Francoise Sagan:With the death of the writer Françoise Sagan, at 69, one of the last links with the famous French intellectual scene of St Germain-des-Près has disappeared.
She was part of that 1950s' firmament which included the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the singer Juliette Greco, jazzman Boris Vian - and a young politician called François Mitterrand. They would all meet up in the jazz cellars of Paris's Left Bank. Sagan's place among them derived from her sensational leap to fame in 1954, with the publication of her first novel Bonjour Tristesse, written when she was 18.
One half of France was shocked by the story of 17-year-old Cécile, a bright lycéenne from a "good" family - as one said at the time - studying in a bored way for her baccalauréat, and dreaming that a Mediterranean holiday with her father will bring sexual initiation and fun. Faced with attempts by her father's mistress to take her and her father in hand, she plots to get rid of the mistress. This, after all, was Catholic France in the days before the pill; sex was supposed to be within marriage, and girls did not speak their mind.
The other half of France, however, was seduced by the audacity and hedonism of it all, by the heroine's survival kit of ennui in the face of tragedy, and by Sagan's ability to project herself so completely in her writing.
What a charming little monster, said the ageing François Mauriac, a great chronicler of the bourgeoisie. Gen de Gaulle was perplexed by the book, and struck by the author's air of social respectability. Bonjour Tristesse became a bestseller, with sales of over 500,000 copies in France in its first year.
Sagan went on to write more than 30 other novels. These included Un Certain Sourire (1956), Aimez-vous Brahms? (1959), Chateau en Suède (1959) and Le Chien Couchant (1980). In 1984, she produced Avec Mon Meilleur Souvenir, a portrait of writers and others with whom her path had crossed. Her books sold 30 million in France, and millions more worldwide. She also wrote for the theatre and the cinema, for example, with Claude Chabrol on the screenplay for Landru.
For much of her life, there was controversy as to whether Sagan's writing was "literature" or "sub-literature". The décor of casinos, fast cars, racehorses, marriages and divorces, penniless aristocrats and idle rich, young girls and older men, which fill so many of her novels, led one critic in 1959 to call her "a luxury hotel existentialist".
This was to be contrasted with "real" existentialists - like Sartre - struggling with ideas of man as a self-creating being, making the choices or existential "leaps" which defined their lives.
Sagan responded coolly by claiming that the rich were all she knew. "It would be bad form for me to describe people I don't know and don't understand," she once said. "Think about it. Whiskey, Ferraris and gambling; aren't they rather more amusing than knitting, housekeeping and one's savings." "Anyway," she added, and this was typically ironic, "I would have been the last person to have written convincingly about that."
It came out convincingly when she added: "All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me."
Along with her modesty, and her capacity to be gracefully ironic, Sagan was a good friend. Sartre became a friend in the last years of his life, and she wrote a wonderful portrait of him.
But she was, first and foremost, a serious writer. As she said much later: "I dreamt of being a writer once I started to read. I started to write Bonjour Tristesse in bistros around the Sorbonne. I finished it, I sent it to editors. It was accepted. It was not bad. It was an honest job. But I know how to read. I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place."
Time has been kind to Sagan as a writer, and her qualities have been recognised. Today, Bonjour Tristesse figures in collections of the world's classic literature. Contemporary critics see a quality and a unity of her work which could touch the heights of tragedy, and is never without irony.
For the media, the apparent similarity of her life - fast cars, lovers, gambling, drink and drugs - and her novels meant that there was always a view that Sagan herself was of more interest than her books - a view she herself refuted with elegance in Les Bleus Dans L'Ame (Bruises In The Soul, 1972).
But her last years continued, for many, to match the notion that real life provided the more interesting plot. Sagan, who by all reports was extraordinarily generous in her heyday, died in Dickensian poverty, after years in miserable health and totally dependent on the charity of her friends. She owed large sums to the tax authorities. Her grand Normandy property had been seized, her racehorses had been sold, the sports cars long gone.
There was a conviction for possession of cocaine in the 1990s. Then, in 2002, a French court found her guilty of defrauding the tax authorities, and linked her to the financial-political scandal involving the petrol giant Elf during Mitterrand's time as president. She was given a one-year suspended prison sentence.
When, shortly after the court case, Sagan appeared on French television, older audiences were shocked to discover just how frail and ravaged she was, how much she needed whiskey to get herself through an interview as she dismissed, in a delicious irony, modern sexually exhibitionist French writers as not being "literature". The young thought her irrelevant.
But Sagan and James Dean had both burst into our lives - the fresh air which was to herald the 1960s.
Sagan was born Françoise Quoirez, at Cajarc, in the Lot. She was educated in convent schools and at the Sorbonne, where she studied literature for a year before leaving, having failed her exams. It was then that she wrote Bonjour Tristesse, in seven weeks during the summer holidays. When she told her father her novel was to be published, he forbade her to use the family name. Characteristically, she took the name Sagan from a character in Proust.
Twice married and divorced, she is survived by her son Denis, from her marriage to the American sculptor Robert Westhoff.
Françoise Sagan (Françoise Quoirez), writer, born June 21st, 1935; died September 24th, 2004