Books: Voyage of Beautiful People

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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 fardée, 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."

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