It is good to see talent not only grow but grow up. It is also properly humbling to those critics of Françoise Sagan who acknowledged her brilliance but nursed a secret prophecy (almost a hope) that her kind of virtuosity would ebb, in the manner of most precocious talents, with her youth. But "Aimez-vous Brahms …" is the work of a serious writer, firmly disciplined and touched with compassion. Whether it is part of a natural development of years or whether her car accident jolted her out of her preoccupation with empty lives which made some of her writing almost a parody, Miss Sagan handles a simple triangle involving complicated people with the sobriety and depth of the mature artist. (p. 4)

With remarkable insight and brilliant observation of small details that carry large meanings, Françoise Sagan has created a real world in which the reader, too, lives...