When I met him he was still immensely shy, but he did all the arrogant and show-off things that make you dislike someone on first sight. He was giving an interview in his parents’ apartment and there were enormous posters of Bardot everywhere. We went out to dinner and then to a nightclub. Serge asked me to dance, which was very kind of him, and then he stepped on my feet and I realized he couldn’t dance. I thought he would leap onto the dance floor and do something extravagant. To my great pleasure, I saw he was wonderfully clumsy.
He took me to every single nightclub that was alive that night. We finished in Pigalle, in Madame Arthur’s, where men dressed up as women and pretended to be cockerels sitting on your knee. They all knew Serge because his father had been a pianist there. “Ah, salut, Serge!” they cried, blowing him kisses and putting plumes in my hair.
