The uncanny thing about spinal surgery, or at least the kind I had, is that I’m not allowed to sit down for three months. I can lie down or stand up,… - Agnès Poirier

I was called Agnès after a character in a Molière play. When I looked at names for my daughter, I wasn't sure until Garance was uttered, and that was it.

Booing the Marseillaise is a very symbolic gesture, especially when it comes from French nationals. France was built on an unwritten national contract, that of a community sharing not only the same geography but also a sense of a common destiny. The Republican model is that of integration and togetherness, not of peaceful cohabitation between separate communities, as with multiculturalism. Integration supposes a will to integrate and a desire to live together. Since the 1960s, the French left has shied away from any debates brushing on anything linked with, in its eyes, the awful word of "nationalism", forgetting that the political concept born in the 1840s was a progressive one.

Prévert wrote the part of Garance for Arletty, France's biggest star before Bardot. Garance and Arletty are the same and one woman, the epitome of the Parisian, according to Prévert: strong, independent, witty, impudent, mysterious, the kind who casts spells, whose laugh ricochets, the kind who loves life and whom life loves.