Françoise Sagan - Bonjour Tristesse and a Certain Smile

I stretched, then got up and got dressed. Bertrand was waking up, asking me questions, yawning, running his hands over his cheeks and his chin, complaining about needing to shave. I arranged to see him that evening and went back to my room planning to work, but in vain. It was atrociously hot and getting on for noon. I was due to have lunch with Luc and Françoise. There was no point in starting work for the sake of an hour. I went out again to buy a packet of cigarettes, came back and smoked one, realizing suddenly, as I was lighting it, that I had performed every one of my actions that morning in a state of complete oblivion. For hours there had been nothing driving me but a vague instinct telling me to stick to my routine. There had been nothing, not for a moment. And where would I have found anything? I didn’t set store by the marvellous smile of a fellow human being on the bus, or by the throbbing life of the streets, and I did not love Bertrand. I needed someone or something. I said this to myself almost aloud as I lit my cigarette: ‘Someone or something’, and it sounded melodramatic, but also funny. So, just like Catherine, I had sentimental highs when I loved love and the words relating to love: ‘tender’, ‘cruel’, ‘sweet’, ‘trusting’, ‘excessive’; yet I loved no one. Luc, perhaps, when he was there. But since the previous day I hadn’t dared think about him. I did not like the taste of renunciation that filled my throat when I remembered him.

I was waiting for Luc and Françoise when a strange dizziness took hold of me and sent me rushing to the washbasin. When it was over I raised my head and looked at myself in the mirror. I had had plenty of time to do the calculations. ‘So,’ I said aloud, ‘it’s happened.’ The nightmare that I knew so well for having so often lived through it mistakenly was beginning again. But this time … perhaps it was the whisky of the previous evening and there was really nothing to get worked up about. I was already having a fierce inner debate, while looking at my reflection in the mirror with a mixture of curiosity and contempt. I had very probably been caught out. I would tell Françoise. Françoise was the only person who could help me in the circumstances.

But I didn’t tell Françoise. I didn’t dare. And then at lunch Luc insisted on pouring us drinks, so I forgot about it for a bit and tried to be rational. But how was I to know whether Bertrand, who was so jealous of Luc, had not found this way of keeping me? I reckoned I had all the symptoms …

The day following the lunch ushered in a week of hot weather, it was summer come early, the like of which I would not have thought possible. I walked about the streets, for my room was so hot it was unbearable. I questioned Catherine vaguely about possible solutions to my dilemma, without daring to confess anything to her. I no longer wanted to see Luc or Françoise; they were strong, free individuals. I was as sick as a dog and had bouts of nervous giggling. I had no plans and no strength. By the end of the week I was sure that I was expecting Bertrand’s child and I felt more composed. I was going to have to take some action …

But on the day before the exam I knew that I had been mistaken and that in fact it had been nothing but a bad dream, and I sat the written paper laughing with relief. Quite simply I had thought of nothing else for ten days and it was a miracle for me to rediscover other people. Everything was becoming possible again, things were looking up. Françoise happened to visit me in my room, was horrified at how swelteringly hot it was and suggested that I should go round to theirs to prepare for the oral exam. So I worked on the white rug in their flat, alone, with the shutters half closed. Françoise would come home at around five, would show me what she had bought, would try without much conviction to test me on the syllabus and it would end up with our joking together. Luc would arrive and would join in our laughter. We would go and have dinner on the terrace of a restaurant and they would drop me back at my place. On only one day of that week did Luc get home before Françoise, coming into the room where I was working and kneeling down beside me on the rug. He took me in his arms and kissed me without a word, over my notebooks. It seemed to me as if I were rediscovering his mouth, as if it were the only mouth I had ever known and as if I had thought of nothing else for the past fortnight. Then he told me that he would write to me during the holidays and that, if I wanted, we could meet up somewhere for a week. He stroked the back of my neck and sought my mouth. I wanted to stay leaning on his shoulder like that until night fell, perhaps complaining softly that we did not love each other. The academic year was over.

PART TWO

One

It was a long, grey house. A meadow ran down to the River Yonne, ensconced among its reeds and its creamy currents, the sluggish, green Yonne, overhung by poplar trees and with swallows flying overhead. There was one tree that I especially liked to lie down under. I would go there and stretch out with my feet against its trunk and my thoughts lost in its branches, which I could see high above, swaying in the wind. The earth smelt of warm grass and gave me a feeling of lingering pleasure, along with a sense of my own powerlessness. I knew that landscape in rain and shine. I had known it long before I knew the streets of Paris and the River Seine and before I knew men: it never changed.

With my exams miraculously over and done with, I was able just to read and would then make my way slowly back up to the house for meals. My mother had lost a son fifteen years earlier in somewhat tragic circumstances and ever since had suffered from a depression which had soon become part and parcel of the house itself. Within those walls sadness took on a flavour of pious devotion. My father walked about on tiptoe and carried shawls around for my mother.

Bertrand had been writing to me. He had sent a curious letter, unclear and full of allusions to the last night we had spent together, the evening we had gone to the Kentucky, a night during which, he said, he had been lacking in respect towards me. It hadn’t seemed to me that he had been more lacking in respect than usual and since, as far as that area of our lives was concerned, we had a very straightforward and satisfactory relationship, I had tried at length to work out what he was alluding to, but in vain. It had finally dawned on me that he was trying to introduce into our relationship an element that would ensure a deep sense of collusion between us, a strong eroticism. He was looking for something to bind us together, he was clutching at straws, and for once what he chose to clutch at was something rather base. At first I resented him for complicating what had been the happiest and indeed the purest thing between us, but I did not know that in some cases people would rather look for any explanation, even the worst, than accept the obvious and the banal. And for him, the obvious and the banal was that I did not love him any more. Besides, I knew that it was me he was missing, and no longer us, since there hadn’t been an ‘us’ for a month, and this awareness pained me even more.

As for Luc, there was no word from him during that month, just a very nice card from Françoise to which he had added his signature. I kept repeating to myself with a certain inane pride that I did not love him, the proof being that I was not suffering from his absence. I did not realize that, in order for this to be at all convincing, I should have felt chastened by the fact of my not loving him and not, as I did feel, triumphant. In any case, all these niceties irritated me. I normally had myself so well in hand.

And then I loved that house, although I should have been so bored in it. I was bored, of course, but it was a pleasant kind of boredom, not the boredom that I was ashamed of experiencing when I was with people in Paris. I was very kind and considerate to everyone. I took pleasure in being so. Wandering from one piece of furniture to another, from one field to another, from one day to the next and there being nothing else to do, what a relief that was! Acquiring a kind of gentle tan on my face and body as a result of staying put, waiting, and yet not waiting, for the holidays to be over. Reading. The holidays were one enormous, dull, yellow blur.