De guerre lasse
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour Monsieur le Président de la République, (jamais [de guerre lasse] avec lui) pour François Mitterrand, avec toute mon admiration, ma confiance, et, s'il le permet, ma grande affection Françoise Sagan.”
“It’s extraordinary how, for fourteen years, at every blow of fate, I received some sign of the attention of that overburdened man, excusing my follies, sustaining my pride, explaining my anger.” A bond of complicity united them throughout their lives: Sagan recalled that at one of the Lazareffs’ Sunday lunches at Louveciennes, she found herself seated “next to a young, brilliant man (in eye and conversation), a man launched into politics — the last of my concerns at the time […]. A vague memory, then, one not clarified by a small duel in Paris-Match between Marguerite Duras and myself, at the time of the elections of…, she defending Mitterrand and I, de Gaulle, ‘a true man of the left’ — as I defined him then — not without a certain accuracy […]. As for François Mitterrand, I said nothing and thought nothing of him, my political education remaining most limited. In short, we were off to a bad start toward becoming friends.”
Sagan met Mitterrand again in the middle of the presidential campaign, in 1980: “[…] We were almost the only passengers boarding a venerable old crate, and I was more uneasy than amused by the journey ahead… Things were going badly for him (and therefore for me, who had at last acquired some political notions, which led me to the left). The Socialists were in complete disarray…” By inviting him to her home, she took the first step toward a friendship that would never waver; and, a year later, she was among those who leapt for joy at the election result.
Shortly after the publication of De guerre lasse, a copy of which she gave him, came the famous trip to Bogotá, Colombia. “Exhausted by the journey” and “a victim of altitude sickness,” according to the official statement, she fell into a coma following an incident that required her emergency repatriation. As a final tribute, she later wrote: “I have never regretted that meeting. […] I have never regretted anything that happened to me because of that President of the Republic, that politician, that friend, and that is not so common.”
From the library of François Mitterrand (Piasa sale, Paris, October 2018, lot 594).