Françoise Sagan was just 19 when she traveled to the United States to promote Bonjour Tristesse. Described as a “charming little monster” by writer François Mauriac, her scandalous reputation preceded her. Some sharp-tongued critics even whispered that she was not the real author of her wildly popular debut novel, an account of a high-school student’s romantic affairs while on vacation on the French Riviera, and her complicity with her father “on subjects that were previously out of bounds between parents and children.” Welcomed to America like a Hollywood star, she gave half-hearted interviews in faltering English. When meeting crowds of eager readers, she mechanically signed the same mistranslated message in every book: “With all my sympathies.” She was bored senseless, but as fate would have it, she received a telegram from Tennessee Williams – a man she considered to be the greatest American poet since Walt Whitman. The playwright invited her to spend a few days at his home in Key West, where he was staying with his partner, actor Frank Merlo, and the novelist Carson McCullers. Françoise Sagan took the first plane to Miami and drove across Florida, “thinking about Key Largo and other detective movies.” Joined by her sister Suzanne and a friend, she stayed at the unremarkable Key Wester Hotel, not far from Tennessee Williams’ house.

Thirty years later, the novelist shared this story in Avec mon meilleur souvenir (1984), an autobiographical book featuring Billie Holiday, Orson Welles, and Rudolf Nureyev. One chapter is devoted to the author of A Streetcar Named Desire, with whom Sagan struck up a transatlantic friendship that lasted until his death in 1983. In a few beautifully written pages, she paints the portrait of a cheerful, tender, profoundly decent man, as celebrated by critics as he was despised by puritans. “Much like Sartre, Giacometti, and several other men I knew too little, he was quite incapable of doing harm, striking out, or being severe,” she wrote. For two weeks, the writer and her fellow travelers experienced a snapshot of life with Tennessee Williams, Frank Merlo, and Carson McCullers, a sad, childlike woman with “eyes as blue as puddles,” ravaged by alcohol and sickness at the age of 38 . “I saw these two men taking care of this woman,” Françoise Sagan wrote, clearly moved. “Putting her to bed, getting her up, dressing her, entertaining her, keeping her warm, loving her; in short, providing her with everything that friendship, understanding, and attention can give to someone who is too sensitive, who has seen too much and extracted too much from it, who has written perhaps too much to bear it, to suffer it even a moment longer.”

In New Selected Essays: Where I Live (2009), a posthumous collection of previously unpublished work, Tennessee Williams gives his own version of this short stay. Perhaps out of modesty, he notes that Françoise Sagan came to Key West to meet Carson McCullers, who was staying with him. “There was clarity and humor, not confusion and panic, in her young eyes,” he writes. “It was evening when I met her. I wondered if in the morning she would be at her typewriter banging out a new novel with panicky compulsion. Well, she wasn’t. In the morning, she was sun-bathing and swimming, and in the afternoon we went deep-sea fishing and in the evening, when it came again, she took the wheel of my sports car and drove it so fast, with such a gay smile, that I had to warn her of the highway patrolmen.”