Ms. Sagan had an enormous international success with 'Bonjour Tristesse,' about an amoral teenager who sets out to keep her philandering widowed father from marrying again. The novel was originally published in France in 1954. The following year an English translation reached No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. Ms. Sagan was only 19, making her the youngest author to achieve that feat at the time.
...'Whoever has not thrilled to speed has not thrilled to life,' she wrote in 'With Fondest Regards' (1985). 'However madly and hopelessly in love you may be, at 120 miles an hour you are less so. Your blood no longer congeals around your heart; your blood throbs to the extremities of your body, to your fingertips, your toes and your eyelids, now the fateful and tireless guardians of your own life.'"
