Françoise Sagan - Bonjour Tristesse and a Certain Smile

31. the Bois : Paris boasts two areas of extensive public woodland on its periphery, the Bois de Vincennes on the south-eastern edge of the city not far from the Quai de Bercy, and, to the west, the larger Bois de Boulogne, set on the edge of the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement . The reference to the Bois will be to one of these.

32. ‘Something is rotten … Denmark’ : Dominique quotes in French this jaundiced comment from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet , Act I, Scene 4. In the Denmark of Prince Hamlet, his uncle has married with almost adulterous haste Hamlet’s mother, widow of the late king, so in the play we may fancy we see mirrored a distorted configuration of the foursome in which Dominique has been caught.

33. I woke to hear music … happy : La Nausée ( Nausea ), a novel published by Sartre in 1938, explores the principal character Roquentin’s sense of the perceived gratuitousness and absurdity of existence, while, in its final pages, seeming to suggest some kind of palliative to the human condition to be found in writing and music. As Roquentin is moved by a bad recording of a jazz melody played on a café record player (prefiguring the jukebox music Dominique listens to at the beginning of this novel) so, here, a portion of a work by Mozart heard coming from a neighbour’s radio gives Dominique fresh courage to face life.