There is a certain melancholic melody to the writings of Françoise Sagan.

Reading Sagan feels light, like a brief summer rain, but also sophisticated, like the first sip of a perfectly chilled vintage Dom Perignon.

Her characters live their lives in elegant Parisian salons and on the sandy beaches of Saint-Tropez, their modes of transportation are either smart sport cars or a comfortable Rolls Royce with a private chauffeur.

They discuss art, music and current events, while at the same time contemplating their next move in affairs of the heart.

To read her novels is to look through a window to a time lost; more elegant but perhaps also more nihilistic, where feelings are fleeting and life can seem both airy and complicated. 

In That Mad Ache, romantic emotions are already from the beginning entangled with pecuniary matters.

Who has funds and who is lacking determines the narrative of the story. It begins with the meeting of two couples, the wealthy Diane and her intellectual, younger beau Antoine, who come across the sophisticated Charles and his carefree, young lover Lucile.

Charles and Diane, with considerably more life experience than their young lovers, quickly realize how this brief encounter will end.

Without even realizing themselves, Antoine and Lucile are drawn to one another, a kind of magnetism that only shared youth can accomplish. Diane and Charles, truly in love with their lovers, must let them go.

Despite the luxury the older and more established they could offer, and the riches that are at their disposal – mink coats, Dior dresses and invitations to all the best parties – Antoine and Lucile (at least for the moment) choose each other.

The original title in French is La chamade, which refers to the drumming that would sound in war when one of the fighting parties wished to surrender.

A fitting title, as the novel operates on two levels. Superficially, it is about a passionate love affair, and its effects on those around the two lovers. Its deeper theme is about passion and finances, about aging and losing one’s allure, and about how poverty can make people fall out of love.

In other words, it’s about victories and losses. 

For months, the young lovers live together in Antoine’s small room, while he works and Lucile, incapable of adapting to a life where she would need to work for a living.

Instead of socializing with the glamorous in-crowd that their former lovers were affiliated with, they now have tedious dinners, eating scraps and having endless and boring pseudo-intellectual conversations with Antoine’s bookish friends.

Lucile finds that she misses the freedom that money brings, the way that not having to think about finances liberates one’s mind.

Is it possible to keep love alive when everything else is scarce?