On the French Riviera, Mediterranean summers, and the melancholy beneath their beauty.
I read Bonjour Tristesse for the first time a long time ago. At university, I studied foreign literature, and French literature was a large part of what I was focusing on at the time. Françoise Sagan was therefore already a familiar name to me.
Her book Bonjour Tristesse has stayed with me for a long time. It is a book I have read several times, and I particularly enjoy reading it during the summer. I think that, more than the plot, what I truly remember and what has always stayed with me is the feeling the book gave me the first time I read it: a sense of deep melancholy and quiet emptiness that is difficult to describe and that, for me, can sometimes be associated with summer.
The setting of the book is probably one of my favorite things about it: the French Riviera, the sea, the heat, and the villa where Cécile spends the summer with her father. It describes a kind of freedom that seems to exist only during summer, when the days are long and there is very little to do besides swim, lie in the sun, go out in the evening, and fall in love. But at the same time, the constant routine of doing the same things every day can sometimes result in a feeling of emptiness.
It is a strange combination because Bonjour Tristesse is, on the surface, filled with so many things I associate with a beautiful Mediterranean summer. And yet there is something melancholic about it almost from the beginning. Even before the summer has really unfolded, we know that we are entering it through a memory of something that has already been lost.
Françoise Sagan Was Barely Older Than Cécile
It is difficult to talk about Bonjour Tristesse without talking about how young Françoise Sagan was when she wrote it.
Born Françoise Quoirez in 1935, Sagan began writing the novel while she was still a teenager, and it was published in France in 1954, when she was eighteen. She took the name Sagan from a character in Marcel Proust and became famous almost immediately.
The novel became an immediate success, but it also caused a scandal in France. François Mauriac famously described the young Sagan in Le Figaro as a “charming little monster,” a description that followed her for years.
Sagan’s young age was also an important part of the attention surrounding the novel. Cécile is seventeen, which means Sagan was writing about a girl only slightly younger than herself. There isn’t the distance we might expect between an adult novelist and a teenage narrator looking at the world with all the selfishness, certainty and contradiction that can come with being very young.
And Cécile is certainly contradictory. She can be intelligent and perceptive one moment and incredibly careless the next. She understands more than she sometimes wants to admit, including the possible consequences of what she is doing. What makes her interesting isn’t necessarily that we like her, but that Sagan allows her to remain complicated.
A Summer on The French Riviera
The novel takes place during a summer Cécile spends in a villa on the French Riviera with her father, Raymond, and his current mistress, Elsa.
Raymond has raised Cécile in a world with relatively few rules. He is charming, wealthy, interested in women and pleasure, and Cécile adores him. Their relationship has an ease to it that is central to the world of the novel. Neither seems particularly interested in judging the other. Cécile spends her days swimming, lying in the sun and seeing Cyril, a young man staying nearby. There is something wonderfully unstructured about this part of the book. The days seem to move according to the weather, the sea, meals, desire and whatever happens next.
This is probably the part of Bonjour Tristesse that has remained most clearly in my imagination. I have always loved books in which the setting becomes almost inseparable from the story, and it is difficult for me to imagine this particular novel taking place anywhere else. The Mediterranean summer isn’t simply a beautiful background. It creates the sense of freedom that Cécile is so desperate to protect.
Then Anne arrives. Anne Larsen is an old friend of Cécile’s late mother, and she is very different from the people Cécile is accustomed to having around her. She is elegant, intelligent and disciplined. She takes Cécile’s studies seriously. She believes in restraint and responsibility. And when Raymond decides to marry her, the entire rhythm of Cécile’s life suddenly seems threatened.
What had been a summer with almost no rules begins to change. That contrast between Anne and the life Cécile shares with her father could easily be reduced to discipline against freedom, but I don’t think it is quite that simple.
Cécile
One of the things I find most interesting about Cécile is that she isn’t completely opposed to Anne.
There are moments when she seems to admire her. She recognizes Anne’s intelligence and composure, and part of her appears to understand the stability she could bring into their lives. At the same time, she cannot tolerate what that stability would require her to give up. Her feelings toward Anne become tangled up with her relationship with her father, her own independence, and perhaps her fear that the particular life she has shared with Raymond is coming to an end. So Cécile decides to interfere.
She draws Elsa and Cyril into a plan intended to make Raymond jealous and break apart his relationship with Anne. The plan succeeds, but in a way that Cécile will not perhaps image. Anne sees Raymond with Elsa, leaves the villa and later drives off a cliff.
Whether her death is an accident or suicide is never resolved with absolute certainty, although Cécile understands the possibility of what has happened.
What is interesting is not only what Cécile does but the fact that she is the person telling us about it. We never really know Anne independently of Cécile. We see her elegance, her severity, her expectations and her relationship with Raymond through the eyes of the girl who eventually decides that she needs to get rid of her.
It creates an uncomfortable closeness between Cécile and the reader. We understand her reasoning because she is the one giving it to us. We see the summer as she sees it. We experience Anne’s arrival as a disruption because Cécile experiences it that way. At the same time, Cécile’s own narration reveals how conflicted she is. She is not completely against Anne, and there are moments when she seems aware that what she is doing is wrong, even as she continues with her plan. of hesitation in Cécile’s narration to make us aware that even she knows the story isn’t quite as simple as she would sometimes like it to be.
Bonjour Tristesse
The title has always seemed particularly beautiful to me.
Bonjour Tristesse. Hello sadness.
Sagan borrowed it from Paul Éluard’s poem À peine défigurée, which contains the movement from Adieu tristesse to Bonjour tristesse, goodbye sadness, hello sadness. It is such a simple phrase, but it captures something about the novel that is difficult to explain. At the beginning, Cécile describes experiencing a strange melancholy but hesitates to give it the more serious and beautiful name of sadness. That hesitation frames everything that follows.
What exactly is she feeling? There is grief but grief doesn’t seem to explain all of it. There is guilt, although Cécile never performs the kind of repentance we might expect from her. There is also boredom, emptiness and the knowledge that something has changed even as she and Raymond eventually return to a life that looks similar to the one they had before Anne arrived.
And the summer setting makes everything more melanchonic I think. There is something inherently temporary about summer. You can know that while you are living it and still behave as though it will continue forever. The long afternoons, the heat, the sea and the lack of routine create their own little world, but eventually that world has to end.
Cécile spends much of the novel trying to prevent exactly that from happening. She wants to keep the life she has with Raymond. She wants the freedom of the villa and Cyril and the sea. She wants pleasure without having to think too much about what comes afterward. But by trying so desperately to preserve that summer, she destroys it.
After Anne’s death, Cécile and Raymond can return to their old habits, but they cannot really return to the people they were before. The summer survives as a memory, and the freedom Cécile wanted so badly no longer feels quite the same.
I think this is where some of the nostalgia I have always associated with Bonjour Tristesse comes from. The beauty of the novel and its sadness aren’t really separate from each other. The Riviera is beautiful partly because we encounter it as something temporary, and eventually as something remembered.
A Novel Without a Verdict
When Bonjour Tristesse appeared in 1954, much of the scandal surrounding it came from Cécile herself.
She is seventeen. She has a sexual relationship without the novel turning it into a cautionary tale. She manipulates the adults around her. Her actions contribute to an enormous tragedy, and yet Sagan never gives us the kind of clear moral reckoning that would make the story easier to digest. The absence of a moral closure seems deliberate.
Sagan later resisted attempts to impose a moral message on her fiction. In an interview with The Paris Review, she spoke about the novelist’s responsibility in aesthetic rather than moral terms and said that Bonjour Tristesse began simply with the idea of the girl.
I find that particularly interesting because there is a temptation, especially when reading the novel today, to decide what Cécile is supposed to represent.
The book can certainly invite a feminist reading. A teenage girl in a novel published in the 1950s is given sexual desire, agency, selfishness and a complicated interior life without being reduced to a lesson about how a young woman should behave. Coming only a few years after Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, it is easy to understand why the novel has been considered in relation to changing ideas about female freedom.
But Sagan herself resisted being turned into a moral spokesperson, and I think something would be lost if Bonjour Tristesse were reduced to that interpretation alone. The novel doesn’t tell us that Cécile is right. It doesn’t tell us that Anne is wrong. It doesn’t even allow us to know Anne particularly well.
Instead, we remain inside Cécile’s version of what happened, aware of what she has done and still strangely close to her.
Maybe that is what was so unsettling about the novel when it appeared. Sagan doesn’t give the reader the comfort of a final moral judgment.