[In "La Chamade"] Mlle. Sagan has not only achieved a subtle fusion of style and content but has moved towards a more reflective maturity—a maturity reminiscent, in its bitter-sweet quality, of her literary progenitor, Colette.

Here, the omnipresent hedonism of her earlier fiction is less insistent and farther horizons are glimpsed: the workaday world intrudes on the little principalities of pleasure; an encounter in the gray of dawn reminds that time is inexorable and that "no one could console a man for being born and then having to die"; and the bright-eyed worldlings of yesterday are now approaching their middle years, and painfully aware of it….

[The story's] denouement is as remorseless as it is poignant. In "La Chamade," Mlle. Sagan exhibits a deepened sense of life and an artistic expansion that carry her strides ahead as a writer….

Patricia MacManus, "Invitation to a Parley," in The...