Much of the most acclaimed French prose by modern (pace, M. Flaubert) French (pace, M. Beckett) authors is written within an aureate scaffold of theory. And as one goes down the slide of French letters the more aureate the worse becomes.

If you have ever finished a novel by M. Robbe-Grillet (Academie Française, 2004) or assayed some frothy exegesis of Jean Baudrillard only to find yourself wondering, "Huh?" Well, so too do legions of Frenchies. Or so they would were they ever to pick up a French highbrow tome in the first place.

For all the pretense to a bloated national intellectualism, the French public doesn't care so much for the unread books of its authors as much as the trains of scandal dragged behind them through the arts and fashion pages of newspapers. All of which neatly brings us to the subject of our post.

Françoise Sagan died Friday, aged 69.

Fame - or rather, the Paris Match version of celebrity - clung tenaciously to Françoise Sagan. Moody, gamine and matchstick thin, elfin face peeping out from under a mop of cropped hair, in the 1950s and 1960s she seemed the epitome of Parisian radical chic.

When offered membership of the Academie Franaise, she turned it down: she had read enough good books, she said, to recognise the difference between the literary merit of Bonjour Tristesse (which she claimed never to have re-read) and the fuss made about it. She never uttered a word of regret for her "unbridled life" but confessed that she had never really grown up: "as a result I don't really understand adult values and I never will".

Flushed with the success of Bonjour Tristesse, she sped down in her new Ferrari to St Tropez where she turned her publishers' cheque into gambling chips, whisky and lines of cocaine - and indulged a prodigious appetite for sex. "She tried every experience," a former lover recalled, "with two persons, with a woman, with three, four. She was in the avant garde, La bande Sagan - a group, with Juliette Greco. They were drunk almost every night and they were a most crazy group. La bande Sagan was the top of sophistication."

Back in Paris in the 1960s, Françoise Sagan declared for the Left - for stylish reasons, naturally. "What's Comrade Sagan doing in a Ferrari?" one revolutionary enquired when she tipped up at the barricades in a sports car. "It's not a Ferrari, it's a Maserati," she said.

But by the 1970s, with her brown hair turned miraculously blonde, fast living was taking its toll. Her passion for gambling became so intense that she asked the Ministry of the Interior to ban her from casinos. She had several brushes with death and in 1978 gave up drinking after a misdiagnosis of cancer of the pancreas. Her drug abuse landed her in court on several occasions and led to a demand from the Right-wing politician Jean Marie Le Pen that she be guillotined.

But in later life, Françoise Sagan effected a miraculous transformation to the Sage of Montparnasse, a sort of existentialist Brigitte Bardot, consulted for her views on the burning issues of the day.

[Emphases added.]