Un Certain Succes

It is hard to imagine that a play called The Fainted Horse would have much of a box-office draw, but if the box office is in Paris and the playwright is Franchise Sagan, the title can be forgiven. The play, in fact, is Paris' biggest hit, and has precipitated a brand-new love affair between France and the eternally precocious Sagan.

Le Cheval Evanoui descends from a dynasty of successful novels and plays that was founded twelve years ago with Bonjour Tristesse, that sad, wispy novel about a girl's incestuously inspired destruction of her father's mistress. By now the author is so celebrated that Cheval's opening night drew the French Rothschild family, as well as large segments of lesser society folk right down to the cafe variety. The critics went away ecstatic. Wrote Jean Dutourd in France-Soir: "This play is charming, brilliant, tender, intelligent and of a special sort of comic turn of mind."

In plot a 19th century French bedroom farce, in setting a Scottish castle, Cheval projects the true tone of Sagan's languorous existentialism--a tone that has been characterized as boredom raised to the level of a passion. What's more, it projects her wit to a new and unexpected height. Amid a tangle of French fortune hunters trying to undo the clothing and the purse strings of a noble Scottish family, Sagan finds room to run Wilde. "If I married you," a girl tells her libertine fiance, "how long would I have to wait before betraying you in order to remain `a la mode?"

"Eat Your Soup." Sagan herself has remained a la mode ever since, at 18, she mailed the manuscript of Tristesse to the late publisher Rene Juilliard. He stayed up all night reading, next day offered Sagan 50,000 francs if she would ask her father, a manufacturer of abrasives, for permission to publish it. "I am famous," Francoise announced at dinner that night. "Eat your soup before it gets cold," replied Papa.

Papa finally gave his permission, but to spare him any embarrassment Franc,oise changed her last name from Quoi-rez to Sagan, after a character in Proust. Tristesse sold 4,500,000 copies around the world and launched her not only as an author but as a peripatetic and hyperbolic prototype of the restless, anarchic youth of Europe. Although her face is triangular and her figure suggests undernourishment, French magazines played her up as if she were Bardot. She played right back, danced all night at a Paris bar called New Jimmy's, raced off in sports cars to St.-Tropez, nearly got killed in an auto accident, twice got married and divorced, made and spent a fortune. "Riches don't keep anyone from feeling unhappy," she said, "but I prefer crying in a Jaguar to crying in a bus."

Aging Well. All the while, Sagan kept writing, turning out a play or novel a year, and gradually earning the respect of the French literary community. Andre Maurois, for example, wrote of her "sober, elliptical" style and her "remarkable economy of means," added sagaciously: "The tone of Sagan fits our times."

If Sagan's tone--knowing, world-weary, unemotional--has remained constant over the years, so has her devotion to the single theme of the interreaction of youth and age. Young heroines are paired with middle-aged men, young men with middle-aged heroines. "The confrontation of young and old in my plays, just as in my books, is something more than a device," she says. "The older one is always the fixed element faced with someone who is still searching for himself. Besides, people who have aged well are often more interesting than younger ones. They know something about life the others still ignore." And Sagan? She is 31.

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