Inseparable: A Never-Before-Published Novel by Simone de Beauvoir

Author:Simone de Beauvoir [Beauvoir, Simone de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780063075061
Google: PzwNEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Ecco
Published: 2021-09-06T23:00:00+00:00

Afterword

by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir

A young brunette with short hair sits down beside Simone de Beauvoir, age nine, then a student at the Catholic Adeline Désir School. She is Élisabeth Lacoin, called Zaza, and only a few days older than Simone. Unaffected, funny, and bold, she is in sharp contrast to the prevailing conformism. But at the start of the following school year, Zaza is not there. Depressing and oppressive, the world is a dark place, until suddenly the latecomer arrives and with her the sun, joy, and happiness. Her lively intelligence and many talents seduce Simone; she admires her, is captivated. They compete for the top places in the class and become inseparable. Not that Simone doesn’t have a happy family life with her beloved young mother, respected father, and submissive younger sister. But what has happened to the little ten-year-old girl is her first emotional encounter: her feelings for Zaza are passionate; she venerates her, is terrified of displeasing her. In the poignant vulnerability of childhood, she does not, of course, understand the early manifestation of love at first sight; it is to us, her witnesses, that it is so moving. Her long conversations alone with Zaza are infinitely priceless to her. Oh! Their upbringing constrains them—no obvious familiarity, they use the formal vous with each other—but despite their reserve, they speak in a way that Simone has never spoken to anyone. What is this unknown feeling, the feeling that, under the conventional label of “friendship,” fills her young heart with passion, wonder, and ecstasy, if not “love”? She understands very quickly that Zaza does not feel the same attachment to her, nor does she suspect Simone’s intense feeling, but why should that matter given the blossoming of love?

Zaza dies suddenly, one month before her twenty-second birthday, on November 25, 1929, an unforeseen catastrophe that continues to haunt Simone. For a long time, her friend appeared in her dreams, her yellowish face beneath a wide-brimmed pink hat, looking at her with reproach. To counteract the void and to never forget her, Simone’s only recourse is the alchemy of literature. Four times, in various forms—in the unpublished novels written in her youth, in her collection entitled Quand prime le spirituel (When Things of the Spirit Come First), in a passage removed from the novel Les mandarins (The Mandarins), which won her the Prix Goncourt in 1954—four times the writer had already tried to bring Zaza back to life, in vain. In 1954 she tries again in a short, untitled novel that we are publishing here for the very first time. This final, fictional transposition leaves her unsatisfied but leads her, via an essential detour, to a decisive literary transformation. In 1958, she merges her autobiographical writing with the story of the life and death of Zaza into what would become Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter).

The finished novel, conserved by Simone despite her critical judgment of it, is of the greatest importance: confronted by

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