The Four Corners of the Heart

From the internationally bestselling author of Bonjour Tristesse comes the surprise publication of a novel she never finished—and a story that evokes her greatest works.

French literary star Françoise Sagan was just eighteen when she published her first bestseller, Bonjour Tristesse, in 1954. Decades later, this short novel surfaced: an unfinished manuscript that wittily dissects the romantic lives of its bourgeois characters.

The glamorous Marie-Laure never expected her wealthy older husband to survive a devastating car accident that left him in a fragile mental and physical condition. But three years later, Ludovic Cresson returns home to the family estate and finds himself in the throes of a tumultuous marriage.

Overseeing this tense dynamic is Henri, the patriarch, who wants to see his son recover but detests various members of his own family. When Marie-Laure’s mother visits the estate, the family equilibrium falters spectacularly. As Ludovic’s virility returns, he cannot resist the charms of his mother-in-law—and neither can his father.

The story ends abruptly, but it offers a vivid, if open ended, look into some of Sagan’s final undiscovered characters.

Born in 1935 in Cajarc, a commune in the Lot department in France, Françoise Sagan spent her childhood in Paris and the years of the German occupation moving between Lyon and the Dauphiné region of the French Alps, where her father owned factories. She returned to Paris after the war to complete her schooling, after which she went on to study at the Sorbonne. It was there, over the summer of 1953, that she wrote Bonjour Tristesse. From the moment of its publication, the novel was a dazzling success. In 1956, her second novel, Un certain sourire (A Certain Smile), confirmed her status as a serious writer; this book, too, was a great success.

Sagan is generally described as having adopted a scandalous lifestyle; this fed into an image she struggled to escape thereafter―that of a habitué of casinos and nightclubs reveling in drink and fast cars. After a serious car accident in 1957, Sagan was left addicted to opioids following her recuperation. Sagan published more than thirty books, including novels and short story collections, as well as nine plays (notably Château en Suède―Château in Sweden). She also cowrote a number of screenplays. In 1985 she was awarded Le Prix Littéraire for her lifetime’s work. Financially and physically depleted, Sagan died in September 2004 in her house in Honfleur but was buried in the cemetery nearest to her native Cajarc.

Sagan wrote her own epitaph―her sense of her own style being, in her view, the mark of the true writer:

Made her entrance in 1954 with a slim novel, Bonjour Tristesse, which scandalized readers the world over. Her exit, after a life and oeuvre as pleasant and as botched as each other, was a scandal for none beside herself.

Despite her outstanding debts, Denis Westhoff, Sagan’s son from her second marriage, took on her estate and has chosen to fight for the posterity of her life’s work. In 2020, he had her unfinished novel Les quatre coins du coeur (The Four Corners of the Heart) published and saw the foreign rights sold to fifteen countries. Françoise Sagan has thus been restored to her status as an icon and a key point of reference in French literature.