Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan's 'amoral' story of a schoolgirl's summer romance, scandalised French society and made its 18-year-old author famous. But this early success led to a life of drink, drugs and unhappy relationships, writes Richard Williams
She took the title from a poem by Paul Éluard and her nom de plume from Proust. Years later, Brigid Brophy would declare that she wrote with "a pen saturated in French literature". But 60 years ago , the publication of a first novel by an 18-year-old author had France's literary establishment in uproar. As a slender volume called Bonjour Tristesse flew off the shelves, Françoise Sagan became a scandalous success, the echoes of which would prove impossible to silence.
Over the course of a long and eventful career, Sagan would go on to produce 20 novels, three volumes of short stories, nine plays, two biographies and several collections of non-fiction pieces on places, things and people she loved. But so powerful was the impact made by Bonjour Tristesse, and so profound the disturbance it provoked in French society, that it remains easily her best-known work.
This short novel of barely 30,000 words is a story told by Cécile, a 17-year-old girl holidaying on the Côte d'Azur with her widowed father, a roué who has brought along his young girlfriend. The daughter is exploring her own first sentimental adventure, a swiftly consummated romance with a handsome law student, when the unexpected arrival of an older woman, a friend of her late mother, disrupts the self-indulgent haze of high summer. First the newcomer takes charge, ordering Cécile to terminate her romance in order to stay indoors and do her homework. Then she and the father fall in love. To prevent their marriage the daughter devises an ill-fated plot in which the pretence of an affair between her boyfriend and the father's dumped girlfriend is intended to provoke jealousy and restore the status quo ante.
The seemingly amoral tone brought celebrity and notoriety to Sagan, who was born Françoise Quoirez in Cajarc, a town in the Lot valley, to bourgeois parents who also kept an apartment in Paris. The youngest of three children, she was a habitual rule-breaker at her Catholic school. In the view of her friend Juliette Gréco, she never really grew up: "She was always 12. She did what she wanted."
A voracious reader since infancy, she adored Proust, Stendhal, Gide and Camus. But in the summer of 1953 she had to forego the usual family summer holiday by the sea in order to attend a crammer in Paris to prepare for a retake of her baccalaureat. Not much studying was done, although she passed the exam that October and enrolled at the Sorbonne. She had acquired the habit of spending several hours a day in a nearby cafe, writing in a blue exercise book. In the evenings she would go to Saint Germain-des-Prés to meet her friend Florence, daughter of the writer and future culture minister André Malraux, and to spend her pocket money listening to the great American jazz clarinettist Sidney Bechet at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier.
"I had a strong desire to write and some free time," she told Blair Fuller and Robert Silvers, who interviewed her for the Paris Review shortly after she became famous. "Instead of leaving for Chile with a band of gangsters, one stays in Paris and writes a novel. That seems to me a great adventure."
The test, she said, was not to produce a great work of literature but to see if she had the willpower to finish a novel at all. After two or three months her manuscript was complete, and on 4 January 1954 she dropped it off at the offices of a publisher, René Julliard, in the Rue de l'Université. Beneath the title and her name, she typed her date of birth: 21 June 1935. Within a few days a telegram was delivered to the young Quoirez at the family apartment on the Boulevard Malesherbes: "Prière de rappeler maison Julliard urgent."
The contract, negotiated with parental approval, authorised an advance of 50,000 francs: a doubling of the first offer, amended by hand. So, at her parents' request, was the author's name. Given a few minutes to chose, she remembered A la Recherche du Temps Perdu and renamed herself after Proust's Princesse de Sagan.
In discussions with Julliard, several alternative endings were attempted. One of them omitted the fatal accident that brings the tainted summer idyll to an end and propels the protagonists into the next phase of their lives, foreshadowed in the final version by a short concluding chapter suffused with a youthful acceptance of melancholy more reminiscent of F Scott Fitzgerald than of her French literary heroes.
Success was immediate and immoderate. In the month of publication, Paris-Match called her "an 18-year-old Colette". Within weeks she had won the important Prix des Critiques, and acclaim was arriving from surprising quarters. The 68-year-old François Mauriac, the reigning Nobel laureate, wrote about her on the front page of Le Figaro. "The literary merit explodes from the very first page and is beyond dispute," he exclaimed. Fanning the flames from the other side of the bonfire, the chief literary critic of Le Monde, the poet and novelist Émile Henriot, dismissed Sagan's effort as "immoral". A dissenting member of the critics' prize jury fretted that Bonjour Tristesse would "deal a fatal blow to the image of young French women in the eyes of foreigners".
In Sagan's view, the disapproval could be explained in terms of the codes of a still predominantly Catholic country. "It was inconceivable that a young girl of 17 or 18 should make love, without being in love, with a boy of her own age, and not be punished for it," she wrote 30 years later. "People couldn't tolerate the idea that the girl should not fall madly in love with the boy, and not be pregnant by the end of the summer. It was unacceptable, too, that a young girl should have the right to use her body as she will, and derive pleasure from it without incurring a penalty." The scandal's lure proved irresistible; within the first two years, according to the publisher, more than 350,000 copies were sold in France alone.
Sagan had much to learn, and she learned fast. Soon she would come to detest the predictable nature of the articles that flooded the pages of newspapers and magazines, and the inevitable suggestion that Cécile was, in fact, herself. "I don't search for exactitude in portraying people," she would tell the Paris Review. "I try to give imaginary people a kind of veracity." Other critics suggested that so knowing and polished a book must have been written by a much older writer, probably a man, and had been published under the name of a teenaged girl simply to create a stir.
She was now a celebrity. Heads turned and conversation stopped when she entered a restaurant. Elle magazine sent her to write pieces from New York and Capri. And as the money rolled in, so it spilled through her fingers. She took a Left Bank apartment and bought a powerful Jaguar XK140 convertible. Her old friends were joined by new ones, and when the bill arrived it was invariably she who paid. "She fed and watered everyone," Gréco remembered.
Her studies abandoned, she took two years to produce a follow-up. Un Certain Sourire (A Certain Smile) depicted a 20-year-old Sorbonne student – once again, a year younger than the author's actual age – drawn into an affair with her boyfriend's uncle. The assurance of the third-person narrative demonstrated that its predecessor had been no fluke.
By that time Britain and the US had caught up with the phenomenon. An English edition of Bonjour Tristesse, translated by Irene Ash, was published by John Murray in 1955, followed by a Penguin paperback. Last year Penguin's current editors saw fit to commission a new translation from a former lecturer in French literature at Glasgow University, who had noticed Ash's omission of more than 100 lines of Sagan's text, including passages dealing with physical intimacy, and wanted to restore them, as well as to spare us such archaisms as "cad", "cavil" and the now almost obsolete usage of "gay" (a word Sagan made clear, writing late in her life about her friendship with Tennessee Williams, that she preferred to employ for its original meaning).
Readers can judge for themselves whether the short opening sentence of the book's second paragraph – "Cet été-là, j'avais dix-sept ans et j'étais parfaitement heureuse"– is better rendered by Ash's "That summer I was seventeen and perfectly happy" or the version that supercedes it: "In the summer in question I was seventeen and perfectly happy." The new translator is already working hard to take some of the spring out of the teenage author's step.
Sagan was at work on her fourth novel, the superlative Aimez-vous Brahms, in which the subtle portrayal of a 39-year-old woman made it seem that the author had gathered 20 years' worth of emotional experience in five years as a published writer, when Otto Preminger's film of Bonjour Tristesse was released in 1958. With David Niven and Deborah Kerr as the adult leads and the 19-year-old Jean Seberg as Cécile, all of them acting away furiously, the result is devoid of the novel's emotional shading. Today we can only wonder regretfully what the young Louis Malle or François Truffaut, with a French cast, might have made of it.
By that time, too, Sagan had survived near-fatal injuries from a crash in her new Aston Martin. This was perhaps the first public sign that her life would not be one of uncomplicated happiness. Soon after her recovery she married the first of her two husbands, an editor 20 years her senior. They were divorced within two years. The second marriage, to an American artist, lasted only 11 months but produced a son, Denis, now in his 50s. Later there would be several significant affairs with both men and women, including a 10-year relationship with Peggy Roche, a fashion stylist. François Mitterrand, then president, was a regular dinner guest at their Paris apartment.
Whisky, cocaine and a gambling addiction had been her companions in success, eventually joined during her personal and professional decline by heroin, yet another drain on rapidly diminishing resources. The flicker of a revival came in 1984 when she published Avec Mon Meilleur Souvenir (With Fondest Regards), a collection of beautifully evocative profiles and essays. But Roche's death from pancreatic cancer in 1991 appeared to mark the end of a period of genuine contentment; soon Sagan's occasional television appearances presented a disturbing figure, emaciated and distrait. Eventually she shut herself away in the country house at Equemauville, near Honfleur, where she had first hosted parties in the 1960s.
All her money had gone. Her friends, watching helplessly as she destroyed herself, found their attempts to reach her on the telephone deflected by a housekeeper. When she died of a pulmonary embolism in a Honfleur hospital on 24 September 2004, aged 69, she left debts of around €1m.
Many years earlier she had given the blue exercise book in which Bonjour Tristesse had been written to a friend for safe-keeping. When that friend predeceased her, she discovered that it had disappeared. The incident received a mention in Derrière l'Epaule, the (sadly untranslated) collection of autobiographical fragments that became the last of her books to be published during her lifetime. "Another good thing gone," she wrote. Reported by guardian.co.uk 19 hours ago.
She took the title from a poem by Paul Éluard and her nom de plume from Proust. Years later, Brigid Brophy would declare that she wrote with "a pen saturated in French literature". But 60 years ago , the publication of a first novel by an 18-year-old author had France's literary establishment in uproar. As a slender volume called Bonjour Tristesse flew off the shelves, Françoise Sagan became a scandalous success, the echoes of which would prove impossible to silence.
Over the course of a long and eventful career, Sagan would go on to produce 20 novels, three volumes of short stories, nine plays, two biographies and several collections of non-fiction pieces on places, things and people she loved. But so powerful was the impact made by Bonjour Tristesse, and so profound the disturbance it provoked in French society, that it remains easily her best-known work.
This short novel of barely 30,000 words is a story told by Cécile, a 17-year-old girl holidaying on the Côte d'Azur with her widowed father, a roué who has brought along his young girlfriend. The daughter is exploring her own first sentimental adventure, a swiftly consummated romance with a handsome law student, when the unexpected arrival of an older woman, a friend of her late mother, disrupts the self-indulgent haze of high summer. First the newcomer takes charge, ordering Cécile to terminate her romance in order to stay indoors and do her homework. Then she and the father fall in love. To prevent their marriage the daughter devises an ill-fated plot in which the pretence of an affair between her boyfriend and the father's dumped girlfriend is intended to provoke jealousy and restore the status quo ante.
The seemingly amoral tone brought celebrity and notoriety to Sagan, who was born Françoise Quoirez in Cajarc, a town in the Lot valley, to bourgeois parents who also kept an apartment in Paris. The youngest of three children, she was a habitual rule-breaker at her Catholic school. In the view of her friend Juliette Gréco, she never really grew up: "She was always 12. She did what she wanted."
A voracious reader since infancy, she adored Proust, Stendhal, Gide and Camus. But in the summer of 1953 she had to forego the usual family summer holiday by the sea in order to attend a crammer in Paris to prepare for a retake of her baccalaureat. Not much studying was done, although she passed the exam that October and enrolled at the Sorbonne. She had acquired the habit of spending several hours a day in a nearby cafe, writing in a blue exercise book. In the evenings she would go to Saint Germain-des-Prés to meet her friend Florence, daughter of the writer and future culture minister André Malraux, and to spend her pocket money listening to the great American jazz clarinettist Sidney Bechet at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier.
"I had a strong desire to write and some free time," she told Blair Fuller and Robert Silvers, who interviewed her for the Paris Review shortly after she became famous. "Instead of leaving for Chile with a band of gangsters, one stays in Paris and writes a novel. That seems to me a great adventure."
The test, she said, was not to produce a great work of literature but to see if she had the willpower to finish a novel at all. After two or three months her manuscript was complete, and on 4 January 1954 she dropped it off at the offices of a publisher, René Julliard, in the Rue de l'Université. Beneath the title and her name, she typed her date of birth: 21 June 1935. Within a few days a telegram was delivered to the young Quoirez at the family apartment on the Boulevard Malesherbes: "Prière de rappeler maison Julliard urgent."
The contract, negotiated with parental approval, authorised an advance of 50,000 francs: a doubling of the first offer, amended by hand. So, at her parents' request, was the author's name. Given a few minutes to chose, she remembered A la Recherche du Temps Perdu and renamed herself after Proust's Princesse de Sagan.
In discussions with Julliard, several alternative endings were attempted. One of them omitted the fatal accident that brings the tainted summer idyll to an end and propels the protagonists into the next phase of their lives, foreshadowed in the final version by a short concluding chapter suffused with a youthful acceptance of melancholy more reminiscent of F Scott Fitzgerald than of her French literary heroes.
Success was immediate and immoderate. In the month of publication, Paris-Match called her "an 18-year-old Colette". Within weeks she had won the important Prix des Critiques, and acclaim was arriving from surprising quarters. The 68-year-old François Mauriac, the reigning Nobel laureate, wrote about her on the front page of Le Figaro. "The literary merit explodes from the very first page and is beyond dispute," he exclaimed. Fanning the flames from the other side of the bonfire, the chief literary critic of Le Monde, the poet and novelist Émile Henriot, dismissed Sagan's effort as "immoral". A dissenting member of the critics' prize jury fretted that Bonjour Tristesse would "deal a fatal blow to the image of young French women in the eyes of foreigners".
In Sagan's view, the disapproval could be explained in terms of the codes of a still predominantly Catholic country. "It was inconceivable that a young girl of 17 or 18 should make love, without being in love, with a boy of her own age, and not be punished for it," she wrote 30 years later. "People couldn't tolerate the idea that the girl should not fall madly in love with the boy, and not be pregnant by the end of the summer. It was unacceptable, too, that a young girl should have the right to use her body as she will, and derive pleasure from it without incurring a penalty." The scandal's lure proved irresistible; within the first two years, according to the publisher, more than 350,000 copies were sold in France alone.
Sagan had much to learn, and she learned fast. Soon she would come to detest the predictable nature of the articles that flooded the pages of newspapers and magazines, and the inevitable suggestion that Cécile was, in fact, herself. "I don't search for exactitude in portraying people," she would tell the Paris Review. "I try to give imaginary people a kind of veracity." Other critics suggested that so knowing and polished a book must have been written by a much older writer, probably a man, and had been published under the name of a teenaged girl simply to create a stir.
She was now a celebrity. Heads turned and conversation stopped when she entered a restaurant. Elle magazine sent her to write pieces from New York and Capri. And as the money rolled in, so it spilled through her fingers. She took a Left Bank apartment and bought a powerful Jaguar XK140 convertible. Her old friends were joined by new ones, and when the bill arrived it was invariably she who paid. "She fed and watered everyone," Gréco remembered.
Her studies abandoned, she took two years to produce a follow-up. Un Certain Sourire (A Certain Smile) depicted a 20-year-old Sorbonne student – once again, a year younger than the author's actual age – drawn into an affair with her boyfriend's uncle. The assurance of the third-person narrative demonstrated that its predecessor had been no fluke.
By that time Britain and the US had caught up with the phenomenon. An English edition of Bonjour Tristesse, translated by Irene Ash, was published by John Murray in 1955, followed by a Penguin paperback. Last year Penguin's current editors saw fit to commission a new translation from a former lecturer in French literature at Glasgow University, who had noticed Ash's omission of more than 100 lines of Sagan's text, including passages dealing with physical intimacy, and wanted to restore them, as well as to spare us such archaisms as "cad", "cavil" and the now almost obsolete usage of "gay" (a word Sagan made clear, writing late in her life about her friendship with Tennessee Williams, that she preferred to employ for its original meaning).
Readers can judge for themselves whether the short opening sentence of the book's second paragraph – "Cet été-là, j'avais dix-sept ans et j'étais parfaitement heureuse"– is better rendered by Ash's "That summer I was seventeen and perfectly happy" or the version that supercedes it: "In the summer in question I was seventeen and perfectly happy." The new translator is already working hard to take some of the spring out of the teenage author's step.
Sagan was at work on her fourth novel, the superlative Aimez-vous Brahms, in which the subtle portrayal of a 39-year-old woman made it seem that the author had gathered 20 years' worth of emotional experience in five years as a published writer, when Otto Preminger's film of Bonjour Tristesse was released in 1958. With David Niven and Deborah Kerr as the adult leads and the 19-year-old Jean Seberg as Cécile, all of them acting away furiously, the result is devoid of the novel's emotional shading. Today we can only wonder regretfully what the young Louis Malle or François Truffaut, with a French cast, might have made of it.
By that time, too, Sagan had survived near-fatal injuries from a crash in her new Aston Martin. This was perhaps the first public sign that her life would not be one of uncomplicated happiness. Soon after her recovery she married the first of her two husbands, an editor 20 years her senior. They were divorced within two years. The second marriage, to an American artist, lasted only 11 months but produced a son, Denis, now in his 50s. Later there would be several significant affairs with both men and women, including a 10-year relationship with Peggy Roche, a fashion stylist. François Mitterrand, then president, was a regular dinner guest at their Paris apartment.
Whisky, cocaine and a gambling addiction had been her companions in success, eventually joined during her personal and professional decline by heroin, yet another drain on rapidly diminishing resources. The flicker of a revival came in 1984 when she published Avec Mon Meilleur Souvenir (With Fondest Regards), a collection of beautifully evocative profiles and essays. But Roche's death from pancreatic cancer in 1991 appeared to mark the end of a period of genuine contentment; soon Sagan's occasional television appearances presented a disturbing figure, emaciated and distrait. Eventually she shut herself away in the country house at Equemauville, near Honfleur, where she had first hosted parties in the 1960s.
All her money had gone. Her friends, watching helplessly as she destroyed herself, found their attempts to reach her on the telephone deflected by a housekeeper. When she died of a pulmonary embolism in a Honfleur hospital on 24 September 2004, aged 69, she left debts of around €1m.
Many years earlier she had given the blue exercise book in which Bonjour Tristesse had been written to a friend for safe-keeping. When that friend predeceased her, she discovered that it had disappeared. The incident received a mention in Derrière l'Epaule, the (sadly untranslated) collection of autobiographical fragments that became the last of her books to be published during her lifetime. "Another good thing gone," she wrote. Reported by guardian.co.uk 19 hours ago.