It was an immediate international success. Sagan's first novel, Bonjour Tristesse ( Hello Sadness), was published in 1954, when she was 18 years old. The pseudonym 'Sagan' was taken from a character ( Princesse de Sagan ) in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu ( In Search of Lost Time). She was an indifferent student, and did not graduate.

She obtained her baccalauréat on the second attempt, at the cours Hattemer, and was admitted to the Sorbonne in the fall of 1952. She was expelled from the Louise-de-Bettignies School because she had 'hanged a bust of Molière with a piece of string'. Sagan was expelled from her first school, a convent, for 'lack of deep spirituality'. The family had a home in the prosperous 17th arrondissement of Paris, to which they returned after the war. Her paternal great-grandmother was Russian from Saint Petersburg. Her family spent World War II (1939–1945) in the Dauphiné, then in the Vercors. Nicknamed 'Kiki', she was the youngest child of bourgeois parents – her father a company director, and her mother the daughter of landowners. Sagan was born on 21 June 1935 in Cajarc, Lot, and spent her early childhood in Lot, surrounded by animals, a passion that stayed with her throughout her life.

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Francoise sagan la chamade