Literary Bites with Bonjour tristesse

& A Sadness Too Soft to Name

Bienvenue à Literary Bites

A quiet moment each week to slow down, savor French through its most moving texts, and reconnect with what truly matters.

This week I chose two excerpts, one that is incontournable and infamous, and another that will transport you to a summer night on la Côte d’Azur. In a few words, they are unforgettable.

You'll also learn more about the brilliant and sulfurous young writer behind the novel. And don’t miss the poem at the very end that inspired the novel’s haunting title.

À savourer avec une brise d’été… ou un souvenir qui serre le cœur.

"Un jour, j’aimerais quelqu’un passionnément et je chercherais un chemin vers lui, ainsi, avec précaution, avec douceur, la main tremblante..."

“One day, I will love someone passionately, and I will search for a path to them, like this, carefully, gently, with a trembling hand...”

A terrace at dusk. Cicadas in the gravel. The weightless ache of something you can’t name.

In Bonjour tristesse, Françoise Sagan distills the fragile, shimmering sadness of youth where love, guilt, and beauty drift like salt in the air. At just 18, she wrote a novel that still lingers like the memory of a summer that changed you forever.

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Les Extraits

– The Famous Opening Lines