The Difficulty of Being with Françoise Sagan’s Lost Profile
Review | Françoise Sagan’s Lost Profile (1976, tr. Joanna Kilmartin)
When I first encountered Françoise Sagan, studying Bonjour Tristesse (1954) in an A-level French class, I knew that I had struck gold. The intense melodrama of the adolescent protagonist, the complexity of her relationships and the luxurious setting of the French Riviera entranced me. Reading Sagan’s debut novel, written when she was just eighteen years old, simultaneously in French and English must also have been one of the first times I was aware of consuming a text in translation.
Since then, I have dipped in and out of Sagan’s works, but always find them equally readable, fatally human, and indulgently tragic. Parched of reading for pleasure during the later months of my degree, I devoured Aimez-vous Brahms… (1959) in a single sitting.
Lost Profile tells the story of Josée who, feeling trapped by an abusive, love-lacking marriage, allows herself to be swept away to safety by a wealthy benefactor, Julius A. Cram. Sagan interrogates the demands and pressures of platonic and romantic relationships, asking what is owed to or expected by others in return for material gain and emotional investment.
It’s a story of agency and identity, misunderstanding and manipulation, love and desire. While Josée insists to her friends and readers alike that the generous Cram is simply a benevolent friend, it is clear that ulterior motives cloud the relationship from the start.
‘… beneath the clear, unruffled surface of the obvious, there lay all the monstrous, hidden shadows of a secret truth.’ Françoise Sagan, Lost Profile
Sagan’s works are deeply invested in human relationships, in messy affairs and forbidden emotions, in the conflicts between the desires of the self and our responsibilities to others. Her female protagonists are flawed and unreliable. While sharing her innermost thoughts with readers, Josée’s actions and speech are governed by the imperative to repress, conform, please and appease.
‘…the fulfilment I felt in my body was no less real than the famine I felt in my heart.’ Françoise Sagan, Lost Profile
Sagan exercises a wit that prevents the text from straying too far into melodrama. As Josée visits her estranged husband in a hospital room she declares, ‘I stood leaning against a wall in the corridor, like someone in a novel’. Sagan teases her readers by playing with the boundaries of novel, character and reader, demonstrating a self-awareness of her craft. Though she indulges the dramatic, Sagan reminds readers of the artifice of events.
As Josée strays in and out of the upper echelons of Parisian society, Sagan interrogates such notions of reality and artifice within lives so far removed from material and monetary concerns that they become inane. And while Josée may insist that she dislikes such practices of the ultra-rich, she continues to benefit directly from them herself. Josée’s experience is undoubtedly marked by privilege - a distinctly white middle-class perspective which seems oblivious to issues of race, poverty and discrimination.
‘I felt remote from them all. But not, alas, superior. And my remoteness made me more doubtful of my ability to comprehend these people than of the people themselves.’ Françoise Sagan, Lost Profile
Sagan uses Josée’s very protection from such issues however, to examine the power imbalances in her relationship with Julius A. Cram. Having escaped one abusive relationship, Josée’s privilege comes with a catch. Sagan captures the evolving role and rights of French women within the era of second wave feminism; women may hold jobs, rent apartments and live alone, but men maintain an agency over money and power that they can reassert at any time.
Lost Profile feels inherently infused with an anglophone influence. While the novel is grounded in its Parisian setting, Sagan also recounts a trip to the United States where Josée visits her former husband and his family. Reading Joanna Kilmartin’s English translation heightens the feeling of detachment that Josée herself experiences in relation to Parisian high society, and the conflict between the anglophone and French influences in her life.
Kilmartin captures the intentionally alienating experience of Parisian society, whilst rendering the central text itself accessible to anglophone readers. What is more, the central themes of Sagan’s novel are universally relatable. Kilmartin successfully communicates these ideas without sacrificing Sagan’s voice, her astute wit, or the personality of her narrator.
Sagan’s ability to balance the serious and the trivial, to fracture the frivolous with erudite insights on the human experience, is piercing. Ultimately, her characters seek out imperfect human connection, otherwise facing isolation and confinement.
‘I was old enough to know that there is always sand beneath the concrete, or concrete beneath the sand, and that the difficulty of being is universal…’ Françoise Sagan, Lost Profile
The ending of Lost Profile feels somewhat abrupt, and naively optimistic. I couldn’t help wondering whether having been duped before, Josée was perhaps being beguiled once again in her relationship with the charming Louis Dalet – a knight in shining armour that might eventually lose its shine. For in Lost Profile, men act as means of escape, until they become the thing that Josée is escaping.
But therein lies the romance of Sagan’s work: the hopefulness of love coupled with its inevitable and tragic conclusions, and the sense that it might still be worth it, no matter how fleeting.