Astragal By Albertine Sarrazin
In April 1957, Albertine Sarrazin jumped from the wall of a prison in Doullens, a commune in the Somme region of France, and broke her ankle bone from the thirty-feet drop. The escape formed the basis of Astragal, a roman à clef about an eighteen-year-old girl’s survival on the run from the law, as she is shifted from house to house in hiding, and her physical agency is literally impaired by the fact she can’t walk.
Anne shifts through the book as if in a lucid dream: the physical pain of her ankle blazes through the prose, which conveys the scenes with the quickness of someone intent on survival. At the heart of Astragal is a love story: Julien, an ex-convict, rescues Anne after her fall and captures her heart, a mutual dependency and longing that becomes “a kind of jail term of its own”, writes Patti Smith in the introduction of the 2013 reissue of the novel.
Julien ignites Anne with love, but without domesticating her: and the novel concludes as she slips away with police, caught at last, but escaping the hell of staying in one place, the risk of a single person breaking her heart. Jail, after all, is preferable to becoming the kind of woman she hates, who surveils her lover for lipstick on his shirts. A broken bone is endurable, but a broken heart is no less than madness: “Here, there is no drug or dodge, the pain twists and shivers my whole body, it is myself.”
Albertine Sarrazin died at the age of twenty-nine after a surgery by a neglectful doctor, immortalizing her in a way that the continuation of old age would have possibly never accomplished. Patti Smith kept a picture of Albertine with her close-cropped hair and fey face on the wall of her rented room in Brooklyn in 1968. As one legend passed into immortality, another was born. Albertine remains a cult icon for rebellious girls, who have no one to go home to, inspiring us to live without fear—and break our bones in our thirst for freedom.
