the couple was now accepted at the family dinner table, young Franois remained in the care of the wet nurse. In the spring of 1934, Roland and Janine had another son, whom they named Ren, but the baby died before he was two months old. One wonders how, had this brother lived, the shared childhood might have affected Franoiss creative outlook and his path in life. But Franois Truffaut remained an only child, and an unwanted one.

Deeply shaken by the death of their little Ren, the young couple decided to leave the family enclave and move into a modest two-room apartment on rue du March-Popincourt, in the Folie-Mricourt neighborhood. It was now, more than ever, out of the question for them to take in Franois. The child reminded his young mother of a gloomy period in her life: Rens death was a tragedy, recalls Monique, Janines younger sister.

The Monferrands, originally from Berry, belonged to the minor nobility. After a strict Jesuit education, Jean de Monferrand followed his parents to Paris in 1902. He met his wife, Genevive de Saint-Martin, through the personal ads. She was from the Oc region, between Auch and Brugnac in the Lot-et-Garonne, where part of her familyalso from minor nobilitystill lived. After graduating from the lyce in Agen, she went to Paris to complete her literary studies. The young couple married in 1907 and settled in Aubervilliers. Following the births of their first two children, Suzanne and Janine, Jean was drafted into the army. Like all men of his generation, he would remain profoundly shaken by the Great War. The experience tempered his conservative ethos, and introduced a certain humanism into a cultural background marked by nationalism, Catholicism, and legitimism. He and Genevive had two other childrenBernard in 1921 and Monique in 1925. Very much satisfied with the rectitude and discipline of their own good upbringing, they raised their four children in a strict but generous way. At the end of his life, Franois Truffaut tried to describe the ambiance of his early childhood: There had been titles in the family. My grandfather, a prim disciplinarian who was always impeccably dressed, was frightening to us, particularly at mealtime. He was really a pain in the neck. For example, at the dinner table, my aunt Monique, who was very mischievous, would take a fistful of salt and throw it behind her, just like that, and I would roar with laughter. He would immediately grab me by the collar and say, Take your plate to the kitchen! I would finish almost all my meals in the kitchen. Thats what the Monferrand atmosphere was like.

The family had moved into the apartment on rue Henri Monnier after the war. Jean de Monferrand worked very close by, overseeing the letters to the editor at LIllustration, one of the most important periodicals of the time, which had its offices on rue Saint-Georges. Though the position was a modest one, he was proud of being the editor of a column. Although the Monferrand family always lived quite frugally, the atmosphere at home was a literary and musical one. Genevive, a former schoolteacher, was a music lover and very well read. An occasional writer, she had penned a novel entitled Aptres (Apostles), written in a very mannered style and permeated with mystical fervor. Genevive shared her passion for reading with Franois, taking him, at the age of five or six, on long walks through the Drouot neighborhood, from bookstore to bookstore, and to the public library in the ninth arrondissement. All four Monferrand children inherited their mothers interest in literature and music, though they took quite different career paths. Bernard, the third-born, chose the military, first attending Navale and then, at the end of the thirties, entering Saint-Cyr military academy. Monique, the youngest child, studied the violin and graduated from the Paris Conservatoire during the Nazi Occupation. Janine, the second child, was more dissolute and fickle; she was impeded in her studies by her love affairs and, above all, by her status as a single mother. Nevertheless, she kept up with the theatrical and literary events of the prewar period. But she had to go to work. In 1934, her father got her a job as a shorthand typist at the weekly magazine