Bonjour Tristesse & a Certain Smile Read online

  Françoise Sagan

  * * *

  BONJOUR TRISTESSE AND A CERTAIN SMILE

  Translated and with Notes by Heather Lloyd

  With an Introduction by Rachel Cusk

  Contents

  Introduction

  BONJOUR TRISTESSE

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  A CERTAIN SMILE

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Translator’s Note

  Notes

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  BONJOUR TRISTESSE AND A CERTAIN SMILE

  Françoise Sagan, born Françoise Quoirez in 1935, was the daughter of a prosperous industrialist. She was only eighteen and had failed her foundation-year examinations at the Sorbonne when she completed her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse. For its publication in 1954 she replaced her original surname by a nom de plume taken from Proust’s character the Princesse de Sagan. As a coming-of-age novel, Bonjour Tristesse was a huge succès de scandale. The fact that it had been written by a young woman of impeccably bourgeois credentials was also a source of fascination to the French public and, as well as attracting critical acclaim, Sagan rapidly gained celebrity status. Her eagerly awaited second novel, A Certain Smile, followed in 1956. Sagan’s other works of fiction include Those Without Shadows, Aimez-vous Brahms …?, La Chamade, The Heart-Keeper, Sunlight on Cold Water, Scars on the Soul, The Unmade Bed, The Painted Lady, The Still Storm, Painting in Blood, Silken Eyes and Incidental Music. She also wrote for the theatre and produced several collections of personal reminiscences. Her work has been widely translated. Françoise Sagan died in 2004.

  Heather Lloyd divides her time between Scotland and south-west France. She was previously Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow where she taught French literature of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. As well as a study of Bonjour Tristesse, she has published work on Françoise Sagan as an incarnation of literary celebrity.

  Rachel Cusk was born in Canada in 1967. After spending much of her childhood in Los Angeles, she finished her education in England, reading English at New College, Oxford. Her much praised debut novel, Saving Agnes, won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1993.This was followed by The Temporary (1995); The Country Life, which earned the 1997 Somerset Maugham Award; A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001); The Lucky Ones, shortlisted for the 2003 Whitbread Novel Award; In the Fold (2005); Arlington Park (2006), shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction; The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (2009); and The Bradshaw Variations (2009). In 2003 Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of twenty Best of Young British Novelists. Her most recent book is Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012).

  Introduction

  New readers are warned that the introduction reveals details of the plot.

  It is one of the ironies of the writer’s predicament that self-expression can sometimes become fate. The fiction lays a fetter on the life. To the reader, as often as not, it will all seem to be part of the same story. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, virtually described his own funeral in The Great Gatsby. Albert Camus, more eerily, foretold precisely the manner of his death in La Chute. Vaguely, the reader comes to see the writer as nothing more than one of his or her own characters: the suspicion that literature occurs entirely within the bounds of personality is confirmed. A kind of disappointment afflicts our feelings about writers, as it does not those about other artists. It is as though they, with their mortal grasp on the faculty of imagination, have crushed our illusions about human destiny. They have described existence, but they have failed to transcend it. They have failed to provide us with a happy ending.

  The obituaries that followed Françoise Sagan’s death in 2004 were full of the sense of this failure. She had become, we were told, a tragic, pitiable figure: destitute, isolated, tainted by scandal and alcoholism. She had, of course, produced many books, but none as successful and hence as troubling to history as her first, published when she was eighteen. In that book, Bonjour Tristesse, she described the hedonism and amorality of youth, the hedonism and amorality of well-heeled French intellectuals, the hedonism and amorality of post-war Europe on the cusp of the sixties. Not surprisingly, it was the hedonism and the amorality of her life that interested the obituary-writers. For there it was, her fetter, her fate: from this slender, misunderstood novel, and from its young heroine Cécile, Françoise Sagan never escaped. Bonjour Tristesse concludes with a fatal car accident, and three years after its publication Sagan, whose love of dangerous driving invariably forms part of the legend of her life, received severe head injuries when her Aston Martin crashed at high speed. The disappointment among the obituary-writers that the author did not submit then and there to her fictional destiny is palpable.

  If there is hedonism, if there is amorality in Bonjour Tristesse, then it is of a most artistically proper kind. Morality, and its absence, is the novel’s defining theme: in this sense Sagan is far more of a classicist than her Existentialist brethren Sartre and Camus. Certainly, she concerns herself with the twentieth-century problem of personal reality, of the self and its interaction with behavioural norms, but in Bonjour Tristesse those norms are as much psychical as societal. Cécile, a motherless seventeen-year-old whose permissive, feckless father has provided the only yardstick for her values and personal conduct, offers Sagan a particularly naked example of the human sensibility taking shape. Cécile’s encounters with questions of right and wrong, and with the way those questions cut across her physical and emotional desires, constitute an interrogation of morality that it is difficult to credit as the work of an eighteen-year-old author. What is the moral sense? Where does it come from? Is it necessary? Is it intrinsic to human nature? Is it possible to lack a moral sense, and if so does that discredit morality itself? These are the questions that lie at the heart of this brief and disturbing novel.

  Cécile and her father, Raymond, have decided to rent a summer villa on the Côte d’Azur for two months. Raymond is bringing his girlfriend, Elsa, along for the holiday, though Cécile is anxious that the reader should not disapprove: ‘I should explain the situation right away, as it could give the wrong impression. My father was forty and had been a widower for fifteen years.’ Notice that it is Raymond who has been bereaved, not Cécile herself: she tells us only that she had been at boarding school until two years earlier. Later, she remembers her father’s embarrassment at her ugly uniform and plaited hair when he came to collect her from the station. It is as though they had not seen each other in the intervening years; as though Cécile, between the ages of two and fifteen, was an orphan. ‘Then, once we were in the car, the
re had been his burst of sudden, triumphant joy because I had his eyes and his mouth and because I was going to be for him the dearest, most marvellous of toys.’

  At the villa the trio are contentedly idle. They swim and sunbathe; they are untroubled by the sense of duty or compunction. Raymond does beach exercises to diminish his belly. The beautiful, vapid, red-haired Elsa badly burns her skin. Cécile, who has recently failed her exams at the Sorbonne, lies on the beach running sand through her fingers: ‘I told myself that it was trickling away like time, and that it was facile to think like that and that it was pleasant having facile thoughts. It was summertime.’ One day, a young man capsizes his sailing boat in their creek – this is Cyril, an ardent, good-looking, conventional university student who offers to teach Cécile how to sail, and is the ideal prospect for a summer romance.

  Chance, impulse, happenstance: this is how life unfolds in the unexamined world of Raymond and Cécile. They do not concern themselves with order and structure, the imposition of the will, the resistance to certain desires and the aspiration towards certain goals. Even Elsa merely submits to the sun’s power to burn her. Is this the correct way to live? The question does not arise; there is no one to ask it. Until, that is, Raymond announces one evening that he has invited a woman named Anne Larsen to stay. The first thing we learn about Anne is that she was a friend of Cécile’s dead mother. With the mother, the whole lost world of order, nurture and morality is powerfully invoked. Anne, it is clear, is the emissary of that world: ‘I knew that, as soon as Anne arrived, complete relaxation would no longer be possible,’ says Cécile. ‘Anne gave things a certain shape and words a certain sense that my father and I preferred to disregard. She set the standards for good taste and discretion and you couldn’t help detecting what these were in her sudden with-drawals, her lapses into pained silence or her use of particular expressions.’ Anne is beautiful, sophisticated, successful; and unlike Cécile, Raymond and Elsa, she is an adult, with an adult’s power of censure and moral judgement.

  Cyril, too, is an adult – he is shocked by Raymond and Elsa’s ménage, and apologizes to Cécile for kissing her. ‘You have no protection against me … For all you know I could be a complete bastard,’ he says in a way that suggests he is anything but that. When Anne arrives, it is clear that she means to take Raymond and Cécile in hand. It is clear, too, that she is in love with Raymond, and that Raymond has reached for her in a bid to escape the pleasurable anomie of his circumstances and the childlike emotional world that he inhabits with Cécile. Elsa is dispatched; the mature, glacial, controlling Anne is installed. Soon she and Raymond announce their plans to marry; immediately, Anne begins to impose her will on Cécile. She orders her to eat more, to study in her room instead of going to the beach, to cease outright her relations with Cyril. Is this love or is it hatred? Is it nurture or is it control? Is it common sense, or the jealousy of a constricted older woman for her uninhibited step-daughter? Is it what Cécile has missed out on by not having a mother of her own, or what her motherlessness has exposed her to?

  Sagan records clearly the effect the change in regime has on Cécile: ‘Yes, that was what I held against Anne: she prevented me from liking myself … because of her I was entering a world of reproaches and guilt … For the first time in my life this “self” of mine seemed to divide in two.’ In one sense, then, morality is a form of self-hatred; it is a wound one assuages by wounding others in precisely the same way. But Anne has done something else – she has stolen Cécile’s father, her one source of unconditional love. Raymond is now ‘growing away’ from his daughter; he ‘was abandoning me and rendering me defenceless’. Cécile the divided girl is forced into immorality: she wishes to get rid of Anne and regain Raymond. Her actual powerlessness gives rise to fantasies of power, and these thoughts cause her to oscillate between hatred and terrible guilt. Here, then, is another indictment of morality, as it is lived by Anne. Anne has fomented violence in Cécile’s pacific nature. By controlling and censuring her, and by interfering with her source of love, she has given her the capacity to do wrong.

  This is a masterly portrait of primal human bonds and needs that cannot but be read as a critique of family life, the treatment of children, and the psychical consequences of different forms of upbringing. One day, Anne locks Cécile in her room, after an argument about schoolwork. At first Cécile panics, and flings herself at the door like a wild animal. Then her heart is hardened, her duplicity sealed: ‘I lay down on my bed and carefully drew up a plan.’ The form her revenge takes occupies the final section of the book, and is almost theatrical in its psychological grandeur. Cécile chooses as her tools her father’s childishness, Anne’s intransigence, Elsa’s vanity and Cyril’s responsible nature, and with them she forges a plot in which each of the four is utterly at her mercy. As a dramatist she experiences, for the first time, complete power over others. Her plot is tragic and bitter, but it plays uninterrupted to its end. Neither right nor wrong, neither conformity nor permissiveness, neither love nor hatred winds up the victor of this moral battle: it is insight, the writer’s greatest gift, that wins.

  Sagan’s second novel, A Certain Smile, is in many ways a sequel to Bonjour Tristesse. Several of the familiar themes are there: the search for and betrayal of the lost mother; the double nature of father/lover and lover/brother; the defence of boredom or nothingness as a moral position more truthful than conventionality. Dominique, a law student at the Sorbonne, meets Luc, the married uncle of her boyfriend, Bertrand. Luc and his gentle, kindly wife, Françoise, take Dominique under their wing, for she is uncared-for and alone, the daughter of distant provincial parents rendered more remote by their unassuageable grief over the death some years earlier of ‘a son’, as Dominique expresses it. Like Cécile, Dominique struggles to maintain the dignity of her own reality, to assert its truth, however abnormal other people might claim to find it. ‘I was fine, and yet, inside of me, like some warm, living creature, there was always that hankering for languor, solitude and sometimes exaltation.

  Luc quickly begins to make advances towards Dominique, even as Françoise is enveloping her in mother-love. Dominique profits from their attention, but can find no moral path through it, for the two forms of affection – sexual and parental – are confused. Luc proposes that Dominique come away with him and have a brief affair, at the end of which he will return to Françoise. Once again, the father-figure is identified with an aberrant morality that results in the girl’s betrayal of the mother-figure. More importantly, he denies her emotional reality: according to Luc, his affair with Dominique can proceed only on the basis that she does not love him. The nature of love is the novel’s central preoccupation. The uncanny maturity that made Sagan’s name as a novelist is most strongly in evidence in her fearless and astute portrayal of love as a psychical event that has its roots in family life and the early formation of personality. To the modern reader, Luc’s conduct towards Dominique has strong undercurrents of abuse: her violent emotional trauma in the aftermath of the affair, and the novel’s exquisitely ambivalent ending in which the subjective death and rebirth of Dominique is described, go far beyond poignancy or even frankness. ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,’ Dominique finds her-self repeating, without knowing why. Sagan’s sense of emotional tragedy is indeed that of the great dramatists.

  ‘Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters,’ Sagan said in an interview, shortly before the publication of A Certain Smile. In Bonjour Tristesse, this structural tenet is illustrated almost sculpturally by Cécile’s description of the three adults standing on the stairs the night Raymond transfers his affections from Elsa to Anne: ‘I recall the scene exactly. Immediately in front of me I was looking at Anne’s golden neck and perfect shoulders. A little lower down stood my father with a dazzled expression on his face and with his hand outstretched. And already fading into the distance was the silhouette of Elsa.’ These two novels, so spare and rigorous, so artistically correct, s
o thorough in their psychological realism, are the highest expression of the triangular purity of their author’s strange and beautiful esthétique.

  Rachel Cusk, 2008

  BONJOUR TRISTESSE

  * * *

  Farewell to sadness

  Sadness hello

  You are written in the lines on the ceiling

  You are written in the eyes that I love

  You are not the same as wretchedness

  For the poorest lips reproach you

  With a smile

  Sadness hello

  Lovers’ bodies love you

  You are the force in love

  And what’s lovely in you looms

  Like some disembodied thing

  Just a look that’s disappointed

  Sadness you are fair of face

  Paul Éluard, La Vie immédiate1

  PART ONE

  One

  This strange new feeling of mine, obsessing me by its sweet languor, is such that I am reluctant to dignify it with the fine, solemn name of ‘sadness’. It is a feeling so self-indulgent and complete in itself that I am almost ashamed of it, whereas I had always looked upon sadness as being a worthy emotion. Before, I did not know what sadness was, though I knew what it was to be languorous, to have regrets and, more rarely, to feel remorse. Today it is as if I am enfolded in some silken thing, soft and enervating, that sets me apart from others.

  In the summer in question I was seventeen and perfectly happy. The ‘others’ were my father and Elsa, his mistress. I should explain the situation right away, as it could give the wrong impression. My father was forty and had been a widower for fifteen years. He was a youthful man, full of life and possibilities, and two years previously, when I had left boarding school, I could not have failed to realize that he was living with a woman, though it took me longer to accept that it would be a different one every six months! But soon his charm, my easy-going new life and my own disposition brought me round to the idea. He was a light-hearted individual, a good businessman, someone who was always curious but who quickly tired of things, and he was attractive to women. I found him an easy person to love, and I loved him dearly, for he was kind, generous, lively and full of affection for me. I cannot imagine a better or more amusing friend. At the start of the summer he was even good enough to ask me whether it would be a nuisance to me during the holidays to have the company of Elsa, his current mistress. I could not but give him an encouraging reply because I knew his need for women and I also knew that having Elsa would not be a problem for us. She was a tall, red-headed girl, a mixture of playmate and sophisticate, who hung out in the cinemas and bars of the Champs-Élysées. She was very sweet, rather dim and quite unpretentious. Besides, my father and I were so pleased just to be going away that we had no objection to anything. He had rented a large white villa on the Mediterranean, a gorgeous, secluded house that we had been dreaming of since the beginning of the warm weather in June. It stood on a promontory overlooking the sea and was hidden from the road by a pine wood. A goat-track led down to a little sun-drenched inlet edged with rust-coloured rocks where the sea swayed back and forth.