Word: sagan
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...hard to imagine that a play called The Fainted Horse would have much of a box-office draw, but if the box office is in Paris and the playwright is Franchise Sagan, the title can be forgiven. The play, in fact, is Paris' biggest hit, and has precipitated a brand-new love affair between France and the eternally precocious Sagan...
...plot a 19th century French bedroom farce, in setting a Scottish castle, Cheval projects the true tone of Sagan's languorous existentialism-a tone that has been characterized as boredom raised to the level of a passion. What's more, it projects her wit to a new and unexpected height. Amid a tangle of French fortune hunters trying to undo the clothing and the purse strings of a noble Scottish family, Sagan finds room to run Wilde. "If I married you," a girl tells her libertine fiancé, "how long would I have to wait before betraying...
...Your Soup." Sagan herself has remained a la mode ever since, at 18, she mailed the manuscript of Tristesse to the late publisher Rene Juilliard. He stayed up all night reading, next day offered Sagan 50,000 francs if she would ask her father, a manufacturer of abrasives, for permission to publish it. "I am famous," Francoise announced at dinner that night. "Eat your soup before it gets cold," replied Papa...
Papa finally gave his permission, but to spare him any embarrassment Françoise changed her last name from Quoi-rez to Sagan, after a character in Proust. Tristesse sold 4,500,000 copies around the world and launched her not only as an author but as a peripatetic and hyperbolic prototype of the restless, anarchic youth of Europe. Although her face is triangular and her figure suggests undernourishment, French magazines played her up as if she were Bardot. She played right back, danced all night at a Paris bar called New Jimmy's, raced off in sports cars...
Aging Well. All the while, Sagan kept writing, turning out a play or novel a year, and gradually earning the respect of the French literary community. Andre Maurois, for example, wrote of her "sober, elliptical" style and her "remarkable economy of means," added sagaciously: "The tone of Sagan fits our times...