On Francoise Sagan’s birthday, revisit Rachel Cusk on the author’s first two novels, “Bonjour Tristesse” and “A Certain Smile,” and the writer’s interrogation of morality in her works.
Photograph by Bert Hardy / Picture Post / Getty
The hedonism and amorality of “Bonjour Tristesse” 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 others of her existentialist brethren, such as Sartre and Camus. Certainly, she concerns herself with the twentieth-century problem of personal reality, of the self and its interaction with behavioral norms, but in “Bonjour Tristesse” those norms are as much psychic as they are societal.
Chance, impulse, happenstance: this is how life unfolds in the world of Raymond and Cécile. They do not concern themselves with order and structure, the resistance to certain desires and the aspiration toward 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.
This is a masterly portrait that can be read as a critique of family life, the treatment of children and the psychic 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. “This was my first contact with cruelty.” Then her heart is hardened, her duplicity sealed: “I lay stretched out, on my bed, and began to plan my revenge.
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