The traditional love triangle consists of two men and one woman:

The woman is usually positioned in the triangle’s centre and the men are placed by her side, one on her left, the other on her right, fighting for her attention.

In this novel, the two men are childhood friends Charles and Jérôme, and the woman they both love is Jérôme’s partner, Alice.

Before the outbreak of the war, which in this case is World War II, she was married to a successful surgeon in Vienna, but already before the Anschluß, when Austria was incorporated into the growing Third Reich, Alice had wanted a divorce, depressed and bored with her marriage.

Her ex-husband was Jewish and with the arrival of the Nazis, the two had to find a way to escape.

This is how she met Jérôme, working with the French resistance and underground, smuggling the two out of Austria and into safety, and in the process becoming Alice’s lover. 

When Jérôme and Alice pay Charles a visit, it’s because they want to make use of his strategically located house, south of the demarcation line between occupied and “free” France.

The plan is to trick Charles into falling in love with Alice, so that they can convince him to hide refugees on their way out of the country.

The plan backfires as Alice finds herself developing real feelings for Charles, becoming torn between the two men. 

The severe wartime backdrop is unusual for Sagan, a step away from the exclusive apartments and lavish milieus her characters usually find themselves in, though of course Alice and Charles still find a way to go on a weekend to Paris, complete with a luxury hotel suite on Rue de Rivoli and a visit to an exclusive nightclub, Alice dressed in an haute couture-dress and Charles finds himself in a bespoke smoking. 

At times, the romance borders the melodramatic, but the threats of war bring the story back to a grim reality. And the end (not to be revealed here), turns everything around, making the sappy love story appear in a completely new and harsher light.

The original French title, De Guerre Lasse, could loosely be translated as “weary of war”, which refers to both the German invasion and the struggles within the romantic trio.

Without the war, the men would never have met Alice, but at the same time, the war is destroying them all as well as the world that they used to live in.