Françoise Sagan - Bonjour Tristesse and a Certain Smile

Luc came with Françoise to pick us up at a café on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. 11He again seemed tired and rather sad. Once on the motorway he began to drive very fast, almost dangerously. Bertrand succumbed to a fit of terrified giggling and I very soon joined in. Hearing us laugh, Françoise looked round. She was wearing that disconcerted expression that is typical of very nice people who would never dare object to anything, even if their lives depended on it.

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘They’re young,’ said Luc. ‘At twenty you’re still young enough to giggle.’

I don’t know why, but that remark annoyed me. I didn’t like Luc to treat Bertrand and me as a couple, especially not as a couple of children.

‘It’s nervous laughter,’ I said. ‘It’s because you’re driving so fast and we don’t feel very brave.’

‘If you come with me,’ Luc said to me, ‘I’ll teach you to drive.’

It was the first time he had spoken to me in a familiar way in public. ‘That’s maybe what people mean by a bit of a gaffe,’ I thought. Françoise looked at Luc for a second. Then the idea of its being a gaffe struck me as ridiculous. I didn’t generally believe in accidental gaffes that resulted in revelations nor in glances that got intercepted nor in sudden intuitions. There was a sentence in novels that always surprised me: ‘And all at once she realized that he was lying.’

We were arriving at our destination. Luc turned sharply down a little lane and I was thrown against Bertrand. He held me against him firmly and tenderly and I was very embarrassed. I couldn’t bear Luc to see us like that. It seemed crass and, what was really stupid, it seemed to me to be lacking in consideration towards him.

‘You’re like a bird,’ said Françoise.

She had turned around and was looking at us. She had a really kind, sensitive way of looking at you. She hadn’t adopted that knowing, approving expression that a mature woman assumes when faced with a teenage couple. She simply seemed to be saying that I looked quite comfortable in Bertrand’s arms and that I was a touching sight. I was happy enough to look touching since it often saved me the bother of having to believe things or think about things or come up with replies.

‘I’m like a bird that’s old,’ I said. ‘I feel old.’

‘So do I,’ said Françoise, ‘but that’s more understandable.’

Luc turned his head in her direction and gave a little smile. I suddenly thought: ‘They’re attractive to each other. They still sleep together, for sure. Luc sleeps next to her, he lies down alongside her and he loves her. Does he similarly think that Bertrand has my body at his disposal? Does he picture it? Does he feel vaguely jealous about it, as I feel jealous about him?’

‘Here we are at the house,’ said Bertrand. ‘There’s another car here. I fear my mother may have some of her usual guests.’

‘In which case, we’ll go away again,’ retorted Luc. ‘I can’t stand my dear sister’s guests. I know a very pleasant inn not far from here.’

‘Come now,’ said Françoise, ‘that’s enough of being negative. This house is very pleasant and Dominique hasn’t been here before. Come with me, Dominique.’

She took me by the hand and led me off in the direction of a fairly attractive house surrounded by lawns. I followed her, saying to myself that I had in fact nearly played her the very nasty trick of deceiving her with her husband, and yet I liked her very much and would rather do anything than hurt her. Of course, she would never have known.

‘You’ve got here at last!’ came a shrill voice.

Bertrand’s mother was emerging from behind a hedge. I had never seen her before. She gave me the kind of interrogating once-over that only the mother of a young man is capable of when the latter is introducing some girl to her. The predominant impression I received was of someone blonde and rather loud. She immediately began to hover round us, twittering away. I quickly felt overwhelmed. Luc was eyeing her as if she were some sort of catastrophe. Bertrand seemed rather embarrassed, which led me to behave very pleasantly. Eventually, with relief, I found myself in my bedroom. The bed was very high, with coarse sheets, like those from my childhood. I opened my window on to rustling green trees, and an intense smell of wet earth and grass filled the room.

‘Do you like it?’ Bertrand asked.

He seemed both pleased and abashed. It occurred to me that this weekend with me at his mother’s must have been a rather important and complicated occasion for him. I gave him a smile.

‘You have a very pretty house. As far as your mother is concerned, I don’t know her, but she seems nice.’

‘So you don’t dislike it. In any case, I’m just next door.’

He gave a conspiratorial laugh which I joined in with. I rather liked strange houses, black-and-white-tiled bathrooms, big windows and imperious young men. He took me in his arms and kissed me gently on the mouth. I knew his breath and his way of kissing. I had not told him about the young man in the cinema. He would have taken it badly. I was taking it badly myself now. When I looked back on it I was left with a rather shameful memory which had its amusing as well as its disturbing side but which was fundamentally unpleasant. For one afternoon I had been free and full of whimsy; I wasn’t any more.

‘Come and have dinner,’ I said to Bertrand, who was bending forward to kiss me again, his eyes slightly dilated. I liked him to desire me. On the other hand, I didn’t like myself much. I had been adopting by turns the role of free-spirited young thing and of cold-hearted miss whose innocent exterior concealed darker intents – yet this now seemed a performance better suited to a public of aged gentlemen.

Dinner was unbelievably boring. There were indeed some friends of Bertrand’s mother’s there, a talkative, up-to-the-minute couple. When dessert was served, the husband, who was called Richard and was chairman of some board or other, could not resist launching into the usual type of remark:

‘And what about you, young lady? Are you one of those wretched existentialists? 12Honestly, my dear Marthe’ – he was at this point addressing himself to Bertrand’s mother – ‘these disillusioned young people are beyond me. At their age, what the deuce, we loved life. In my day we knew how to enjoy ourselves. We may have got up to some shenanigans but whatever we did, we did light-heartedly, I assure you.’

His wife and Bertrand’s mother laughed in a knowing way. Luc was yawning. Bertrand was working up a speech that wouldn’t get a hearing. With her usual good humour, Françoise was visibly trying to understand why these people were so boring. As for me, it was the umpteenth time that a rosy-complexioned, grey-haired gentleman had subjected me to his robust good sense of humour by mouthing the word ‘existentialism’ with a pleasure that was all the greater for his not knowing what it meant. I did not reply.

‘My dear Richard,’ said Luc, ‘I fear that shenanigans are really only for people of your age – I mean, our age. These young people don’t get up to shenanigans, they simply make love and that’s just as good. For shenanigans you need a secretary and an office.’

The self-styled fun-lover did not respond. The rest of the meal passed without incident and with more or less everyone talking, except Luc and myself. Luc was the only one to be as intensely bored as I was and I wondered if that wasn’t the thing that first made for complicity between us, being both in a way unable to tolerate boredom.

After dinner, as it was mild, we moved out on to the terrace. Bertrand went off to fetch some whisky. Luc advised me quietly not to drink too much.