A painful injury rib-cartilage injury kept Jean Béliveau out of the Montreal Canadiens’ line-up in 1957 and on into early ’58, but at least he got some quality reading in at home while he convalesced. A close study of the paperback consuming his bedtime attention here, above, suggests that he was well into Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel Bonjour Tristesse, a tale of teenaged angst, desire, and Riviera tragedy that Sagan published at the age of 18. In 1958, Otto Preminger adapted it for movie screens in a version that starred David Niven and Deborah Kerr. No word on whether Béliveau saw that.

He was a serious reader, we know, as this Yale Joel portrait from 1952, below, substantiates. Béliveau was with the QMHL Quebec Aces that year. With superstardom in the NHL still ahead of him, he found time to kick back with a cigar and a tale of marital angst, betrayal, and Imperial Russian upheaval: Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

(Top image: Fonds La Presse, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal)