The Unmade Bed by Françoise Sagan

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I didn’t know what to expect when I picked this book up from my local library. At first, I was intrigued by the orchid on the cover, coupled with the title that screamed “Cheap Romance”. However, flipping to the first page, I was transported to the drowsy bedrooms of Paris in the 1970s, where scratched orchestral records played on repeat.

We step into the lives of Edouard and Beatrice; estranged lovers from years prior. Before long, they find one another wrapped in the other’s arms, offering worldly pleasures in their altar of sacrifice. This is not hyperbole. We see an exploration of love which twists, and turns; driving knives into one another’s hearts. A fantastical trial by fire leaving the reader squirming and wincing in anguish.

One might think in these circumstances it would be easy to place blame, but Sagan adamantly demands you listen instead. In hearing their stories, you uncover profound complexity and depth.

Françoise Sagan writes beautifully (powerfully translated by Abigail Israel’s). She captures the animalistic desire of sensuality in a way that contemporary authors veer away from; flaunting all the destruction that it can cause.

I cherish texts that show a frame of mind that’s so different to my own, growing an appreciation for the vastly different perspectives people can have. In this, I felt the hot-stinging tears of Edouard, and Beatrices’s inner turmoil of accepting love - the tenacity of choosing each other even if it hurts (or perhaps because it hurts). Ultimately, we see how the act of being seen can elevate domestic love into something transcendent.

Borrowed in November, finished in December 2025.

Depending on their threshold of sensitivity, people who knew her spoke of her as either a tonic or a terror, but all of them recognised that it was better to have this particular public menace on their side. Tony, of course, adored this definition of herself.

composed of a thousand closely related yet contradictory pieces, she was nonetheless always and in all circumstances wholly each and every one of those pieces. And as she never felt divided, never ar a distance from herself, she could be completely hard or completely tender in succession, completely idiotic or completely lucid. Indeed, perhaps the reason she could never share her feelings with anyone else was that she had never been able to admit the ambiguities in them. On the other hand, this counterfeit façade - an armour so shabby and patched that no medieval knight would have dared to put it on - had sheltered her from countless blows, to say nothing of hard knocks. She had never let herself slip into comfortable friendships or reassuring con-fidences. In fact, she had never slipped into anything that could be called a habit. Her entourage, including all friends, male and female, as well as her lovers, had always been alternately subject to savage ill-treatment or equally savage adoration, and none of those who approached her ever had the right to trust her. Yet if they could expect anything and everything from her, they could also take a certain comfort in her unpredictability. They could be sure, absolutely sure, that she was as capable of holding out her hand to pull them from the water or of stepping on their heads while they drowned. And they could also be sure she would do both with the same absence of calculation and the same clear conscience.

But Édouard did feel a certain pleasure in the desolate lobby. It was a sinister day in a sinister place, but he knew that nothing in the world could tear him away from it. It’s one of love’s greatest charms, he thought, not to have to wonder any more what I’m doing here, but to find myself asking how I can manage to stay…

‘You’ve become involved with a wild animal, he told Édouard. ‘With a woman like her, you have to love less than you’re loved. Or in any case, you have to pretend to love her less. If you don’t, you’re a loser from the start.? I may be a fool,’ he replied. I may be a coward and a pushover, but I don’t care. The one thing you just don’t understand about me, Nicolas, is that when Béatrice threatens to destroy me, I care so little about it that it makes me virtually indestructible. The minute she embraces me, I don’t care it a thousand people are laughing at me.’

From the window, he watched Edouard dash across the street, jump into his car, and take off towards his Destiny. He reminded Nicolas of one of those collapsed moths lying prostrate in the darkness that, the minute someone lights a lamp, flies off with the same intoxication to crucify itself again. He shrugged. Both he and Raoul, or Raoul’s scriptwriter, wanted to tell the same story, the same endless supplication, the same terror, the same demand: Don’t leave me alone! it wasn’t really worth looking any further. Every piece of literature and every piece of music came from this cry, or from its sometimes absurd corollaries. Could she in fact be bored with him? Boredom itself was so foreign a concept to him, each moment seeming to him so fragile and so intense, that he’d never dreamed of asking what she, the mistress of their Destiny, thought about their shared solitude. Perhaps, outside their moments of passion, she found it a little flat, a little tepid?

Perhaps his impression of shared tenderness and laughter was his alone? In fact, it was entirely possible she was bored. The fact that an inmate on death row never gets bored is no reason to think that his executioner might not yawn once or twice before tackling the job in hand.

All sexual predilections were blameless as far as she was concerned, unless of course they were hopelessly sectarian, and the exhibitionism, the fantasies, the embarrassing guilts and secrets that ravaged her contemporaries were completely beyond her understanding In the final analysis, she found the pleasure-is-obligatory dictum of her age to be as ridiculous as the dictum of ten years ago that had prohibited it.

And so tonight she felt oddly reassured and wholly at ease, as if her treachery had proved that where Eduard was concerned, her body could protect her even against herself.

He felt that the ecstatic face he’d seen in the win circles of the binoculars would always and forever be superimposed on the expressionless face now opposite him. Not the slightest shadow of remorse or fear had crossed this face, and the infernal tension he’d been subjected to dissolved suddenly before the obvious: it would do no good whatsoever to beat her, or to shout, or to beg. There was only one possibility: he would have to leave her. This he could never bring himself to do, and she knew it as well as he.

Yesterday’s betrayal suddenly reassured him. She’d been able to betray him, hed been able to accept it, and the fact that things had resolved themselves in such a way meant that nothing irreparable could ever come from such an act. Yet he still refused to admit that his acceptance of Béatrice’s treachery was not what had worried him. No, what had worried him was whether or not she could tolerate that accept-ance. Some women were unfaithful to their men cheerfully and even affectionately, but the minute the men found out, the women couldn’t stand them any longer: It was a question of their self-respect that they saw dissolving in the other’s gaze.

For Béatrice, relationships between the sexes had at least a slim chance of becoming real, or staying that way, only if these sorts of childish and conventiona Béatrice could not have put up with loving a coward for long pretences were respected. Both as mistress and as actress without feeling ashamed.

Basically, Edouard had no idea where he stood or whose side he was on, but he knew that one day, in the midst of the whirlpool of false truths and half-lies, he would have to define a very precise image of himself. Be it here in Paris or somewhere else. The truest image, of course, would be defined by his work. But whatever it was, it was sure to be misinterpreted, misunderstood, betrayed. He’d be judged by people who had no sense of justice, admired by people he despised. That was his destiny as a playwright. And one day, without a word, they would all come to an agreement at his expense, so to speak. They would all agree upon a certain image of him. It was an age of classification, yet Édouard knew he would remain - like all other artists, good or bad - what he knew himself to be at heart: unclassifiable.

Instead of making him the priest, she had simply made him the sacrifice. At first glance, that might have seemed a reversal of roles but, since it was she who’d made the decision, nothing had really changed. There was clearly a kind of melody in their story and no matter how it was orchestrated, no matter what key it was played in, no matter what inevitable improvisations its players added, Edouard knew it would always be the same melody and that he would find it everywhere, intact and unforgettable, and forever at his ear.

‘You’re so wanton, he said between gasps. ‘You’re absolutely indecent. And wanton… and…’ Béatrice stopped laughing and looked at him. ‘Of course I am,’ she admitted with a little smile. ‘But that’s why Eduard loves me, isn’t it? There was a sad question mark in her voice and it disconcerted him.

The difference was that what she saw in douard was the fanaticism not of the possessor, but of the possessed. She could do what she wanted to him; she could say whatever came into her head. He would never have enough of her. He would go on forever demanding kisses, looks, even blows. Not that he was masochistic; when she was inadvertently tender with him there were long and inimitable sighs of satisfaction, like those of a contented child. And inadvertently was definitely the word.

She had always deliberately refused all forms of détente, just as she had always refused to make things easy, not only for him but for herself. She was the one who set the pace and drove the team; she was the one who forced him to wear the double yoke of anxiety and desire. But why? Who was forcing her to play animal tamer? Who or what was pushing her - if not tomorrow, then the day after - into the arms of a Basil who made love no better than Edouard? Who kept her from saying ‘we’ when she talked about herself and Edouard in the past or future? And who was keeping her from even imagining this future? She’d always maintained that her passions were strictly provisional, but this idea had been no more than a flat and abstract judgement, based on past experience. So why did she insist on reminding herself of it now? Why did she exhaust herself trying to be like her image and why did she feel secure only when this fierce and primal image coincided with the reflection she saw in Edouard’s eyes? Edouard wasn’t exactly the public, after all! It was his job to look for her truth, even find it. But which truth? After all the lies and lives she’d lived, who was she?

Everyone who walks down the street wants someone else to turn around; or when he can’t sleep, he wants someone to worry about him; or when he laughs or cries, someone to understand him. And when he’s happy, someone to envy him. Which is perhaps why all separations, all divorces, are so painful. It’s not the loved one - opposite or complemen-tary, master or slave - you miss, it’s the ‘other, the spectator, the perpetually plugged-in microphone or camera. It doesn’t matter whether you are watched with desire or hatred; what’s important is that there should be someone to see you get up, get dressed, smoke, go out, someone to hear you whistle, yawn, or tall silent, even if that someone doesn’t really look or listen. And then, suddenly, there’s no one. Because even if you can’t stand him, for whom do you stub out your cigarette in an ashtray rather than in the middle of the rug? Even if you feel no more desire for him any more, for whom do you put out the light and get undressed? Even if you hope he won’t be there in the morning.

From the first time she’d ever talked about love or heard it talked about, from the first time she’d begun making others fall in love with her and pretending to reciprocate, she’d felt the same discomfort. Now, however, she felt an almost mystical pride. She too was capable of love!

He’d been like a circus ventriloquist with only one dummy who’d forced himself to fulfl his contract even though madly in love with a rider about to leave the show. (Of course, Eduard didn’t really say this to himself. He didn’t even think it. But even though he didn’t realise it now, one day he’d give it to someone to say for him. On stage. Hed show the world the poor, vanquished, and humiliated child, and when that day came, he would doubtless wonder who could possibly have put such an idea into his head.)

She stretched out in bed happily. Tomorrow there would be a foot on hers, a weight across her body, a human being next to her all night long. He might be as cumbersome as he was reas suring, but she couldn’t, and wouldn’t, kick him our of her bed even if he did disturb those activities of sleeping and forgetting that were so vital to her equilibrium. The point was that she could for once stand the fact that Edouard represented discom-fort; indeed, she even demanded that he do so.

Created by Apurva Shukla.

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