Françoise Sagan - Bonjour Tristesse and a Certain Smile

I left feeling completely demoralized. The new academic year was not off to a good start …

Catherine was waiting for me in my room, sitting on the bed looking tragic. She got up when I came in and held out her hand. I shook it without enthusiasm, and sat down.

‘Dominique, I wanted to apologize. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything to Bertrand. What do you think?’

I had to admire her for asking the question.

‘It doesn’t really matter. It would perhaps have been better if I had told him myself, but it doesn’t really matter.’

‘Good,’ she said, obviously relieved.

She sat down on the bed again, looking pleased and excited.

‘So now, tell me all about it.’

I was speechless, then I burst out laughing.

‘Honestly! You’re priceless, Catherine. First you dispose of the Bertrand issue – right, that’s that done! – and once that problem is out of the way, then on to some juicy details!’

‘Don’t tease me,’ she said, acting the little girl. ‘Tell me everything.’

‘There’s nothing to tell,’ I answered drily. ‘I spent a fortnight on the Côte d’Azur with someone I liked. For various reasons, the story ends there.’

‘Is he married?’ she asked shrewdly.

‘No, he’s a deaf-mute. Now I have to unpack my case.’

‘I’m quite sure that you’ll tell me everything,’ she said.

‘The worst of it is, that’s probably true,’ I thought as I opened my wardrobe. ‘One day when I’m feeling down in the dumps …’

‘Now, about me,’ she continued, as if she were going to announce some great revelation, ‘I’m in love.’

‘Which one is it this time?’ I said. ‘Oh, the latest one, of course.’

‘If you’re not interested …’

But she went on anyway. I began putting my things away, feeling cross. ‘Why have I such idiotic girlfriends?’ I wondered. ‘Luc wouldn’t stand for her. But what has Luc got to do with it? It’s my life, after all.’

‘… So, to cut a long story short,’ she was concluding, ‘I love him.’

‘What do you mean by “love”?’ I asked curiously.

‘I don’t know. Love means thinking about someone, going out with him, preferring him to other people. Isn’t that it?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

I had finished unpacking. I sat down on the bed, disheartened. Catherine came over all sympathetic.

‘Dominique, dear, you’re crazy. You’re not thinking straight. Come out with us this evening. I’ll be with Jean-Louis, of course, and one of his friends, a very intelligent guy who’s interested in literature. It’ll take your mind off things.’

As it happened, I didn’t want to phone Luc until the next day. And then, I was tired. Life seemed to me to be like a dismal vortex with a single stable element glimpsed occasionally at its centre, Luc. He was the only one who could understand or help me. I needed him.

Yes, I needed him. I couldn’t require anything of him but, even so, he was in a sense responsible for me. Above all I mustn’t let him know it. After all, conventions are conventions, even if they make things difficult for people.

‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and see your Jean-Bernard and his intelligent friend. I don’t care about intelligence, Catherine. No, that’s not true, but I only like intelligent people who have a sad streak. Those who can cope with things get on my nerves.’

‘It’s Jean-Louis,’ she protested, ‘not Jean-Bernard. And cope with what?’

‘With that,’ I said theatrically, pointing up through the window to a low sky, all grey and pink, and sweetly, damnably sad.

‘There’s something not right about you,’ said Catherine in a worried voice, and she took my arm as we went down the stairs, watching the steps for me. When all was said and done, I liked her a lot.

The said Jean-Louis was handsome; his good looks had a sort of loucheness about them that was not disagreeable. However, the friend, Alain, was much more shrewd and amusing and had in particular the kind of acerbic intelligence and the insincerity and ability always to be changing his stance that Bertrand did not possess. We weren’t long in leaving Catherine and her suitor, who in any case were displaying their passion with an ardour that was out of place, at the very least in a café, and Alain took me back to my residence, talking about Stendhal 28and literature, which interested me for the first time in two years. He was neither ugly nor good-looking, just nothing special. I was happy enough to agree to lunch with him a couple of days from then, while praying that it would not turn out to be Luc’s free day. Everything was already converging on Luc, everything depended on him and was taking its course whether I liked it or not.

Three

In short, I loved Luc and I quickly came to that conclusion on the first night I spent with him again. It was in a hotel facing the Seine; he was lying on his back after we had made love and was talking to me with his eyes closed. He said: ‘Kiss me,’ and I raised myself up on one elbow to kiss him. But as I bent over him I was filled with a kind of malaise and an unyielding conviction that this face and this man were the only things that counted for me, and that the unbearable pleasure and sense of expectation that kept me hovering over that mouth were indeed the pleasure and the expectation of love. And that I loved him. And I stretched out against his shoulder, without kissing him and with a little moan of fear.

‘You’re sleepy,’ he said, putting his hand on my back and laughing a bit. ‘You’re like a little animal; after love you either go to sleep or you’re thirsty.’

‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘that I really like you.’

‘And I you,’ he said, and he tapped my shoulder. ‘As soon as we don’t see each other for three days you start calling me vous . Why?’

‘Because I respect you,’ I said. ‘I respect you and I love you.’

We both laughed.

‘No, but seriously,’ I went on enthusiastically, as if that brilliant thought had just come into my head, ‘what would you do if I loved you for real?’

‘But you do love me for real,’ he said, with his eyes closed again.

‘I mean, if I couldn’t do without you, if I wanted you to myself all the time …’

‘I would be very worried,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t even be flattered.’

‘And what would you say to me?’

‘I would say: “Dominique, eh … Dominique, forgive me.”’

I gave a sigh of relief. So at least he wouldn’t have had the dreadful reaction of a cautious, conscientious man, and said: ‘I told you so.’

‘I forgive you in advance,’ I said.

‘Pass me a cigarette,’ he said lazily. ‘They’re on your side.’

We smoked in silence. I was saying to myself: ‘So there we are, I love him. This love of mine probably amounts to nothing more than the thought: “I love him.” That’s all it is, but outside of “that”, there is no salvation.’ 29

In fact there had only been ‘that’ the whole week: the telephone call from Luc asking: ‘Will you be free on the night of the fifteenth?’, those words that had come back to me every three or four hours, just as he had uttered them, coolly, but each time causing a diffuse weight of emotion within me to teeter between happiness and a sense of suffocation. And now I was beside him and time was passing, very slowly and in a featureless blur.

‘I’m going to have to go,’ he said. ‘It’s a quarter to five! It’s late.’

‘Yes, it is,’ I said. ‘Is Françoise at home?’

‘I told her I was going out with some Belgians to Montmartre. But the cabarets will be closing now.’

‘What will she say? Five in the morning is late, even for Belgians.’