Françoise Sagan, the hedonistic writer who invented youth and captivated Ava Gardner

Marie-Dominique Lelièvre is a journalist but prefers to define herself as a detective of the French star system of the 1960s. “I investigate the lives of figures who enjoyed enormous fame at a time when stars were few and far between and idolized.” Bardot, Yves Saint Laurent, Françoise Hardy... she has ended up writing biography of all of them. The latest to join this stellar list is novelist Françoise Sagan, who at just eighteen years old, after her literary debut with Good Morning, Sadness —now reissued by Tusquets—experienced the inconvenience of being stopped on the street. The result of this investigation is Françoise Sagan at Full Speed , which has just arrived in Spanish-language bookstores from the publisher Superflua.

The title is no coincidence. “The thrill of speed is exhilarating,” says Lelièvre, referring to a woman who “was all adrenaline” and seemed to strive for life on the fast track. The speed with which she squeezed her days and the speed she achieved with her cars had more to do with freedom than with sportsmanship, “but that doesn't mean she wasn't dangerous.” She was involved in several car accidents. One of them would tie her to a lifelong drug addiction. “They gave her a lot of morphine after her Aston Martin accident on April 13, 1957. She managed to kick the habit thanks to alcohol, and when it was banned, she discovered cocaine,” notes the biographer.

Sagan managed to get off morphine thanks to alcohol, and when it was banned, he discovered cocaine. Marie-Dominique Lelièvre Biographer

The incident was well worth its dose of tranquilizers, although not the subsequent consequences. Lelièvre explains in his pages that “the young driver pressed the accelerator up to 175 km/h, which was quite fast for the time and very dangerous on the pothole-ridden roads of the time.” Upon braking, catastrophe struck, as the car had no power steering and the wheels locked, eventually overturning the vehicle. “All the passengers were thrown out, except Françoise. A ton and a half of steel fell on her. The rescue team struggled to extract her body from the metal frame. From that moment on, the car would be inseparable from its legend.”

It wasn't Sagan's first time crashing a car. His first vehicle, a Jaguar, fared no better. He bought it with the royalties from Good Morning, Sadness , which became a scandal in mid-1950s French society. The work, equally tender and bitter, follows Cécile, a young woman who, seemingly unintentionally, causes the death of her father's lover, of whom she is jealous.

“How could an eighteen-year-old girl write such a accomplished text, with such elegance? The miracle lies in the rhythm; the narrative is of unsurpassed fluidity, its length perfectly suited to its content. I see no equivalent in French literature,” admits Lelièvre, who insists on the idea that Sagan was “the inventor of youth,” because, with her books and her style of writing, “she inaugurated a new era determined to turn its back on defeat and surrender to entertainment, to extravagance. At the end of the 1950s, France wanted to turn the page, to forget, to have fun. As in the 1920s, a period of decompression followed the exertion of the immediate post-war period. Sagan fit perfectly with the spirit of the times and became the prototype of a mass model, that of the hedonistic adolescent.”

Many readers are unaware that the cult author's surname is not Sagan, as they have long believed, but Quoirez. She changed it after her father forbade her from using her own, sensing the stir the novel would cause. First, because of the themes it addressed, such as women's sexual liberation and the questioning of the established family model; and second, because she wrote it when she was just a teenager.

Far from intimidating her, the pseudonym, which she borrowed from a character in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time – Princesse de Sagan – “would act as a screen, a decoy that would allow her to hide from the persecutory gaze of the superego. Behind this mask through which she can observe without being seen, Françoise Quoirez has no intention of going unnoticed. She wants to be looked at, to be perceived, to become the focus of attention.” And, perhaps for that reason, she wasn't bothered by the fact that the sleeve of her literary debut featured a slogan as exciting as it was provocative, which quickly proved its advertising effectiveness: Le Diable au coeur (The Devil in the Heart).

Sagan knew something about the heart, precisely. “Her love life conforms to the specifications of her legend and flows into the forms imposed by the myth,” notes her biographer. She was married twice: first to Guy Schoeller, editor of Hachette, 20 years Sagan's senior, from whom she divorced two years later. In 1962, she walked down the aisle again accompanied by Bob Westhoff, a young American playboy and aspiring ceramist. But both men and women passed through her heart, such as Ava Gardner and Peggy Roche, who is considered “the love of her life.” So much so that they are buried in the same grave, in the Cajarc cemetery, in southern France.

“Peggy supervises Françoise's health as much as possible and empties the cocaine-filled medication tubes down the toilet,” explains Lelièvre. Meanwhile, “Françoise has fun making her jealous; she travels to New York with a man and makes sure that Peggy finds out by chance, as does the man's wife.” However, as soon as she receives, by chance, an X-ray report indicating that her companion has liver cancer, she does everything in her power to make her final months bearable. “Françoise decides that Peggy won't know anything about it and makes her believe that she simply has pancreatitis.”

And as for Sagan herself, she died of a stroke at the age of 69, ruined by her debts to the Treasury in 2004. “Her debt to the tax authorities is still there,” the biographer says. “She left her son Denis nothing, not even a personal memento, a painting, a manuscript: everything had been seized. And what wasn't, it was because she hid it in the homes of friends during the tax investigations, and they never returned it to her. She paid dearly for her early success.” However, despite her somewhat uncontrolled life, she wasn't alone, as some of her friends recalled that, “when she had money, she gave it away generously.”