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Françoise Sagan (1935-2004) - pseudonym of Françoise Quoirez |
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French novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, who published her first novel, Bonjour tristesse (1954), at the age of 19. It was a succes de scandale. Françoise Sagan's early novels were partially autobiographical. Her dispassionate portrayals of bored, amoral middle-class people made Sagan a new kind of literary celebrity.In her later life, she was twice convicted of cocaine charges. "I leaned against his coat, just at the curve of his shoulder, this masculine shoulder where my head fitted so well. I breathed in the smell of him, which was so very familiar and yet never failed to stir my feelings. Bertrand was my first lover, and it was on his body that I had discovered the odor of mine. It's always through someone else's body that, first warily and then with a rush of gratitude, you discover your own, its lenght, its smell. . . ." (A Certain Smile by Françoise Sagan, translated from the French by Anne Green, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1956, pp. 11-12; originally published in Paris under the title Un certain sourire, 1956) Françoise Sagan was born Françoise Quoirez in the village of Cajarc, in southwestern France, into a well-to-do family. She was the third child of Pierre Quoirez, a prosperous industrialist, and Marie (Laubard) Quoirez. The family moved at the outbreak of World War II to the provinces, living mainly in Lyon; Sagan also spent some time in Switzerland. After the liberation of France in 1944, the family returned to Paris. Sagan was educated at convent schools and attended the
University of Sorbonne. She failed in 1953 the second-year examination
for higher academic degrees and spent several weeks during the summer
writing her first novel, Bonjour tristesse. The title of the
book came from Paul Éluard,
from the second line of 'À peine défigurée' – "Adieu tristesse, /
Bonjour tristesse. / Tu es inscrite dans les lignes du plafond. / Tu es
inscrite dans les yeux que j'aime". At home and by her friends
Sagan was
nicknamed Kiki but her pseudonym she took from a character, the
Princesse de Sagan, in Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things
Past. The thin story of Cécile's first love affair made Sagan famous in France and abroad and was awarded the Prix des Critiques. Sagan travelled in the United States, where she was seen in the company of the writer Truman Capote and the actor Ava Gardner. The Russsian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko listed Sagan as the number one person he wished to meet. Brigitte Bardot was number two. (Françoise Sagan by Judith Graves Miller, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988, p. 5) In September 1957 near Milly-la-Foret her
fondness of fast cars led to an accident in which she almost killed
herself – this time Sagan was driving Aston Martin sports car. She
broke eleven ribs and smashed her legs. Her skull was fractured. But
speed as pleasure remained a part of Sagan's life. "Just as speed is
tied with the idea of risk-taking and chance," Sagan wrote decades
later in her memoirs, "so too is it tied to the joy of being alive, and
therefore the vague death wish of which there is always a trace where
there is joie de vivre." (With Fondest Regards
by Françoise Sagan, translated by Christine Donougher, New York: E.P.
Dutton, 1985, pp. 73-74; originally published under the title Avec mon
meilleur souvenir, 1984) "A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness. In the past the idea of sadness always appealed to me now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism." (Bonjour Tristesse, translated by Irene Ash, London: John Murray, 1955, p. 5) Cécile, the narrator of Bonjour tristesse, is a pampered teenager. She spends her summer holidays in the south of France in a villa. Cécile has failed her exams but Cyril, a young law student, is more interesting than books. Her forty-year-old father, Raymond, is widowed. His latest mistress Elsa is ousted by Anne Larsen, his late wife's friend. Anne works in fashion, and has come to stay for a short visit at the villa. "Everything about her denoted a strong will and an inner serenity which were disconcerting. Her friends were clever, intelligent and discreet; ours; from whom my father demanded only good looks or amusement, were noisy and insatiable." (Ibid., p. 7) To provoke her father's jealousy, she asks Cyril and Elsa to pretend to be in love. Cyril wants to marry Cécile, and accepts the plan. Anne is in love with Raymond. Elsa represents to Raymond his lost years, but he sees in the beautiful and sober Anne a perfect wife and mother to Cécile. The plan works, Anne drives recklessly away from the villa, and dies in a car accident. Cécile returns with her father to Paris and leaves the summer, Cyril, and her youth behind. The world of the rich and beautiful is hollow, and the care-free existence is lost for ever. Irene Ash's translation into English gives readers a cut-down version of Cécile and Cyril's love-making. There are a lot of other cuts, too. Echoes of the novel's melancholic atmosphere – 'Hello Sadness' – can be heard in Simon & Garfunkel's famous song 'The Sound of Silence' from 1964. The story was made into a film in 1957, directed by Otto Preminger, starring Deborah Kerr, David Niven, and Jean Seberg. It became a very big success in France where it was shot in monochrome for Paris and colour for the Riviera. Preminger thought it was a film he liked. "lI rarely say this, but I really don't think the American critics did it justice. You know, it was a very big success in France, and in America the critics said it wasn't French enough, which is very funny." (The Cinema of Otto Preminger by Gerald Pratley, London New York: Zwemmer; A. S. Barnes & Co., 1971, p. 122) At that time Sagan became
known for her drinking and gambling. "I shall live badly if I do not
write, and I shall write badly if I do not live," she has been quoted
as saying. For the cabaret
singer and actress Juliette Greco she wrote the lyrics of
many songs; they had a brief affair. Greco sang the theme of Bonjour
tristesse. For the ballet Le rendez-vous manque (1958,
The Broken Date), Sagan devised the scenario in collaboration with
Michel Magne, with whom she also wrote such songs as La valse
and De toute manière. A Certain Smile (1958), her second book, also was a bestseller. It told about a student's love affair with a middle-aged man. Like Cécile, she is slightly bored of life. She suddenly realizes that "some day I was going to die, that my hand would be gone from this chromium edge and the sun from my sight." (Ibid., p. 9) Another variation of the formula was presented in Aimez-vous Brahms? (1959), in which a young man falls in love with a middle-aged woman. Although Sagan's works about love, marriage and rootless
existence are classified often by male critics as entertainment, her
earlier novels in particular deserve according to feminist critics more
attention. The confessional tone of Bonjou tristesse has been
considered a precursor in such writing by women from more recent years.
Sagan once said that for her "writing is a question of finding a
certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic
progression of three characters." ('Françoise Sagan, The Art of Fiction No. 15,' interviewed by Blair Fuller & Robert Silvers, The Paris Review, Issue 14, Autumn 1956) Her style is classically cool,
restrained, austere, continuing the tradition of the French
psychological novel during the decade when noveau roman made
its breakthrough. When her writing didn't meet her own standards, Sagan felt ashamed. Like in the works of existentialist writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Sagan's lonely characters are disappointed in personal relationships, and try the fill the passage of time with the pursuit of pleasure. The polite everyday speech reveales the aimlessness of their lives. Sagan married in 1958 Guy Schoeller, a publisher, 20 years her senior; they divorced two years later. Her second husband, Robert Westhoff, was an American ceramics designer. They had one son. The short marriage ended in 1963 due to her husband's homosexual activities. Sagan petitioned for divorce on the basis that Westhoff had "left the conjugal home." Westhoff translated the novels La Chamade (1965, La Chamade) and Le Garde du coeur (1968, The Heart-Keeper) into English. Sagan also had long affairs with the writer and journalist Bernard Frank, the fashion stylist Peggy Roche, and Annick Geille, the former editor of French Playboy. In the 1960s Sagan turned from novels to plays, proving her
talent for writing witty dialogue. Her first plays, Castle in Sweden
(1960) and Violins Sometimes (1961), were only moderately
successful. Truman Capote once said that "If Francoise Sagan hadn’t written a book called A Chateau in Sweden, I would certainly write a short story called A Chateau in Puerto Rico. And I may yet." ('New Again: Truman Capote' by Bob Colacello and Andy Warhol, in Interview Magazine, September 15, 2016) After The Purple Dress of Valentine (1963) Sagan
wrote Happiness, Odd and Pass (1964), in which a young army
officer wavers between love and his wish to be killed. In The
Vanishing Horse (1966) Sagan took up the subject of the amorous
conflict between two generations. Sagan worked with the director Claude Chabrol on the script for the film Landru (1963, Bluebeard), a story about a murderous antique dealer; the character had previously inspired Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947). She also co-wrote with Philippe Grumbach the dialogue for Marc Allegret's adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's Le Bal du Comte d'Orget (1969). Le Garde du coeur (1968, The Heart-Keeper)
was a kind of black comedy with Hollywood as the background. In the
story a former film star Dorothy Seymour, now a screenwriter, takes the
guardianships of a beautiful boy, Lewis, who is also a nonchalant
killer devoted to Dorothy. "When a good writer gives us a book that
does not come off, we long to know what the writer intended, probably
to lessen our sense of loss. What was Miss Sagan trying to achieve? A
pop novel? A cartooned comment on America's violence, laced with
romantic and absurd touches?" ('The Heart-Keeper; Heart' by Norma Rosen, The New York Times, November 10, 1968) Scars on the Soul (1974)
was a combination of an essay, autobiography, and novel. Un Orage immobile (1983, The Still Storm), set in 1932 in a small country village, was a tragic love story narrated by a young notary. "Writing or remembering, or both together, have dangerous, or at least painful, consequences." (The Still Storm, translated by Christine Donougher, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1986, p. 14) In Un Chagrin de passage (1994, A Fleeting Sorrow) Sagan follows the thoughts and reactions of a man in his thirties, Paul Cazavel, who learns that he has lung cancer. Paul sees his life and closest relationships, his mistress and former wife, in a new light. In the 1990s Sagan was convicted for using cocaine; her prison
sentences were suspended. "Yes, I take cocaine. Hasn't everybody?"
Sagan defended herself. (Santa Ana Orange County Register in Santa Ana, California, 20 March 1988, https://newspaperarchive.com/. Accessed 1 July 2025) President François Mitterrand claimed
that she was the victim of rightist leaks. Later Sagan's name was
connected to the Elf scandal – she allegedly received money in exchange
for persuading François Mitterrand to intervene on a contract in
Uzbekistan. Sagan claimed that the money had been provided by her
insurance company – her manor house in northern France was partially
destroyed by a fire in 1991. Due to ill health, Sagan was not present
in the Paris court. In 2002 Sagan was sentenced to a suspended prison
sentence for tax fraud. Françoise Sagan died of a blood clot in a lung
in Honfleur, on September 24, 2004. In his statement French President
Jacques Chirac said: "With her death, France loses one of its most
brilliant and sensitive writers – an eminent figure of our
literary life." Sagan's unfinished novel, Les Quatre coins du
coeur, came out in 2019. Her life inspired Diane Kurys' film Sagan
(2008),
starring Sylvie Testud in the title role. "It's a hasty run through a
busy but unexamined life and at the end of it you are no wiser about
her impulses and inspirations as a writer," said the film critic Sandra
Hall. (The Sydney Morning Herald, October 7, 2010). For further reading: Faut-il brûler Sagan? by Flavien Falantin (2023); Sous le soleil de Sagan by Ingrid Méchoulam (2019); Françoise Sagan ou, L'ivresse d'écrire by Valérie Mirarchi (2018); Melinda Camber Porter in Conversation with Francoise Sagan in Paris: Volume 1 Number 6 Melinda Camber Porter Archives of Creative Works by Melinda Camber Porter, Francoise Sagan (2017); Le Paris de Sagan by Alain Vircondelet (2015); Françoise Sagan, ma mère by Denis Westhoff (2012); Françoise Sagan: Une Conscience de Femme Refoulée by Nathalie Morello (2000); 'Francoise Sagan: The Superficial Classic' by A. Cismaru, in World Literature Today. Vol. 67; Number 2 (1993); Sagan by Jean-Claude Lamy (1988); Bonjour Sagan by B. Poirot-Delpech (1988); Françoise Sagan by Judith Graves Miller (1988); Nightbird: Conversations with Françoise Sagan, translated by David Macey, prepared by Jean-Jacques Pauvert (1980); Françoise Sagan ou L'élégance de survivre by Pol Vandromme (1977); 'Sagan, Françoise,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, New York: H. W. Wilson Company (1975); Françoise Sagan précédé de le secret de Françoise Sagan par P.de Boisdeffre by Gérard Mourgue (1959); Le cas Françoise Sagan by Georges Hourdin (1958) Selected works:
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