Françoise Sagan at Home

The other night, I watched the movie Goodbye Again for probably the third or fourth time. The 1961 movie which starred Ingrid Bergman, Yves Montand, and Anthony Perkins is, as my mother likes to call it, a guilty pleasure. Bergman plays Paula, a Parisian interior decorator whose love life is complicated thanks to both her philandering boyfriend who she loves and the eager to pleasure and much younger man who loves her. At 40 years old, Paula considers herself to be an old woman (yes, at 40), something that leads her to make the wrong choices when it comes to the men in her life. But, as sad as Paula's life was, we must look on the bright side: she had a fabulous apartment (which I've written about in a previous post); she had a kind and protective lady's maid; and she wore Christian Dior and Van Cleef & Arpels. If you're going to have a disastrous love life, you should at least be able to find some solace in your couture wardrobe and well-appointed home.

The movie was based on a novel written by Françoise Sagan titled Aimez-Vous Brahms? (Do You Like Brahms?) You might be more familiar with Sagan's first novel, one that was also made into a movie, titled Bonjour Tristesse. If you Wikipedia Sagan, you'll find that Sagan had a tumultuous love life, just like Bergmans' character Paula. And also like Paula, Sagan lived in a beautiful home. Make that two beautiful homes: a house in Paris and one in the Normandy countryside (shown above.) Both appeared in the Architectural Digest book, Celebrity Homes II.

The Wikipedia entry mentions Sagan's extravagant lifestyle, but not being very familiar with Sagan, I don't know if that's true or not. After looking at these photos, though, I think it's obvious that Sagan liked to live well in comfortable settings. To me, that's not such a bad thing.


Sagan's Paris Home:








Sagan's country house in Normandy:








All photos from Celebrity Homes II: Architectural Digest presents the private worlds of thirty international personalities.