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| Le Livre de Poche, c 1960 |
De plus, je le savais bien, ce jeu –– si jeu il y avait, si jeu il peut y avoir entre deux personnes qui se plaisent vraiment et qui peuvent entrevoir l'une par l'autre une faille, même provisoire, à leur solitude –– ce jeu était dangereux. Il ne fallait sottement me faire plus forte que je n'étais. Du jour òu je serais << apprivoisée >>, comme disait Françoise, admise et supportée entièrement par Luc, je ne pourrais sans souffrir le quitter. Bertrand n'était pas capable d'autre chose que de m'aimer. Je me disais cela avec tendresse pour Bertrand, mais je pensais à Luc sans réticence. Car enfin, tout au moins quand on est jeune, dans cette longue tricherie qu'est la vie, rien ne paraît désespérément souhaitable que l'imprudence. Je n'avais, au reste, jamais rien décidé. J'avais toujours été choisie. Pourquoi, une fois de plus, ne pas laisser faire? Il y aurait charme de Luc, l'ennui quotidien, les soirs. Tout se ferait tout seul; il était inutile de chercher à savoir.
What's more, I knew it well, this game –– if there was a game, if there can be a game between two people who truly please each other and glimpse each other through a crack, even temporary, in their solitude –– this game was dangerous. It would have been foolish to make myself stronger than I was. From the day when I would be 'tamed,' as Françoise said, admired and supported entirely by Luc, I could not leave him without suffering. Bertrand was not capable of anything but loving me. I told myself that with tenderness for Bertrand, but I thought of Luc without hesitation. Because finally, at least when one is young, in this long swindle that is life, nothing but carelessness seems desperately desirable. I had, all the same, never decided anything. I had always been chosen. Why not let it happen one more time? There would be Luc's charm, the daily boredom, the evenings. Everything would be singularly itself; it was useless to try to understand it.
The Novel: Dominique is reading law at the Sorbonne and dating her fellow student Bertrand who, despite his intellectualism, does not appear to share her ever-present fear of boredom. Bertrand is her first lover and for that reason she is able to maintain a certain degree of tenderness toward him which sometimes feels like love until he begins to argue about literature with his friends or strives too hard to find the comedic element in every situation. Still, she's happy enough to accompany him when he goes to meet his uncle, a traveling businessman, for a drink at a Paris café late one afternoon.
The uncle, whose name is Luc, surprises Dominique by being less ridiculous and a lot more attractive than she expected him to be. 'Il avait les yeux gris, l'air fatigué, presque triste. D'une certaine manière il est beau.' [He had grey eyes, an air of weariness, almost sad. In a certain way he was handsome.] She is immediately struck by Luc's attempts to monopolize her attention, deciding that he's just the type to make a play for an attractive girl like herself even though she's sleeping with his nephew and has been for a year. She nevertheless feels flattered by Luc's interest in her, her curiosity further piqued when he invites Bertrand and herself to lunch the day after next so they can meet his wife Françoise.
Françoise finds the shabbily dressed Dominique every bit as charming as her husband finds the girl, gladly showing her through their apartment and, when lunch is over, impulsively buying her a new coat while strolling through the streets of Paris in the company of their respective partners. (Bertrand resents Dominique for accepting this gift and sulks about it for a time, refusing to buy her dinner before taking her back to his house to make love to her again.) The two couples see a lot more of each other over the next few weeks, strengthening the mutual attraction between Dominique and Luc and encouraging Françoise –– a woman 'si visiblement faite pour la maternité' [so visibly made for maternity] in the girl's view –– to treat her like the daughter she's never had.
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| Julliard first French edition, 1956 |
It seems a foregone conclusion that the witty, pleasure seeking Luc will make a move of some kind and eventually he does, asking Dominique to dine alone with him one evening while his wife is away visiting friends. Dominique is once again flattered and intrigued by his attentions, telling herself it's perfectly normal for a young woman who has fallen under the spell of such a handsome and entertaining older man to feel the way she does. She accepts Luc's invitation, deciding before they meet that their encounter must be 'drôle et sans consequences' [amusing and without consequences]. But this proves not to be the case. She learns that Luc shares her fear of boredom and, after he drives her to a nearby bar, that he wants to have an 'adventure' with her despite the fact he is generally not interested in sleeping with young inexperienced girls. Luc doesn't force the issue, leaving it up to Dominique to decide what she wants to do before taking her to watch the sunrise and then back to the boarding house which she shares with her nosy friend Catherine and their fellow students.
Dominique tries to put Luc's offer out of her mind, vacillating as always between her strong attraction to him, her genuine fear of hurting Bertrand and Françoise and the feelings of intense joy she sometimes experiences when alone. (These epiphanies are a key component of her character, demonstrating that she's independent-minded and fundamentally solitary by nature.) But none of this prevents her from seeing Luc again, though always in the company of at least one of his similarly amusing middle-aged friends. Nor does it prevent her from agreeing to join him, Françoise and Bertrand for a weekend in the country as the guest of Bertrand's mother.
It is here, toward the end of a tedious dinner party presided over by Betrand's mother (whose name is never revealed), that Luc seizes the opportunity to finally kiss Dominique by announcing to the group that he intends to take her for 'une promenade sentimentale' [a sentimental stroll] in the garden. Dominique is scared at first and wishes she was safely at home with her own parents in the Yonne, but she doesn't push Luc away. Her fears conquered, she desires only that she and Luc should go on kissing uninterrupted until dawn, fully aware that this episode is merely the prelude to the 'adventure' he remains committed to enjoying with her.
Two days later they meet secretly in Paris, where Luc suggests they satisfy themselves by taking a short vacation together once Dominique has finished her exams. 'Je ne t'aimerai jamais "pour des vrais", commes des enfants,' he confesses with his usual disconcerting honesty, 'mais nous sommes pareils, toi et moi. Je n'ai plus seulement envie de coucher avec toi, j'ai envie de vivre avec toi, de partir de toi en vacances.' ['I could never love you "for real," as children say... but we're alike, you and me. I no longer only need to sleep with you, I need to live with you, to go on vacation with you.'] With the academic year over, Dominique returns to her parents' house in the countryside where she whiles away the hours reading letters from Catherine and Bertrand (with whom she has now broken up), postcards from Françoise and waiting to hear from the frustratingly silent Luc. Before the end of the month his letter finally arrives, asking her to meet him in Avignon. She attends this rendezvous, having invented an invitation to go and stay with Catherine as the pretext for cutting short her visit to her parents in whom, of course, she makes no effort to confide.
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| Penguin Books UK, c 1985 |
Reunited in Avignon, she and Luc now travel on to Cannes where he rents them a suite in one of the city's many luxury hotels. The Côte d'Azur remains their home for the next two weeks, their days spent on its beaches perfecting their tans and their nights spent drinking and dancing in tourist-packed nightclubs before returning to their room to make love. The experience of having Luc all to herself is an enlightening one for Dominique who, instead of becoming bored with the arrangement as she feared she was bound to become, soon finds herself doing the unthinkable and falling in love with him despite his pragmatic insistence that under no circumstances should she permit herself to do this. Her suggestion that their relationship should continue after they return to Paris only annoys Luc who insists that their liaison must be temporary, something to be enjoyed for as long it lasts before he returns to Françoise who, aware of his true nature and wearily accepting of it, never questions him about the affairs he regularly has with other women. Dominique also accepts this aspect of his personality, admitting that what he says makes sense despite her growing love for him and the guilt she feels at having betrayed Françoise and, to a lesser extent, Bertrand. 'Nous arrivâmes à Paris trés tard dans la nuit. A la porte d'Italie je regardai Luc qui avait les traits un peu las et je pensai que nous nous étions bien tirés de notre petite aventure, que nous étions vraiment des adultes, civilisés et raisonnables, et je me sentais tout à coup, avec une sorte de rage, affreusement humiliée.' [We arrived back in Paris very late at night. At the Porte d'Italie I looked at Luc who had a world-weary expression on his face and I thought that we were wise to pull ourselves out of our little adventure, that we were truly adults, civilized and reasonable, and I suddenly felt, with a sort of rage, horribly humiliated.]
Dominique soon resumes her normal routine, attending classes at the Sorbonne, listening to the unwanted advice of Catherine and even fending off Bertrand who, after being apart from her all summer, now declares he wants her back –– a demand she's quick to reject for obvious reasons. The only thing she craves is a call from Luc who, before they parted, promised to get in touch with her soon. Two days pass without Dominique hearing from him, prompting her to send him a note which results in another dinner invitation, followed by an evening at the theater with himself and the still unsuspecting Françoise during which he behaves as though they did not just spend a fortnight together sharing the same bed. Disappointed to realize that he was sincere in his desire to keep their affair temporary, Dominique returns to her parents' house, only to find herself stymied at every turn by her old nemesis boredom. Seeking relief from it, and eager to sleep with Luc at least one more time, she returns to Paris and the unexpected news that Catherine, her judgemental so-called friend, has 'accidentally' told Bertrand about their affair. The only person who remains unaware of the fact that they've been lovers, it now seems, is the sweet natured, all forgiving Françoise.
This changes the following day when Dominique, more in love with Luc than ever and now feeling quite sorry for herself into the bargain, goes to lunch with him, Françoise and a shifty-looking friend of theirs named Pierre. The meal proves to be something of an ordeal for Dominique, with Luc telling her on the way to the restaurant that what she feels for him is certain to fade in time. Both he and Françoise promise to call her as they leave the restaurant but neither of them does. When Luc does eventually call some time later, it is only to inform her that Françoise now knows everything because Pierre –– someone he erroneously thought he could trust with the tale of their two week stay in Cannes –– has intentionally and very calculatedly betrayed his confidence.
Dominique asks to see Luc and they meet twice more, once at a bar and once in his car which he drives to the Bois de Boulogne to gain them some privacy while he tells her that he'll shortly be leaving for North America on business and will be gone for at least a month. Although Dominique passionately re-declares her love for him and begs him not to end their relationship, he's incapable of giving her what she wants, adopting instead a patronizing attitude of sympathy before dropping her back at her boarding house where, over the next few days, she falls into a depression relieved only by the thought of writing him a letter that will be so elegantly composed, so uncannily perceptive, that falling madly in love with her will be his only possible response to it.
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| Pocket/Le Livre de Poche, c 1990 |
Days pass, during which Dominique goes through the motions of living –– spending time with Catherine and a new friend Alain who listens to her tale of woe without passing judgement on her, wandering the streets, dropping in to cafés to play her favorite jazz records on their jukeboxes –– without really living at all. Only a call from Françoise, inviting her to come for a visit, pulls her out of the paralyzing funk she's fallen into. But rather than condemn her for her deceitful behavior, Françoise expresses pity for her unhappy situation, reminding her, and not without a certain degree of sadness on her own part, that Luc is a man constitutionally incapable of fidelity. This attitude –– so mature and, again, so maternal –– opens Dominique's eyes to what she must do. 'Il faillait que Françoise retrouve Luc et son demi-bonheur. Il faillait je me sacrifice. Cette dernière pensée me fit sourire. C'était un dernier effort pour me cacher mon inimportance… Cette résignation âcre comportait un certain optimisme.' [Françoise must regain Luc and her half-happiness. I must sacrifice myself. This last thought made me smile. It was a final effort to hide my own unimportance from myself… This bitter resignation carried with it a certain optimism.]
Ten days later Luc returns to Paris and calls her, inviting her to meet him at a bar for a drink. Dominique agrees, but something has changed in the meantime, making her less susceptible to his charms than she was before he left the country. After hanging up the telephone, she returns to her cramped cold room with a smile on her face. 'A nouveau, je le savais, j'étais seule. J'eus envie de me dire ce mot à moi-même. Seule. Seule. Mais enfin, quoi? J'étais une femme qui avait aimé un homme. C'était une histoire simple; il n'y avait pas quoi faire des grimaces.' [Once again, I knew I was alone. I needed to say this word to myself. Alone. Alone. But finally, what? I was a woman who had loved a man. It was a simple story; no need to pull faces about it.]
Françoise Sagan was twenty years old when Un certain sourire, her second novel, was published in 1956. The book was an immediate success, largely thanks to the scandal generated by her debut novel, a runaway bestseller titled Bonjour Tristesse [Hello Sadness] which was published when she was eighteen and made her the most talked about woman in France and, for a time, in much of the literary anglophone world as well. Like its predecessor, Un certain sourire displays a maturity well beyond its author's years, allowing her to explore age-old themes of love, jealousy and loss in what was an entirely new and fascinating voice that had its roots in Existentialism and the Nouvelle Roman [New Novel] rather than in the morally unambiguous formulae of traditional romantic fiction. Sagan's style is spare and direct, short on description but featuring the kind of penetrating psychological insight that is sometimes merciless in its dissection of human behavior and the forces –– lust, boredom, love, lassitude –– which serve to motivate and guide it.
Un certain sourire is really a novel, as Bonjour Tristesse was before it, about growing up and learning to shed your illusions about the concept and the act of love before they become morally inhibiting and emotionally destructive. Dominique learns a lot about love and heartbreak but she also learns a new appreciation for the solitude she came so close to sacrificing for what, in the end, she realizes was nothing but her own impractical fantasy of Luc and the life they might have shared together had he been a more conventionally-minded man. She may begin their affair as a girl but she ends it as a woman, confident of her ability to survive whatever life and love may throw at her in future. Whatever else she may be, she is certainly no dewy-eyed victim of male duplicity. Love is difficult and painful, yes, but at least it isn't boring. No need to cry or, as she says, pull faces when the relationship, indeed any relationship, reaches its inevitable conclusion.
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| FRANÇOISE SAGAN, 1954 |
The Writer: 'She was always twelve,' vocalist Juliette Greco said of her friend (and occasional lyricist) Françoise Sagan following the latter's death from a pulmonary embolism on 24 September 2004. 'She did what she wanted.' Like many an enfant terrible [unruly child] before and after her, Sagan seemed to pay a heavy price for her early success and the notoriety that was, for much of her career, its natural concomitant and, some may suggest, its curse.
Sagan was born on 21 June 1935 in Carjac, a town in the Lot region of southern France. She was the fourth child of Marie and Pierre Quoirez and was doted upon by her well-to-do parents because the child born before her, a boy, had died in infancy, making her birth 'un cadeau du ciel' [a gift from heaven] as far as they were concerned. As her sister Suzanne later remarked to one of her sibling's biographers: 'Elle était une enfant pourrie-gâtée. Tout sa vie, elle a joui de totale impunité.' [She was an over-spoiled child. All her life, she enjoyed total impunity.] She was nicknamed 'Kiki' by her family and grew up in privileged circumstances, shielded for the most part from the harsh realities of World War Two by her bourgeois parents who, though anti-semitic by nature, nevertheless risked their lives to hide several Jews from the occupying Germans. A film she saw at the age of ten, revealing precisely what went on inside the Nazi death camps, would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Having divided their time between the Lot and Paris during the war years, the Quoirez family permanently relocated to the capital in 1945 where Françoise attended several different schools which failed, as did a stint in a boarding school in Grenoble, to tame her independent spirit. At the age of thirteen she discovered the novels of André Gide, beginning what was to become a crash course in French and foreign literature which saw her immerse herself in the works of Albert Camus, Arthur Rimbaud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, William Faulkner, Colette, André Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre (with whom she would later form a friendship), Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald among many other writers. She sat her baccalauréat (the French equivalent of the North American SATs and English A Levels) exam in 1951 and failed it, forcing her to re-sit it that summer while her family returned to the Lot for its annual vacation –– a process she repeated the following year before she earned the passing grade that made her eligible to enrol at the Sorbonne.
It was during this second attempt to pass her exams –– living alone in the family apartment in Paris and haunting the cafés, nightclubs and jazz bars of St-Germain-des-Prés –– that she decided to write a novel. This book, which she worked on for two to three hours per day in order, she said, to find out if she could finish it, became Bonjour Tristesse [Hello Sadness]. The first person to read it was her lifelong friend Florence Malraux, daughter of writer (and future Minister of Cultural Affairs) André Malraux, who in turn passed it along to her mother Clara Malraux. Shocked by what, for its time, was its immorality and frank depictions of both adolescent and adult sex, Clara reluctantly sent it to a young writer named François Nourissier who worked at the firm of Denoël. Unfortunately for Nourissier and his firm, he never bothered to read it.
In the meantime Sagan was advised by writer and academic Colette Audry, to whom she had submitted the novel on her own account, to revise its ending to make it more tragic. Audry also recommended three other publishing houses which, in her opinion, might be interested in publishing such a daring book by an untested teenage author. On 6 January 1954 Sagan sent her manuscript (which prominently featured her date of birth on the title page) to the houses of Gallimard, Plon and Julliard. Gallimard found the book offensive, Plon did not respond, but Julliard sent her a telegram on 17 January, asking her to call them urgently. This resulted in an initial offer of F25,000, a figure doubled by the time Sagan signed her parent supervised contract and, at her father's insistence, selected a pen name for herself to protect the family from unwanted scandal. Given just a few minutes to do this she remembered the Princesse de Sagan, a key character in Proust's masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time], and re-invented herself as 'Françoise Sagan.'
Bonjour Tristesse was published on 15 March 1954 and shook conservative Catholic France to its core. While many critics were quick to condemn the book on moral and religious grounds, just as many recognized it as an outstanding new novel, completely original and clearly the work of a prodigiously gifted young writer. On 24 May it won the Critics' Prize and on 1 June an article about the book, written by no less a figure than the reigning Nobel laureate François Mauriac, appeared in Le Figaro, stating that 'ce prix des Critiques décerné… à un charmant petit monstre de dix-huit ans (dont) le mérite littéraire éclate dès la première page et n'est pas discutable.' [The Critics' Prize has been awarded… to a charming little monster of eighteen (whose) literary merit bursts forth from the first page and is not debatable.] Love her or loathe her, Sagan had arrived and was now a cultural force to be reckoned with.
Her second novel did not appear until 1956 and, like its predecessor, was an instant hit with young people attracted to a writer whose brief but psychologically complex novels seemed to speak both to and for them and dealt specifically with their own social and sexual preoccupations. She became, with her slight build and sunglasses and trademark jeans and sandals, an appealingly photogenic symbol of youth and the new bohemianism, as iconic as James Dean or any other era-defining celebrity who rose to prominence during the 1950s. Like the dead North American actor, Sagan was also the victim of a serious car accident on 4 April 1957 which left her in a coma for several days and resulted in her becoming addicted to morphine –– an addiction that saw her enter a detox facility after leaving hospital but one which, along with her existing addictions to prescription medications and alcohol, she would never permanently conquer.
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| FRANÇOISE SAGAN, c 1965 |
Un certain sourire [A Certain Smile] made her wealthy enough to have her own entourage and become a frequent visitor to the casinos of Monte Carlo, where she quickly earned a new kind of a notoriety as an uncannily successful gambler. On the night of 8 August 1958 she won F8,000,000 at the gaming tables, enough to buy her the house in Honfleur that would remain her home until 1991 and allow her to continue indulging her passions for sports cars and the hedonistic Parisian lifestyle she had by then come to personify. By this time she was married to Guy Schoeller, an editor twenty years her senior who had been one of her 'protecters' since the publication of Bonjour Tristesse, whom she would divorce in 1960. A second marriage to North American model Robert Westhoff followed two years later along with the birth of her only child, a son named Denis. 'Quand on me l'a mis dans mes bras, j'ai eu une impression d'extravagante euphorie… je sais ce que c'est d'être un arbre avec une nouvelle branche: c'est d'avoir un enfant.' [When they put him in my arms, I had a feeling of extravagant euphoria… I know what it is to be a tree with a new branch: it's to have a child]. Although she and Westhoff quickly divorced, they continued to share the same house (and presumably the care of their son) until 1972. By then, Sagan had been in a sexual relationship with Peggy Roche, a former fashion journalist and stylist who would prove to be the love of her life, for several years –– a relationship that was to endure, despite brief affairs with partners of both sexes, until Roche's death in 1991.
Sagan's literary reputation was sealed with the publication of Aimez-vous Brahms… [Do You Like Brahms?] in 1959. Like her first and second novels, her fourth novel was also optioned by Hollywood and adapted for the screen but, unlike them, managed to remain more faithful to its original source material. The popularity of the 1958 film version of Bonjour Tristesse, which made a star of Jean Seberg, also helped to consolidate Sagan's status as a cultural icon outside her native France, with her work often parodied by journalists who were unable (or unwilling in many cases) to appreciate its subtlety and elegance. By the mid-1960s she had become an official member of the jet-set, frequently sighted in the company of film stars, pop singers and high profile foreign writers like Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams (whose 1959 play Sweet Bird of Youth she would translate into French in 1971) becoming, as one friend quipped, 'Mademoiselle Chanel de la littérature' [the Chanel of literature].
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| FRANÇOISE SAGAN, c 1990 |
Always an industrious writer, Sagan managed to combine the composition of novels –– of which she would publish twenty in total –– with the composition of eleven plays, six film scenarios, numerous song lyrics (for Johnny Hallyday as well as for her old friend Juliette Greco) and dozens of nonfiction pieces including a memoir published in two parts as Avec mon meilleur souvenir [With my fondest memory, 1984] and …Et toute ma sympathie […And All My Sympathy, 1993]. Her heavy workload did not prevent her from supporting political causes such as the movement to end the war in Algeria and, during the 1980s, foreign-based pro-democracy groups like Solidarity. She reportedly gave away nearly as much money as she earned, supporting members of what, by the 1990s, had become an extended 'family' of friends, lovers and assorted hangers-on for whom she had become a convenient and easily tapped source of cash. Her involvement in what would come to be known as the Elf affair –– an embezzlement scandal involving the Elf/Aquitaine petroleum company and several high-profile French business and political leaders including her friend, former President François Mitterand –– led to her being charged with tax evasion in 1991, earning her a one year suspended prison sentence and a fine of F4,000,000 which led to her financial ruin. This setback, combined with her arrest for cocaine possession and other drug-related offences, brought to an inglorious end what had been, in the eyes of her peers and the French media, her seemingly charmed existence.
The final years of Sagan's life, which saw her increasingly withdraw from the spotlight after her last novels Un chagrin de passage [A Fleeting Sorrow, 1991) and Le Miroir égaré [The Lost Mirror, 1993] were attacked by some critics, were marred by addiction, ill-health and alarming periods of rapid weight loss. Nevertheless, her 2004 death prompted nationwide mourning in France, with President Jacques Chirac stating that 'With her death, France loses one of its most brilliant and sensitive writers –– an eminent figure of our literary life.' The last word belonged to Sagan herself, who composed her own epitaph for The Dictionary of Authors in 1998 at the request of its editor: 'Sagan, Françoise. Fit son apparition en 1954, avec un mince roman, Bonjour Tristesse, qui fut un scandale mondial. Sa disparition, après une vie et une œuvre également agréables et bâclées, ne fut un scandale que pour elle-même [Sagan, Françoise. Made her appearance in 1954, with a slim novel, Bonjour Tristesse, which was a worldwide scandal. Her disappearance, after a life and a body of work equally agreeable and botched, was a scandal to no one but herself].
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