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If I have tears in my eyes tonight, is it because you have died, or rather because I’m the one who is still alive?
The hardness, the flintiness, the unflinching stare at the uglier sides of existence that we find in Beauvoir are not unconnected to France’s ordeals. Enduring these two wars, with their privations, dangers, anxieties, political infighting, and betrayals: that passage through hell would have taken its toll.
Without Zaza, without the passionate devotion between the two of them, without Zaza’s encouragement of Beauvoir’s intellectual ambitions and her desire to break free of the conventions of her time, without Beauvoir’s view of the crushing expectations placed on Zaza as a woman by her family and her society—expectations that, in Beauvoir’s view, literally squeezed the life out of her, despite her mind, her strength, her wit, her will—would there have been a Second Sex? And without that pivotal book, what else would not have followed?
You don’t believe what you believe on purpose: could you be punished because certain ideas come into your mind?
I didn’t try to ask Mama: she always gave the same answers as Papa.
I felt the kind of fear aroused by the unknown.
But what gave her the greatest prestige in my eyes were certain unique characteristics whose meanings I have never understood: when she looked at a peach or an orchid, or if anyone simply said either word in front of her, Andrée would shudder, and her arms would break out in goose bumps; those were the times when the heavenly gift she’d received—and which I marveled at so much—would manifest itself in the most disconcerting way: it was character. I secretly told myself that Andrée was one of those child prodigies whose lives would later be recounted in books.
The wind enthralled me. I felt that from one end of the earth to the other, the trees spoke to each other and spoke to God; it sounded like both music and a prayer were piercing my heart before rising to the heavens.
was getting older, becoming sentimental.
would look at the enormous wardrobe and the hand-carved wooden clock that held within it two copper pinecones and the obscurity of time.
Next year, he’ll start a new book, and I’ll still be here, between the wardrobe and the clock. How many years? How many evenings? Is living nothing more than that: killing one day after the other? Would I be this bored until I died? I thought that I missed Sadernac; before going to bed, I shed a few more tears over the poplar trees.
We made small talk, like adults do; but I suddenly understood, with astonishment and joy, that the emptiness in my heart, my gloomy feeling of recent days, had only one cause: the absence of Andrée. Living without her was no longer living.
compared to the long dialogue that continued secretly in her heart, our conversations seemed quite childish.
I wanted to know why, with so much emotion in her heart, so many things to do, so many gifts, she often looked distant and seemed sad to me.
In books, I thought with sadness, people declare their love or hatred for each other, they dare admit to everything they feel in their hearts; why is that impossible in life? I would walk for two days and two nights without eating or drinking to see Andrée for an hour, to spare her any pain: and she had no idea!
while the world probably could not be explained without God, God really didn’t explain that much, and besides, no one understood anything about Him.
They preferred talking about music, painting, and literature, in a rather stupid way, actually.
“They teach us in catechism class that we have to respect our bodies: so selling yourself in marriage is just as bad as selling yourself outside of marriage,”
“Do you think that animals have a soul?” Andrée asked. “I don’t know.” “If they don’t, that’s just too unfair! They’re just as unhappy as people are. And they don’t understand why,” Andrée added. “It’s worse when you don’t understand.”
if you don’t believe in God, how can you bear to live?” “But I like living,” I said.
At every instant, blessed eternity was in play, and no clear sign was given to indicate if you were about to achieve it or lose it!
I wanted to take her hand, make some gesture, but I remained a prisoner of our harsh past and did not move.
In some strange way, I understood that Andrée had died, suffocated by that whiteness.
Zaza died because she tried to be herself and was convinced that such a desire was evil.
Because Zaza was exceptional, she could not “adjust”—a sinister term that means fitting into a predetermined mold where a small dungeon awaits you, one among many; anything outside that dungeon will be constricted, crushed, thrown away like trash. Zaza could not fit the prototype; her uniqueness was destroyed. Therein lay the crime, the assassination.
She is suffocating, she so yearns to escape the constant presence of other people—which conjures up similar types of self-mortification in certain religious orders—that she goes as far as cutting her foot with an ax to escape a particularly odious social obligation. In this milieu, it is necessary to not stand out, not exist for oneself but to exist for others: “Mama never does something for herself, she spends her life devoted to other people,” she said one day of her mother. Under the continual imposition of these constricting traditions, any spirited individualism is crushed from the start.
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The repression exerted by Madame Lacoin was even more paradoxical when we perceive a crack in the foundation of her conformity: when young, it seems that she herself was forced by her mother into a marriage she found repulsive. She had to “adapt”—and this is where that atrocious word appears—so she abandoned her convictions and, after becoming an authoritarian matron, decided to reproduce the crushing cycle of events. How much frustration and resentment were hidden beneath her self-assurance?
Because, to her, faith was not, as it was for so many others, a complaisant dependence on God, a means of being right, of self-justification or fleeing responsibilities but the painful questioning of a silent, obscure, hidden God.
There is nothing sweeter in the world than feeling there is someone who can completely understand you and on whose friendship you can count on absolutely.
I am so often with you despite the distance. You know that, but I’m saying it to have the pleasure of seeing my pen write a truth that is so indisputable.
