He was so livid that he hung out by the school gates waiting for the teacher the next day, having forewarned all his friends to be there to witness the action. When Pierre was a pupil at aged seventeen, a teacher slapped him. He had not yet harnessed his energy, but the famous Bergé temper was already much in evidence.
He was happy with getting by,’ recounts his mother. He read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables at the age of eight or nine, which perhaps provided inspiration for the life he was to lead. He became such a distraction to the others that when he was in his mother’s class she made him sit up at the front, by her side. He jumped a class and was aged six among seven- or eight-year-olds, who, as his mother remembered over fifty years later, not exactly bright sparks as they were the children of alcoholics’. He was bright, learned to read early, grasped things straight away and then set about disrupting the rest of the class by being loud and obnoxious. The family moved to Lisieux in Normandy and Pierre attended the local school, where his mother taught. He was the eldest of two boys and his mother worked as a schoolteacher, his father as a tax inspector. He was born on 14 November 1930 in Saint-Pierre d’Oléron, which is the main town of the small Ile d’Oléron, located off the west coast of France in the Charente. At dinner Saint Laurent and Bergé were seated opposite each other, Bergé vibrating with energy, scintillating in his conversational thrust and parry before the mute and watchful Saint Laurent.īergé was a man of modest beginnings intent on an extraordinary life. He was already an ambitious operator around town he had been there at Yves’ Trapèze show at Dior and he had attended Dior’s funeral, as had Yves. Bergé was twenty-seven at the time and the lover and business manager of Bernard Buffet. Several days after the presentation of his first Dior collection, society hostess Marie-Louise Bousquet threw a dinner at a restaurant in honour of the new star and there Yves met with his destiny – Pierre Bergé, short and bristling and lethal. ‘Fame is rather flattering … and this is a trade that’s essentially on that.’
began uniquely for fame,’ he would admit ten years later. The extraordinary high of his first acknowledged success excited every desire Yves Saint Laurent possessed for recognition.
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