on Francoise Sagan and Francoise Quoirez

How well she wrote. Her essay “Lectures” in Avec mon meilleur souvenir is limpid, modest, impeccable in style and clear in message. Her assertion that writing was her guiding principle is well-grounded. As for Francoise Quoirez: one cannot really deprecate success in art - but celebrity, in early adulthood, when its excesses and enslavements were less understood than today, when support appears not to have been there; there one sees the adumbration of later poor choices, burdened last days, too-early death. That said, she left a large body of crystalline fiction, theatre and prose, and she says that writing was her life. A life well lived for Sagan, if not always for Quoirez? Her generosity to other artists and writers, in this collection, as in “,,,Et toute ma sympathie” is striking.