Sagan, Françoise

Françoise Sagan got her pseudonym as an author from Duchess Sagan in Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" (À la recherche du temps perdu). Her real name was Françoise Quoirez, and she was born as the youngest daughter of a wealthy civil servant in Cajarc, Lot. The family then moved away from southern France, and Sagan grew up in Lyon and Paris. When fourteen years old, she was forced to leave a convent school in which she had been placed due to "insufficient spirituality". In this period, she also began writing poems and short stories.