Françoise Sagan - Bonjour Tristesse and a Certain Smile

‘But I thought Françoise was expecting you?’

‘I can sort that out,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to leave Cannes. I don’t want to leave Cannes and I don’t want to leave you.’

‘Neither do I,’ I replied in the same calm, restrained voice.

The same voice as his. For a moment I thought he perhaps loved me but didn’t want to tell me so. It made my heart do a somersault in my chest. Then I remembered that these were only words, that in fact he liked me a lot and that that was enough. We were simply granting ourselves one more happy week. Afterwards I would have to leave him. Leave him? But why would I leave him? For whom? To do what? To go back to that restless boredom, that fragmented solitude of mine? At least, when he looked at me, it was he whom I saw; when he spoke to me it was he whom I tried to understand. It was he who interested me, he whom I wanted to be happy. He, Luc, my lover.

‘That’s a good idea,’ I went on. ‘To tell the truth, I hadn’t given any thought to leaving.’

‘You don’t give thought to anything,’ he said, laughing.

‘Not when I’m with you.’

‘Why? Do you feel young and irresponsible?’

He was wearing a mocking little smile. Had I shown the slightest tendency towards it, he would have quickly eliminated from our relationship any hint of its being a case of ‘the little girl and her marvellous protector’. Fortunately I was feeling perfectly adult. I was feeling adult, and blasé with it.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I feel completely responsible. But responsible for what? For my life? My life is something very pliable, as soft as putty. I am not unhappy. I am content enough, though not really happy. I am nothing, except that I’m fine with you.’

‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘And I’m really fine with you too.’

‘So let’s do some satisfied purring.’

He broke into laughter.

‘You’re like an angry pussycat as soon as anyone attacks your little portion of the absurd, 21your little dose of daily despair. I don’t care about making you “purr”, as you say! Nor do I care about your being blissfully happy with me. I would find that boring.’

‘Why?’

‘I would feel alone. That’s the one thing about Françoise that frightens me: when she is beside me, saying nothing, and is happy like that. On the other hand, it’s very satisfying, sexually and socially, to make a woman happy, even if you ask yourself why.’

‘So basically it’s fine,’ I said, straight out. ‘There is Françoise whom you make happy and there is me whom you’re going to make just slightly unhappy in the autumn.’

I had no sooner uttered those words than I regretted them. He turned to me.

‘You, unhappy?’

‘Not unhappy,’ I replied, smiling, ‘just a little disoriented. I’ll have to find someone to take care of me and no one else will be as good at it as you are.’

‘Be sure not to tell me about it,’ he said angrily.

Then he changed his mind.

‘Actually, yes, do tell me about it. Tell me everything. If a certain person is unpleasant to you, I’ll thrash him. If not, I’ll speak well of him to you. In short I’ll be a real father to you.’

He took my hand, turned it over and kissed the palm gently and at length. I laid my free hand on the back of his neck. He seemed very young, very vulnerable and very kind, this man who had offered to take me on an escapade that had no future and where no sentimentality was involved. He was honest.

‘We’re honest people,’ I said sententiously.

‘We are,’ he replied, laughing. ‘Don’t smoke your cigarette like that, it does nothing to make you look like an honest woman.’

I drew myself up in my polka-dot dressing gown.

‘Well, am I an honest woman? If so, what am I doing in this sick, luxury hotel, in this courtesan’s get-up, with someone else’s husband? Am I not entirely typical of those delinquent young ladies from Saint-Germain-des-Prés 22who break up marriages without a second thought?’

‘Yes, you are,’ he said remorsefully. ‘And I’m the husband, up to now a model husband, who has been led astray by his senses, I’m the sucker, the unfortunate sucker. Come here …’

‘No, no. I’m refusing you, I’m sending you packing in the most despicable way. Having lit the fires of lechery in your veins, I am refusing to quench them. So there!’

He collapsed on to the bed with his head in his hands. I sat down beside him, solemnly. And when he raised his head again I fixed him with a harsh stare.

‘I am a dangerous woman.’

‘And what am I?’

‘You are a wretched human reject who was once a man … Luc! One more week!’

I threw myself down next to him, I entwined my hair in his. He was burning yet cool against my cheek. He smelt of the sea and salt.

I was on my own, and quite happy to be so, in a deckchair in front of the hotel, facing the sea. On my own except for a few elderly English ladies. It was eleven o’clock in the morning and Luc had had to go to Nice to do various complicated things. I rather liked Nice, at least the shabby side of Nice, between the station and the Promenade des Anglais. 23But I had declined to go with him because I had suddenly wanted to be on my own.

So there I was on my own, yawning, exhausted through lack of sleep, and feeling wonderful. I couldn’t light my cigarette without my hand trembling a bit as it held the match. The September sun, not giving out much warmth, caressed my cheek. For once I felt very good about myself. ‘We only feel good when we’re tired,’ Luc used to say, and it was true that I was one of those people who only feel good when they have killed off that part of themselves that is truly alive, that is demanding and full of care, that part of them that asks the question: ‘What have you made of your life and what do you want to make of it?’ to which I could only reply: ‘Nothing.’

A very handsome young man went by; I looked him up and down a bit with what seemed to me marvellous indifference. Good looks, generally speaking, and to some extent at least, made me feel rather embarrassed. They seemed somehow indecent and beyond my reach. The young man was pleasant to look at but didn’t seem real. Luc cancelled out other men. By contrast, I did not cancel out other women for him. He took pleasure in looking at them, even without passing comment.

Suddenly I saw the sea only through a mist. I felt myself suffocating. I put my hand to my forehead and found it bathed in sweat. The roots of my hair were soaked through. A drop of sweat was slowly running down my back. Death was probably nothing more than this, a blue mist and a gentle sense of falling. If I could have died there and then, I would not have put up a struggle.

I seized on those words as they brushed up against my conscious mind and before they could tiptoe away and elude me: ‘I would not put up a struggle.’ And yet there were things that I loved greatly: Paris, certain smells, books, love and my present life with Luc. My intuition told me that there was probably no one I would be better off with than Luc, that he had been meant for me from all eternity and that, without a doubt, fate was involved when people met. My destiny was for Luc to leave me and for me to start all over again with someone else, which I would do, of course. But I would never again feel the same way with anyone else as I did with him: so not alone, so tranquil and with a sense of holding back so little. Only, he was going to go back to his wife, he was going to leave me to my room in Paris, to interminable afternoons, to fits of despair and to liaisons that wouldn’t work out. I began to snivel quietly out of self-pity.

After three minutes of this I blew my nose. Two deckchairs away from me an elderly Englishwoman was staring at me, not with compassion, but with a curiosity that made me blush. I looked at her attentively. For a moment I was overcome with incredible respect for her. She was a human being, another human being. She was looking at me and I was staring back at her, in the sun, as if both of us were dazzled by a kind of revelation: two human beings not speaking the same language and looking at each other in mutual astonishment. Then she got up and limped off, leaning on her stick.