HONFLEUR, France (AP) - Francoise Sagan, author of the best-selling novel “Bonjour Tristesse” about seduction and infidelity among the idle rich, died Friday. She was 69. The cause of death was heart and lung failure, said Yves Buzeins, director of Honfleur hospital, near her home in Normandy, where Sagan had been hospitalized for several days. Born Francoise Quoirez on June 21, 1935, in the town of Cajarc in southwest France, Sagan wrote “Bonjour Tristesse” in six weeks while a student at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1953. Published in 1954, the book sold more than 2 million copies worldwide and was translated into at least 15 languages. “I met upon glory at 18 years of age in 188 pages - it was like an explosion,” she once said.
Sagan, who selected her pen name from a character in Marcel Proust’s “A City of Lost Time,” went on to write 30 novels and compilations of novellas as well as nine plays. A longtime smoker with a penchant for fast cars, Sagan was fined for using cocaine in the mid-1990s and ordered to seek treatment. In 2002, a court convicted her of tax fraud. She was survived by her son. Funeral arrangements were not immediately available.