Bonjour Tristesse

Plot summary

Seventeen-year-old Cécile spends her summer in a villa on the French Riviera with her father Raymond and his current mistress, the young, superficial and fashionable Elsa, who gets on well with Cécile. Raymond is an attractive, worldly, amoral man who excuses his serial philandering with an Oscar Wilde quote about sin: "Sin is the only note of vivid colour that persists in the modern world." Cécile says, "I believed that I could base my life on it", and accepts their lifestyle as typical. One of its advantages for her is that her father, who has no intellectual interests, does not care if she studies or not. Another is that he leaves her a free hand at attracting men. Though she initially tries men of her father's age, in the next villa to theirs is a young man in his 20s, Cyril, with whom she starts a romance.

This peaceful holiday foursome is shattered by the arrival of Anne, who Raymond had vaguely invited. A cultured, principled, intelligent, and hard-working woman of Raymond's age, who was a friend of his late wife, she regards herself as a sort of godmother to Cécile. A contest develops between the three women, which Anne wins by sleeping with Raymond and next morning announcing their engagement. Elsa moves out, upon which Anne starts on Cécile. She tellls her to stop seeing Cyril and get back to her school books. Horrified at this threat to her lazy life as the darling of her father, Cécile devises a plan to prevent the marriage.

With the idea of making Raymond jealous, she arranges for Elsa and Cyril to pretend to be a couple and to appear together at specific moments. When Raymond can't take their togetherness any longer, he goes off to find Elsa. But Cécile has misjudged Anne's sensitivity, with tragic results. Seeing the two close together in the woods, she storms off in her car and plunges from a cliff in a suspected suicide. It later emerges that Raymond and Elsa were only kissing.

Cécile and her father return to the empty, desultory life they were living before Anne interrupted their summer.

Characters

Reception

An early brief review of Irene Ash's English translation (John Murray, 1955), in The Times of 19 May 1955, describes it as "An unusual little fiction ... written by a 19-year-old girl from the Dordogne ... a nice piece of precosity". The reviewer in The Spectator of the same date said "Bonjour, Tristesse, which has achieved remarkable celebrity by virtue of its subject-matter and its authoress's age, is a vulgar, sad little book".