BON JOUR TRISTÈSSE SEVENTY YEARS OLD

She smoked intensely, went down to buy tomatoes to quit, made love with Antoine, forgot to read with him, fell asleep

In 1954, at just eighteen years old, one of the great novels of the twentieth century was written by a woman in desabillé. A gigantic title “Bon jour tristesse” that defines an entire generation of the nouvelle vague.

The teenagers of those days believed in the redemptive and libertarian power of literature. In Spanish schools and institutes, French was studied instead of English. We smoked black tobacco, wore ready-to-wear turtlenecks and cared little for the Gallicisms that crept into our language. We liked Silvie Vartan if I sing it is for you or we hummed the muse of our days: the great Hardy, the girl with the long hair always dressed in black who recently died. All the boys and girls of my age go down the street two by two.

Aznavour, Brassens, Gilbert Becaud were other greats of the repertoire.

The films, Renoir, Visconti, Zefirelli, Passolini. Europe was a unit of destiny in the universal. It was ours, it belonged to us. Also the Russian because Charles de Gaulle in a brilliant speech projected a Europe from Portugal to the Urals.

The future was ours and it belonged to us. My knowledge of French was so thorough that I felt capable of tackling his novels (Cocteau's and Sartre's were a bit harder to read, both authors resorted to slang) Sagan broke the mould, she began to talk about women's liberation, free love, the fear of every bourgeois of losing what they have: the house, love, health, the job.

The contraceptive pill became fashionable, the council, the aggiornamento, we stopped going to church but never stopped believing.

─ Parra, did you see the bad-tempered face of Paul VI ─ a colleague in the SP editorial office told me, I think it was Felix Ortega when we jointly wrote an encyclical “Pacem in Terris”?

─ He must have had vinegar for breakfast.

From those powders these muds and from those pilgrimages these scallops.

François Sagan, sapper of the future, ploughed the new furrows of feminism. She was much loved and at the same time much hated but always widely read and popular. Her inimitable simple style of a woman down to earth left us with our mouths open. Shrewd. Stubborn. Quite ugly,

Her characters drive around Paris in a convertible. They lived entangled in metaphysical discussions and surrounded by paperback books.

She died in 2004 in ruin after having earned millions with her books, a choice of the gods was of little use to her, and she was behind bars for tax evasion. a soul friend of Mitterrand sed sic transit gloria mundi

Never has literature been so widely read or so popular in Europe thanks to the skill of the Gallic genius. Good morning, sadness