Voyage of Beautiful People

By Patricia Blake

THE PAINTED LADY by Franc,oise Sagan

Translated by Lee Fahnestock; E.P. Button; 468 pages; $15.95

It was 29 years ago that Bonjour Tristesse, a short novel by an 18-year-old schoolgirl, Franc,oise Sagan, sold a record-breaking 1.5 million copies in France. Translations soon topped bestseller lists throughout Europe and in the U.S. A tale of worldly intrigue and adolescent sex, the book caught the public fancy as much for the author's precocious sophistication as for her fine-grained, sensuous prose style. Since then, literary fashions, linguistic games and critical theories have reduced much of French fiction to an esoteric art, impermeable to the intellect, oppressive to the spirit and absolutely no fun to read.

Meanwhile, Sagan has remained imperturbably on course, charting the manners of France's Beautiful People who inhabit the milieu of high fashion, advertising and show business. Those of her novels that appeared in the U.S., such as A Certain Smile, Aimez-Vous Brahms? and The Unmade Bed, came across as high-class pop fiction `a la franc,aise with predictable complements of cuckolds, betrayed mistresses and golden-eyed lovers.

Still, she could not easily be dismissed as France's Jacqueline Susann. Stylistically, her descriptive powers were a match for her formidable perceptions. The pity was, went the critical chorus, that she wasted her talent on such trivial themes and frivolous characters. That argument reflected the reverse snobbism of intellectuals who were unwilling to grant that the rich and the worldly were worthy of a novelist's attention, as if there had been no Proust. Sagan defended herself: "I have always made my characters belong to the same social group, out of decency. I've never known poverty; I don't see why I should try to make a living talking about social problems I've never experienced and know nothing about."

Criticism of her fiction stepped up after 1972, when Sagan reportedly began battling spells of illness, and her novels grew skimpier and more vulnerable to attack. In 1981 she was devastated when a French court banned her twelfth novel, a 178-page crime story called Le Chien Couchant (The Setter), on the ground that it was an "illicit reproduction" of a short story by another writer. The ban was later reversed on appeal.

Thus her 13th novel, The Painted Lady, wrought out of a decade of travail, long silences and undoubted artistic growth, comes as a reassuring surprise. A tale of loves won and lost on a ten-day Mediterranean cruise, The Painted Lady is more than entertaining; its verve and humor disguise a serious work. Sagan's cruise has a musical motif; the deluxe passengers have each paid $15,000 to listen to a virtuoso pianist and a celebrated diva perform aboard a ship pointedly christened Narcissus. The lure is also gastronomical: "The port of call determined the musical work, and the musical work determined the menu. These delicate musical relationships, hesitant at first, had bit by bit been transformed into invariable ritual, even if it occasionally happened that the sudden decay of a tournedos necessitated the replacement of Rossini by Mahler, and the tournedos by a Bavarian pot roast."

The passengers include a cast of characters from Sagan's usual repertoire: a vulgar movie producer and a mindless starlet, a tycoon with a calculator in his skull and his excruciatingly chic wife. Other figures have been sketched in bolder relief: the fiftyish diva with an insatiable appetite for young lovers, and her prey, the ravishing little gigolo who, while searching for a profitable connection, falls perilously in love.

Equally improbable, but far more affecting, is the love that develops between Julien, the ship's engaging cardsharp and a dealer in forged pictures, and Clarisse, the heiress wed to Eric, a leftist newspaper publisher. Eric has used his young wife's money to support extremist causes, while sadistically stripping her of dignity and selfesteem. When Clarisse first appears aboard the Narcissus, she is grotesquely made up, her features virtually indistinguishable behind the greasepaint. She is the painted lady or, more ambiguously in French, la femme fardee, the made-up woman.

Julien's sudden awareness of Clarisse comes in a scene in which Sagan best demonstrates her skill, surely inherited from Colette, in isolating the heart-wrenching, tactile detail that illuminates a whole panoroma of feelings. "She had laid her left hand flat on the tablecloth; then, restless, it moved toward a loose thread and furtively pulled at it, drawing out others in the process, and a lengthy unraveling ensued . . . Wearying of this vandalism . . . that hand now lay with the palm open, taking on the appearance of a dog in the sun, turned over on its back to present its throat to the warmth and possibly the fangs of a mortal enemy." Julien, watching her hand, is stirred. "As he leaned to give her a light, and her shimmering fawn-colored hair momentarily entered his field of vision, bringing with it a whiff of perfume, Julien discovered with surprise that he desired her."

Unlike most of Sagan's previous books, this one has a happy ending, save for the gigolo who dies for his diva. Clarisse breaks free of her hateful husband and, after an intrigue as absorbing as a thriller, is united with Julien, the con man redeemed by love. In a passage strikingly at variance with Sagan's earlier pessimism, Clarisse rains kisses on her lover's face: "an inexhaustibly tender downpour beneath which Julien felt his face open up, become a fertile and blessed land, a gentle and handsome face washed of everything, precious and perishable, a face forever cherished."

"I have sometimes been criticized for showing a disenchanted image of life," Sagan noted in 1974. "I know: there exist great and beautiful loves. But these are sufficient unto themselves and cannot be made the subject of novels. There are hardly any great novels that end well." True, perhaps. But the writer who greeted her first readers with a "Bonjour tristesse " (Hello sadness) drawn from a famous poem by Paul Eluard has chosen to return to literature with another line from the same poem: "Adieu tristesse."

EXCERPT

"Just then the beacon from the lighthouse crossed her face and Julien was left petrified. Her make-up had given way under the tears and Kleenex and like the ramparts of a city it had crumbled and seeped away. From behind the . . . greasepaint emerged a superb new countenance, until now unknown, outlined and highlighted from the blurry bar light in an implacably tragic way that few faces could have withstood." --By Patricia Blake This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.