By Lubna Abdel-Aziz To savour fully the acid flavour of Fame and Fortune, is to embrace its many undesirable surrogates. Wine and whisky, cars and cocaine, lust and liaisons, all Fame's formidable and irresistible companions, succeed to engulf and overwhelm with their foul rack and ruin. Thus began the destructive journey of the surprising rise and fall of a French teenage phenomenon known as Françoise Sagan. It was 1953, WWII was over and a once defeated and humiliated France, rising from the ashes, was revelling and rejoicing in a new age of new freedoms for a new world. The resurgence of all things French, philosophy, art, theatre, film, food, fashion, wine and song charmed and intrigued the rest of the world. When an 18-year-old French student from the Sorbonne dared to write a novel with no constraints or restraints, breaking all the shackles of moral traditional behaviour, the world applauded wildly and enthusiastically. There was never anyone quite like her. She was young, spoiled, idle, and bored. By 15 she was hanging around Paris' cafés and clubs on the Blvd St Michel, "talking about boys, God, and politics". She discovered whisky and kept a bottle hidden in her room. Bedridden following a boating accident in the summer of 1953, and in an attempt to compensate for the failure of her exams at the Sorbonne, she typed out a story of 200 pages in six weeks. She picked the title from a poem by Paul Eluard, which begins: Adieu tristesse Bonjour tristesse By so doing she entered the lofty gilded halls of "Les Auteurs de la Literature Française". It was an immediate "succès de scandale", depicting Cecile, a young girl breaking up her philandering father's recent love affair. It was both shocking and delightful, cynical and outrageous; it struck the right note "perfectly in accord with a moment in time" in post-war Europe. The book was scorned by some as nothing more than a tale of "passionless hedonism" by a bored, amoral, "enfant terrible". Undeniably it was a universal coming-of-age novel about that tremulous troubled time when one is no longer a child, not yet an adult. Her youth was the main ingredient, combined with a sophistication of style, language and subject matter that made Bonjour tristesse an international literary event. She won the Prix de Critiques, 500,000 francs, became a household name and her book became a bestseller in 20 languages. Accolades came from many including François Mauriac who hailed the talent of: "ce charmant petit monstre" (this charming little monster). It also won her a papal denunciation! The choice of title seemed eerily prophetic as Sagan spent the next 50 years slip-sliding away down the rocky road of self destruction. She died 24 September at Honfleur, of a lung blood clot after 69 years of burning the candle at both ends and right through the middle. Sudden wealth, success, publicity and flattery are enough to destroy the meanest men of steel let alone a vulnerable teenager with a voracious appetite for everything life has to offer. She sped through life in her Ferraris, Maseratis, and Aston Martins, followed by a band of the idle rich, dubbed "la bande Sagan", which included Truman Capote, Juliette Greco, Jean-Luc Godard and Roger Vadim. She even wined and dined with the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoire, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, and a young François Mitterand who later became president of France. Now a central figure of the literati and glitterati, she became an icon of the avant-garde movement, epitome of sophisticated stylish living. Says Vanessa Redgrave: "I too began smoking Gauloises and downed whisky and coffee for breakfast." Between jazz clubs, night swims, whisky and cocaine, and a series of lovers, she managed to write a few more best- sellers after Bonjour tristesse -- Un certain sourire and Aimez vous Brahms -- all three made into Hollywood films. "All sins are attempts to fill voids," and Sagan's lonely characters, aimless and idle, pursued every pleasurable sin to fill every pathetic void. She was always fascinated by the "constant loneliness of so many people", she said, "that's not a minor harmless theme". Her feverish life style became more newsworthy than her many books. Following several brushes with death, she survived a serious car crash in 1957 that left her in a coma from a skull fracture. Soon after she married publisher Guy Schoeller, 20 years her senior. The marriage lasted two years. Next she married American sculptor Robert Westhoff. They had a son Denis but the marriage ended after one year. Reviewers became less enthused, less gushing with praise of their "enfant terrible". While she continued down the road to her own private hell with gusto, Sagan never abandoned her writing. She wrote novels, plays, film scripts, television, short stories, newspaper articles, songs, always proving her talent for beautiful prose and witty dialogue, but she never recaptured that first rosy flush of Bonjour tristesse. She wrote nine plays and over 30 novels, most of them best sellers in France. "I have the right to destroy myself so long as I don't harm anyone," but she increasingly became a menace to society as well as herself. Her drug abuse led to a demand by rightwing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen that she be guillotined. Her passion for gambling was so out of control, she urged the Minister of Interior to ban her from casinos. She was convicted for cocaine possession in 1990 and 1995, and for tax fraud in 2001, but her sentences were suspended. "With her death France loses an eminent figure of our literary life," said Jacques Chirac at the death of Sagan. Born Françoise Quoirez 21 June, 1935 in Southwest France, the third and youngest child to Marie and Paul Quoirez, a prosperous industrialist. Tiny and petulant she was nicknamed "Kiki", a troubled child with a stammer that kept her withdrawn from family discussions. Kiki grew up largely in Lyons, but moved with the family to Paris after the war. She attended several convent schools, was expelled from most, but miraculously qualified to study literature at the Sorbonne. After failing her second year entry exam, she started to write. When her book was accepted by publisher René Juillard, her father absolutely refused, that"she sully the family name". Kiki came across "le duc Sagan" in Marcel Proust's � la recherche du temps perdu which she was reading at the time. She adopted the name, and made it a symbol of her generation's rebellion against the establishment. It was pure drama of the 1960s era, "La Dolce Vita" where the charm of the forbidden was doubly desirable. Her gamine looks, matchstick figure, elf face under a mop of cropped hair was the epitome of Parisian radical chic. Fame stuck to her like bees to honey. It was style over substance, lifestyle over responsibility. But despite the hype, Françoise remained remarkably honest about her limitations as a writer and as a person. She turned down membership to the Académie Française and said she recognised the difference between the literary merit of Bonjour tristesse and classic good books. As with all of us, Sagan was punished by her mistakes, not for them. She feared "boredom and tranquillity more than anything", but the price was high. Sagan never managed to exorcise her demons. She tried to recover some of her old edge as a writer with little success. She took a serious interest in political affairs supporting her old friend François Mitterand, but the years of drugs and alcohol had taken their toll and her frailties became more pronounced. She seemed more and more a pathetic embarrassing figure and less and less the ultimate model of chic and sophistication. Most of us have read Bonjour tristesse in our salad days. At best it is a powerful portrayal of youthful angst "forever recounting the rotting of a generation", a mirror to a sea of troubled souls. Sagan's tristesse has now come to an end. In death she may still find "it is the most beautiful adventure yet." It all started with Bonjour tristesse It all ends with Adieu tristesse Paul Eluard French surrealist poet (1895-1952)
