Dutton in New York[2] and that by Irene Ash was published by John Murray in London,[3] followed in the same year by a Penguin Books paperback edition.

Dominique is a sophisticated twenty-year-old law student at the Sorbonne in mid-1950s Paris who is introduced by her lover Bertrand to his uncle and aunt, the worldly businessman Luc and his wife Françoise.

Tiring of Bertrand, Dominique eventually decides on the experiment of accepting Luc's desire to make love to her and spends two weeks with him in a luxurious hotel in Cannes.

[6] Another study notes that the novel's appearance was followed by the even greater challenge to conventional morality in the film Et Dieu créa la femme, embodied in its star Brigitte Bardot.

[7] Thus it appeared in French intellectual terms, while the review in Time stated less sympathetically that "Sagan's prose is as disciplined as her characters are not… her novel is a petition in spiritual and emotional bankruptcy.

The short piece takes its beginning "After reading A Certain Smile by Françoise Sagan" and makes fun of the book's mood of melancholy boredom and amorality.