She had acquired the habit of spending several hours a day in a nearby cafe, writing in a blue exercise book. Not much studying was done, although she passed the exam that October and enrolled at the Sorbonne. But in the summer of 1953 she had to forego the usual family summer holiday by the sea in order to attend a crammer in Paris to prepare for a retake of her baccalaureat. She did what she wanted."Ī voracious reader since infancy, she adored Proust, Stendhal, Gide and Camus. In the view of her friend Juliette Gréco, she never really grew up: "She was always 12. The youngest of three children, she was a habitual rule-breaker at her Catholic school. The seemingly amoral tone brought celebrity and notoriety to Sagan, who was born Françoise Quoirez in Cajarc, a town in the Lot valley, to bourgeois parents who also kept an apartment in Paris.
To prevent their marriage the daughter devises an ill-fated plot in which the pretence of an affair between her boyfriend and the father's dumped girlfriend is intended to provoke jealousy and restore the status quo ante. First the newcomer takes charge, ordering Cécile to terminate her romance in order to stay indoors and do her homework. The daughter is exploring her own first sentimental adventure, a swiftly consummated romance with a handsome law student, when the unexpected arrival of an older woman, a friend of her late mother, disrupts the self-indulgent haze of high summer.
This short novel of barely 30,000 words is a story told by Cécile, a 17-year-old girl holidaying on the Côte d'Azur with her widowed father, a roué who has brought along his young girlfriend.
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