Bonjour tristesse

Résumé

Cecile is seventeen. Most of her youth was spent in a convent school, but for the past two years she has lived with her widowed father, a hedonistic forty-year-old with a wandering eye. Cecile has accepted the constantly changing women of their household and cherishes the free-spirited life she shares with her father, including, most recently, a two-month summer vacation at a villa with her father's new mistress, Elsa. The villa is beautiful, Elsa is "rather simple-minded and unpretentious," and Cecile has her own plans for sexual exploration with a "tall and almost beautiful" law student. To Cecile's surprise, however, Anne comes from Paris to join them. Anne, her late mother's friend, is cool, intelligent and restrained; Cecile and her father are exuberant and careless. Cecile expects complications when she realizes that Anne is in love with her father: "All the elements of a drama were to hand - a libertine, a demimondaine, and a strong-minded woman." What unfolds is far from what she imagines. Sympathetic and unsparing, Francoise Sagan takes us into the mind of a precocious seventeen year-old as she attempts to understand and control a world beyond her years.