2018

In 1960, shortly after the publication of Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan takes a holiday on the Normandy coast with two friends. She rents an old and well known house, le Manoir du Breuil, a few kilometres from Deauville, from July 8 to August 8. The night before leaving she goes to the casino and spends the night there: 8 is the number she repeatedly calls. She comes out with 80,000 francs in cash in her bag. Once back to the house it is 8 am. The landlord is there for inventory and paperwork. She’s exhausted. By any chance wouldn’t he be selling the house, she asks. He says yes, 80,000 francs would do. It did. Françoise Sagan remained there for the rest of her life. This series echoes this story. A free interpretation, a visual revisitation of that story combining chance, the Casino and games, Deauville and its luxury hotels, the people going in and out, nightlife and the number 8.

"The story Marguerite Bornhauser decided to tell and to call "8" is striking. It’s Françoise Sagan’s unlikely story of how she settled here in Deauville, too long a story to tell, if it weren’t by chance. Through colors, the utmost intensity of colors, tracking that number, number 8, the key code to Sagan’s irrational mystery in a city with a casino. »
Thierry Grillet, Curator of the cultural section of the National Library of Paris (BnF)