Françoise Sagan - 'Bonjour, Tristesse'

The rebellious French writer who in 1955 achieved international fame at age 19 with her first novel, "Bonjour, Tristesse," died last Friday in Honfleur, France. She was 69.

By early 1958, the novel had sold 810,000 copies in France and more than a million in the U.S. and had been translated into 20 languages.

She loved gambling, drinking, drugs, and fast cars.

She was twice convicted of narcotics offenses, in 1990 and 1995.

She once told an investigating magistrate, "I believe I have a right to destroy myself as long as it does not harm anyone. If I feel like swallowing a glass of caustic soda, that's my own problem."

She attended the Sorbonne in the early 1950s, failing her crucial year-end examinations in 1953, when she was 17.

She felt she "had to do something" to placate her parents, she recalled, so she sat down and wrote "Bonjour Tristesse" during August of that year.

The book began with what has come to be seen as a vintage Sagan sentence: "A strange melancholy pervades me, to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow."

Her views on romance could be somber. In a 1980 interview, she said, "I think love is like an illness, an intoxication. Sometimes I've been intoxicated for three or four years, but never more. I think that people can be happy together for longer than I used to believe, but I still don't think it can be forever."

[via Eric Pace in the New York Times]