Françoise Sagan
The Four Corners of the Heart
The following extract is reproduced with permission from Françoise Sagan’s The Four Corners of the Heart. To order a copy, visit Amazon.
It should be said that Ludovic Cresson had only just emerged from a series of sanatoriums, to which he’d been consigned by a road accident so disastrous, so horrific, that neither his doctors nor his lovers could have dreamed he would survive.
With Marie-Laure at the wheel, the little sports car he’d bought for her birthday had been crushed against a parked lorry and the passenger side torn off by the steel bars the lorry had been carrying. While Ludovic’s head had been extracted aesthetically intact, and while Marie-Laure had come out untouched of face or body, Ludovic’s body had been gored in several places. He had gone into a coma and the doctors had given him a day or two, maximum, to take his leave of this mortal coil.
Except that, within the natural fortress of his body, the shoulders, neck, lungs, and other organs making up the outer and inner health of this naïve boy turned out to be much smarter and more tenacious than anyone imagined. So while thoughts were turning to ceremony and funeral music—while Marie-Laure was assembling a soberly superb outfit of widow’s weeds (very simple, with a purposeless sticking plaster at her temple); while Henri Cresson, furious at his procreative project’s stalling, was kicking every object in sight and insulting his domestic staff; and while his wife Sandra, Ludovic’s step- mother, cultivated her habitual overbearing dignity as an often bed-bound invalid—Ludovic himself had fought back. And at the end of the week, to general consternation, he awoke from the coma.
.
As we know, some doctors can be more attached to their diagnoses than to their patients. Ludovic exasperated all the big shots Henri had (naturally) summoned from Paris and everywhere else. The ease with which he returned to life so irritated them that he was found to have something potentially very compromising on the brain. This—and his own silence— was enough to consign him to close observation and then to a more specialized health facility. He was befuddled, so appeared somewhat vacant, even to have suffered some brain damage— and the perfect vigor, the very healthiness of his body only reinforced this impression.
For two years, wordless and unprotesting, Ludovic went from clinic to clinic, from psychiatric unit to psychiatric unit, and was even sent to America, literally strapped down inside his jet. Every month, his little family would visit, to watch him sleep—or to “smile stupidly at him,” as they muttered amongst themselves—before leaving again at top speed. “I cannot bear the sight,” Marie-Laure moaned, not even trying to hold back a false tear for, in their car, all were decidedly dry-eyed.
Not all: the exception was Marie-Laure’s mother, the very charming and recently widowed Fanny Crawley, still mourn- ing her husband when she came to see the son-in-law she had not appreciated before. Ludovic’s devil-may-care, cowboyish style had got up the noses of many, many sensitive women, even while it had also tickled many, many decidedly spirited women. So it was that she returned to see the man she’d called a playboy lying on a sofa, strapped down at the wrists and ankles, grown dreadfully thin and somehow much younger too, looking as harmless as he was vulnerable, and quite inca- pable of refusing all the psychoactive drugs being fed into his veins from dawn to dusk . . . and Fanny Crawley had wept. She’d wept until Henri noticed and drew her aside for a serious and private conversation.
Happily, Henri Cresson had then managed to speak to the director of that latest clinic—possibly the most expensive of its kind in France and certainly the most useless. The head doctor had told him categorically that his son would never, ever recover. Now, certainty in others invariably provoked disbelief and rage in Henri, who was as brilliant at business as he was hopeless at emotions (not having had any, or rather only having had them for his first wife, Ludovic’s mother, who had died in childbirth). He was, then, stunned to see this beautiful and elegant young woman, whom he knew to be inconsolable over the loss of her husband, weeping over a son-in-law she disliked. Fanny demonstrated persuasively that it was time to stop the torture. Henri had gone back to the doctor and spoken to him in such a way that, despite his institution’s eye-watering rates, the latter could no longer retain a patient whose family so scorned his services.
A month later Ludovic arrived at La Cressonnade where, having thrown his little vials of medicine one after the other into the waste-paper basket, he turned out to be perfectly fine. He was sweet-tempered, a mite distant, a mite anxious, and he did a lot of running. In fact, he spent most of his time running in the vast estate park, running like a child who’s recovered the use of his legs, if not one trying to regain an approximately adult demeanor. There was no question—and indeed there never really had been any question—of Ludovic working in his father’s factory: he had wealth enough, even without finding a profession discreet enough to justify a life spent in all the best spots around Europe (the life Marie-Laure very much meant to lead, with or without him).
Ludovic’s return was a disaster for Marie-Laure. She had been admirable as his widow but finding herself the “wife of an idiot,” as she cast herself among her closest friends (who shared a very public social life), was quite another thing. Marie-Laure began, then, to hate this boy whom she had previously put up with and even vaguely liked.
Still, Ludovic’s former raptures, his love and passion for her, would rapidly have annoyed Marie-Laure. For Ludovic had loved women passionately, he loved romantic love as perhaps the only art he practiced with skill and care. Ardent and gentle, he had been charming—and all the (very many) whores of Paris who knew him from before still harbored deep affection for him.
Françoise Sagan was born in 1935 in Cajarc, a commune in the Lot department in France, and 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.
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.
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