Françoise Sagan - Bonjour Tristesse and a Certain Smile

It was half past three. I reckoned my father would be asleep in Anne’s arms and that Anne herself would be drifting into sleep, completely fulfilled and lying there in disarray, luxuriating in a warm glow of physical pleasure and pure happiness … I began very quickly to draw up plans, without pausing for a moment to think of myself. I was walking back and forth in my room, going over to the window to look out over a perfectly calm sea lying flat on the sands, then I would come back to the door and turn round again. I planned, I calculated, I gradually overcame all objections. I had never realized how agile the mind can be and what leaps it can make. I felt dangerously cunning and, on top of the wave of self-disgust that had engulfed me from the moment of my first exchanges with Elsa, there came a surge of pride, a feeling of being in league with myself and a sense of loneliness.

I need hardly say that all this collapsed when the time came for our swim. I was quivering with remorse in Anne’s presence, I didn’t know what to do to make amends. I carried her bag, I rushed forward to hand her her towelling robe when she came out of the water, I showered her with consideration and friendly remarks. This sudden change of behaviour, coming as it did after my taciturnity of the previous few days, did of course surprise and, indeed, please her. My father was delighted. Anne kept smiling her thanks and replying gaily to me. I remembered Elsa’s exclamation: ‘What a trollop!’ and my response: ‘That’s the very word for it.’ How could I have said that? How could I have endorsed Elsa’s rubbish? Tomorrow I would advise her to leave, having admitted to her that I had been mistaken. Everything would resume as before and I would take that exam of mine after all. The baccalaureate was bound to come in useful. 9

‘That’s so, isn’t it?’

I was addressing Anne.

‘It’s useful to have the baccalaureate, isn’t it?’

She looked at me and burst out laughing. I followed suit, happy to see her so cheerful.

‘You are incredible,’ she said.

It was true that I was incredible, and she would have found me even more incredible if she had known what I had been planning to do! I was dying to tell her, so that she would see just how incredible I was! ‘Just think that I was getting Elsa in on the act – she was pretending to be in love with Cyril and was staying in his house, and we would see them go past in his boat, we would bump into them in the woods or along the coast. Elsa has become beautiful again. Oh, of course, she doesn’t have your beauty, but, you know, she’s got that flamboyant look that makes men’s heads turn. My father wouldn’t have stuck it for long. He has never accepted the idea that a beautiful woman who has once belonged to him might get over him so quickly and, as it were, before his very eyes, especially not with a younger man. So you understand, Anne, even though it’s you he loves, he would have very soon wanted to get her back, to give himself reassurance. He’s very vain, or not very sure of himself, whichever way you like to think of it. Elsa, on my orders, would have done whatever it took. One day he would have deceived you, and you would not have been able to bear that, would you? You are not one of those women who are happy to share. So you would have left, and that was what I wanted. Yes, it’s stupid, I know, I resented you because of Bergson, because of the heat; I imagined that … I daren’t even talk to you about it because it’s all so abstract and ridiculous. Because of the baccalaureate I could have made you fall out with us, you, my mother’s friend, our friend. And it is useful to have the baccalaureate, isn’t it?’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Isn’t it what?’ said Anne. ‘Is it useful to have the baccalaureate?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

All things considered, it was best not to say anything to her. She might not have understood. There were things that Anne didn’t understand. I threw myself into the water in pursuit of my father, I wrestled him, I rediscovered the pleasures of playfulness, of being in the water and of having a clear conscience. Tomorrow I would change over to a different room. I would move into the attic with my schoolbooks. But I wouldn’t take Bergson – let’s not exaggerate! I would do two good hours of study on my own, working away in the silence with the smell of paper and ink. I imagined myself being successful in October, my father’s amazed laughter, Anne’s approval and ahead of me a degree. I would be intelligent and cultured and a bit detached, like Anne. Perhaps I had intellectual potential. Hadn’t I drawn up a logical plan in the space of five minutes? It was despicable, sure, but it was logical. And as for Elsa, I had ensnared her by appealing to her vanity and her sentimentality. She had come just to fetch her case and in the space of a few moments I had wanted her as my prize. It was funny, really, I had got Elsa in my sights, had glimpsed her weak spot and had taken careful aim before speaking. I had recognized for the first time what an extraordinary pleasure it is to be able to probe people, to expose them, to bring them into the light of day and, there, to touch them. I had sought to discover what drove an individual, in the same cautious way as when you go to put your finger on a spring, and the desired response had been immediately triggered. Got you! I had no experience of that. I had always been too impulsive. Whenever I had affected another person, it had always been inadvertently. But I had suddenly now glimpsed the whole marvellous mechanism of human reflexes and all the power of language. What a pity that this had come about in the service of untruth! One day I would love someone with a passionate love and I would seek out a way to him, just like that, cautiously, gently and with trembling hand.

Three

The next day, as I made my way to Cyril’s villa, I felt much less sure of myself intellectually. To celebrate my recovery I had drunk too much at dinner the previous evening and had been more than merry. I had been explaining to my father that I was going to do a literary degree, that I would be associating with learned people and that I wanted to become famous and a real bore. To launch me he would have to use all the tricks of the advertising trade and the scandalmongers. We swapped preposterous ideas and roared with laughter. Anne laughed too, but less loudly and in an indulgent way. At times she stopped laughing altogether, when my ideas about being launched went beyond the boundaries of the literary world, not to say the bounds of decency. But my father was so clearly happy at our being back together again and telling our silly jokes that she said nothing. In the end they put me to bed and tucked me up. I thanked them in a heartfelt way and asked what I would do without them. My father really didn’t know. Anne seemed to have quite strong ideas on that topic but, just as I was begging her to tell me them and she was bending over me, I was overtaken by sleep. In the middle of the night I was sick. Waking up was worse than any previous bad experience of waking up that I had ever had. With my thoughts unfocused and my resolve wavering, I made my way to the pine wood, taking in nothing of the morning sea or the frenzied seagulls.

I found Cyril at the entrance to the garden. He bounded towards me, took me in his arms and clasped me fiercely to himself, murmuring incoherently:

‘My sweetheart, I was so worried … It’s been such a long time … I didn’t know what you were doing or whether that woman was making you unhappy … I didn’t know that I could be so unhappy myself … I sailed past the inlet every afternoon at least once, sometimes twice. I didn’t know I loved you so much …’

‘Neither did I,’ I said.

The fact was that I was both surprised and touched. I was sorry I felt so sick and unable to express my emotion.