Mlle. Sagan may very well have demonstrated that she is in the line of a great fictional tradition, reaching from Mme. de La Fayette, a seventeenth-century writer, through Benjamin Constant and Stendhal in the early nineteenth century, to the literary giant, Proust, with his Remembrance of Things Past. (p. 258)

Confronted with such a success, we may legitimately ask if this should be attributed to Mlle. Sagan's literary qualities alone, or whether there is something in the books that expresses the deeper yearnings of a generation. (p. 259)

[The present tendency of French youth] toward sober decisions finds an immediate explanation in the deceptiveness of extremist ideologies, on the one hand, and in the promises of a soon-to-achieve economic stabilization, on the other. But at a different, socially more sophisticated level, young French men and women have a greater difficulty in readjusting their vision.

One may safely say that part...