Bonjour Tristesse  

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Bonjour Tristesse (in English, Hello, Sadness) is a novel by Françoise Sagan. Published in 1954, when the author was only eighteen, it caused an overnight sensation. The title is derived from a poem by Paul Éluard, "À peine défigurée," which begins with the lines "Adieu tristesse/ Bonjour tristesse...".

The 1958 film Bonjour Tristesse featured Geoffrey Horne, Deborah Kerr, Jean Seberg and David Niven as the lead actors. The music was composed by Georges Auric.

Plot summary

17-year-old Cécile spends her summer in a villa on the French Riviera with her father Raymond and his current mistress, the young, superficial, fashionable Elsa, who gets on well with Cécile. Raymond is an attractive, worldly, amoral man who excuses his serial philandering by quoting Oscar Wilde: "Sin is the only note of vivid colour that persists in the modern world." Cécile says, "I believed that I could base my life on it", and accepts their languorous lifestyle as the ideal of privileged status. One of its advantages for Cécile is that her father, who has no intellectual interests, does not care if she studies or not. Another is that he gives her leeway to pursue her own interests, with the assumption that she will be an amusing addition to the superficial social gatherings he favors. In the next villa to theirs is a young man in his 20s, Cyril, with whom Cécile has her first sexual romance.

Their peaceful holiday is shattered by the arrival of Anne, whom Raymond had vaguely invited. A cultured, principled, intelligent, hard-working woman of Raymond's age who was a friend of his late wife, Anne regards herself as a sort of godmother to Cécile. The three women all have claims on Raymond's attention; the remote, enigmatic Anne soon becomes Raymond's lover, and the next morning she announces their engagement. Elsa moves out, then Anne tries to take over parenting Cécile. She tells Cécile to stop seeing Cyril and get back to her schoolbooks. Cécile is horrified at this threat to her pampered life as her father's darling, especially as Anne becomes the entire focus of Raymond's interest. She devises a plan to prevent the marriage, while nevertheless feeling ambiguous about her scheming.

To make Raymond jealous, Cécile arranges for Elsa and Cyril to pretend to be a couple and appear together at specific moments. When Raymond predictably becomes jealous of the younger Cyril, he renews his pursuit of Elsa. But Cécile has misjudged Anne's sensitivity. After she sees Raymond and Elsa together in the woods, with Raymond brushing pine needles off of his suit, Anne drives off in tears and her car plunges from a cliff in an apparent suicide.

Cécile and her father return to the empty, desultory life they were living before Anne interrupted their summer and consider the impact Anne has had on their lives. Cécile lives with the knowledge that her manipulations led to Anne's death and longs for the summer they shared.





Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Bonjour Tristesse" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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