Mlle. Sagan may very well have demonstrated that she is in the line of a great fictional tradition, reaching from Mme. de La Fayette, a seventeenth-century writer, through Benjamin Constant and Stendhal in the early nineteenth century, to the literary giant, Proust, with his Remembrance of Things Past. (p. 258)

Confronted with such a success, we may legitimately ask if this should be attributed to Mlle. Sagan's literary qualities alone, or whether there is something in the books that expresses the deeper yearnings of a generation. (p. 259)

[The present tendency of French youth] toward sober decisions finds an immediate explanation in the deceptiveness of extremist ideologies, on the one hand, and in the promises of a soon-to-achieve economic stabilization, on the other. But at a different, socially more sophisticated level, young French men and women have a greater difficulty in readjusting their vision.

One may safely say that part of Françoise Sagan's success and significance has its roots in the profound understanding she displays of the plight of her peers. This plight has little to do with poverty or prosperity: it is the result of the political-philosophical disappointments which, at this level, are experienced as failures of a class and as personal failures. Mlle. Sagan is, naturally, not a spoiled brat with a leopard-skin coat and a Jaguar, as popular magazines like to portray her; she belongs to a circle of young persons, sons and daughters of the Republic's most distinguished leaders in the field of politics, the letters and the arts.

As such, their personal history, that of their parents and social equals, coincides with the history of World War II, occupation, underground, liberation and the establishment of the Fourth Republic. The political, artistic, etc., philosophies of the last two decades may be said to have been elaborated in the circles where these young men and women live, and where doctrinal refinements, debated by half the world, are associated with the very men who propose them. It is easily understandable why the prestige of certain ideologies dies harder in these milieus, and why economic changes have no power here to dislocate cults rooted in personal relationships.

Françoise Sagan's novels express admirably the twilight of this world. Note the word ennui (boredom) so frequently used: boredom with the well-trodden routine of a comfortable existence, with the elusive substance of life. If Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile have about them an uncomfortable air of cynicism, this is not because they deal with illicit sexual relationships, but because they are unable to define happiness, to offer an image of it. Happiness is unknown: at best it is an "absence of boredom," a distraction in the Pascalian sense of the term. Love, in this light, is not to be imagined as a stormy passion; to be in love with a man means simply to be less bored with him than with another…. (pp. 262-63)

Does it mean that Françoise Sagan is the product of a "lost generation"? I think not. However disheartening, boredom in her case—in their case—is not the appalling confusion of an uprooted youth, cynically moving across the wastelands of mid-twentieth-century Western civilization; it is the taste which has remained in their mouths after they were forced to discard some old ideals and old meanings. In this sense boredom has a quality of temporariness about it, and thus it is essentially hopeful; it is like an intermediate phase between what is no longer and what is not yet. (p. 263)