Comment te dire adieu?

Raising a glass to an unwilling muse

I wasn’t alive during the ’60s and ’70s. But I’m tethered to the era by a fascination for its music and its fashion. The stars burst into technicolour in my imagination, thanks to their songs and pictures, and countless cast-off accounts of their lives revived in print. We cannot lay claim to a world before our existence, but our brains are architects, building imaginary mausoleums to house the tombs of people from decades we never knew. John Lennon and I didn’t exist at the same time, yet I know more about him than I do of some of my friends.

With the death of someone famous comes a flurry of tributes and articles celebrating their life. It can also bring about more personal memories, allowing us to reflect on certain moments when their existence carried meaning in our lives. For me, Françoise Hardy’s passing earlier this week did just that. Though, for the last few years, she was an absentee of my memory, the news of her death reminded me of how her songs once helped to make my French degree more palatable. Or how I would plaster images of her on my old Instagram feed to appear as nonchalantly cool as Hardy herself (I’ve since been told that this is what Pinterest is for).

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By no means was I the first to admire Françoise Hardy. She was a universal muse, the switchboard from where the calls of creative minds would be redirected. Paco Rabanne, Yves Saint-Laurent, Sonia Rykiel. The careers of fashion designers were set afloat by Hardy, just as musicians and poets were moved by her too. Being assigned the status of ‘muse’, however, implies a degree of ownership; the muse becomes a conduit that can be used as the artist sees fit, a way for them to channel their creativity. In this sense, the portrayal need not be accurate (and often it isn’t), it need only be poetic and powerful, evocative and enduring.

“Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of Illium”

The idea transcends the person. Our impression of someone, even when we don’t know them personally, speaks to us on a deeper level. We fill in the blanks with what we want to see. Mick Jagger barely knew Hardy, but for him she was his ‘ideal woman’. Just as she ‘inspired’ Paco Rabanne to design a dress made out of metal. These representations are not faithful to the muse but reinforce the idea behind them; they reflect the artist’s desires rather than truth itself. Rabanne’s reinvention of Hardy as a glittering, gold-plated trinket was at odds with the reality of a woman who was plagued with insecurity (she later confessed that she thought she was too clean for Jagger).  

Hardy was an accomplished songwriter, having penned most of her own hits. But there is something about the public gaze – her elevation to a muse – that overshadows her accomplishments. She becomes an ideal, her image reproduced endlessly – a meme in the truest sense of the word. Until we don’t even need to know her in the slightest to still feel like we understand her.

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This idea of public ownership is not limited to the muse. When Queen Elizabeth II died, tributes spoke of a ‘grandmother to the nation’, of an eternal presence in people’s lives that was suddenly lost. Stories emerged with people treasuring brief encounters, speaking as if they knew the late monarch well. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of mourners queued to say goodbye (a queue long enough to have its own weather forecast) – not to a person, but to an era. A farewell to the safety net of constancy.

As with Hardy and her followers, there was a sense of belonging, and in turn, of ownership – of knowing without ever encountering. In Hardy’s case, her admirers were not attached to her as a human being, but with the image of her that was forged in their own minds. An idea that was transfigured in numerous different ways. An immortal myth in endless motion.

In reality, Hardy was diffident, refusing the trappings of show business (something that would only add to her mystique). The melancholic lyrics within her songs often reflected a paralysing self-doubt. For instance, in La question (1971), Hardy speaks of this internal fear when confronting the conflicting emotions of falling in love. The line “Les mondes où malgré moi je plonge / Sont comme un tunnel qui m'effraie” describes how the world around her, into which she dives against her will, is like a terrifying tunnel.

The song could also be read as a reflection on how being the unwilling muse for her contemporaries was such a frightening burden. “Je ne sais pas pourquoi je reste / Dans une mer où je me noie” – she knows not why she stays in a sea that drowns her. Hardy was like the winter sun; her brilliance and apricity longed for by all, but one that was aching to retire to the sanctuary of the horizon as quickly as possible. In 1968, she stopped perfoming live all together due to stage freight.  

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Hardy was only 17 years of age when she debuted in 1962, a youth that has been immortalised ever since. Of the many articles paying tribute to her life, few include photos of her as an older woman. Instead, there are images which are, at the very least, 50 years out of date. But then again, so too were all the photos I would post.

As we alluded to in The allure of icons, we eleveate celebrities in ways that might have previously been reserved for gods. Françoise Hardy was (still is, and perhaps always will be) the face of the Swinging Sixties, her legacy preserved in youth. But as the curtain closes, we say goodbye to the real-life woman behind the legend. Here’s to an icon.