It was summer. At 167, boulevard Malesherbes, in her parents’ Parisian apartment, a young woman was completing a first novel which, the following spring, would become a phenomenon. Her name was Quellerez, not yet Sagan. At 18, she would find fame with a 188-page book and join the list of the most read French-language writers. Scandal would go hand in hand with success. Winner of the critics’ prize in May 1954, the novel would establish itself as a classic, today studied in high school. Although the causes of literary success are often mysterious, a book does not become a classic by chance. Since summer is coming to an end and we are already nostalgic for it, let’s dive back into this burning text to explore its grace and ferocity, intact seventy years after its release in bookstores.
Unity of time and place
Behind closed doors Mediterranean, Hello sadness is told retrospectively by its heroine, Cécile. Cécile is 17 years old and has just failed the baccalaureate. With his father, Raymond, and his mistress, Elsa, “tall red-haired girl, half-creature, half-worldly”she reaches the south of France, where Raymond has rented a villa “isolated, lovely”built on a dominant promontory “a small golden cove, bordered by red rocks where the sea swayed”.
The holidays are announced under the sign of idleness and pleasures, pleasures that Cécile discovers in the arms of Cyril, a 26-year-old law student. The arrival of Anne, a friend of Cécile’s deceased mother, changes the situation. Refined, strict, uncompromising, she stands out from the women Raymond usually frequents. She soon ousts her rival, Elsa, and shows herself “determined to reform father and daughter in her own way”. Worried at the idea of losing the complicity that binds her to her father and their life of fun and worldliness, Cécile imagines a stratagem to keep Anne away. She asks Cyril to simulate an affair with Elsa. Upset to see his former mistress seek consolation with a younger man, Raymond sets out to win her back. Anne, whom Raymond had meanwhile proposed to marry, surprises them. Humiliated, she leaves the villa behind the wheel of her car and is killed in an accident. Once devastated by this tragedy, Cécile and Raymond resume their habits, and life begins again “as before, as it was planned that it would start again”.
The summer and the south of France, the unity of time and place combined with the drama, give the novel the aspect of an ancient tragedy which contributes to making it a classic. The unhappy loves of Elsa and Raymond, of Cécile and Cyril, of Anne and Raymond, can easily be transposed to other eras, and the psychological dimension of the story, the play of masks that it stages, does not is reminiscent of certain emblematic jokes of classical theater.
Sagan’s reader will also easily identify the exposition phase (“The first days were dazzling. We spent hours on the beach, crushed by the heat”), the trigger (the arrival of Anne), the rise in tension (the rivalry between Anne and Cécile), the climax (Anne surprises Raymond in Elsa’s arms) and the outcome (the death of Anne), reminiscent of the structure of a play. The classicism of the text is further reinforced by the Sagan style. Unlike the writers of…
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