And then we began travelling together in the summers.” She let me into her life and presented me to her friends in her entourage including Sartre. “Something happened between us that, like love, is not explicable. The death of De Beauvoir’s mother, Françoise, three years later brought the two women even closer. I was very moved by her interest and I remember very well that first rendezvous,” Le Bon de Beauvoir says. “I was very intimidated, but she succeeded in putting me at ease and asked me about my studies and my family. ![]() Le Bon’s appearance in her life was, she wrote, “a stroke of luck”, even if her guest seemed “very intimidated” and so nervous “she twisted her fingers and spoke with a strangulated voice”. In the fourth volume of her memoirs, dedicated “To Sylvie”, De Beauvoir writes that at the time she believed “nothing important could happen to me from then on, except unhappiness”. “Lots of people wrote to her, especially young women and especially philosophy students like me, and she always replied,” she says. Later, after she moved to Paris to study, De Beauvoir invited her to her home, a two-floor artists’ studio in an art deco building in Rue Victor Schoelcher, in Paris’s 14th arrondissement. Le Bon was 17 and still at high school when she wrote to De Beauvoir, expressing her admiration and asking if they could meet. The story of how the celebrated feminist thinker, then in her 50s, met and became attached to a young philosophy undergraduate from Rennes 33 years her junior is in itself worthy of a novel. I also have to protect myself,” she says. “I believe our relationship was very important in her life, but this is my life. ![]() Photograph: Editions de L’HerneĪt 80, Le Bon de Beauvoir, like De Beauvoir a former philosophy professor, is a strikingly elegant and discreet figure who in the 35 years since the writer’s death has rarely spoken at length or written about her love for De Beauvoir, partly, she suggests, to shield herself. Simone de Beauvoir, right, and Elisabeth ‘Zaza’ Lacoin, with whom the writer had an intense coming-of-age friendship, 1928. “I knew the manuscript existed because she had spoken about it, but after she died there were other works that I felt should be published first.” But she kept it, which suggests a certain judgment of it, because she destroyed the works she didn’t want to keep,” Le Bon de Beauvoir says. She wanted to write an autobiography, not another novel. ![]() “She wasn’t happy with it because it wasn’t what she wanted to do at the time. The story was never published in De Beauvoir’s lifetime, not, Le Bon de Beauvoir insists, because it was “too intimate” – as was suggested when it came out in France last year – or even because Sartre was sniffy and dismissive of it, but because the writer wanted to move away from fiction to concentrate on her memoirs. The Inseparables – as Le Bon de Beauvoir has named it in the absence of a title on the original manuscript – is a short, intimate account of De Beauvoir’s ultimately doomed relationship with Zaza, who died suddenly of viral encephalitis aged 21, and was written after she won the prestigious Goncourt literary prize in 1954. ![]() I have kept my nostalgia for that my whole life.” Now The Inseparables, an autobiographical De Beauvoir novel written in 1954 but just published for the first time in English, has thrown light on two relationships with women that bookended the writer’s life: the first, her intense coming-of-age friendship with classmate Elisabeth “Zaza” Lacoin the last, with Le Bon de Beauvoir, who was her companion for more than 25 years and whom De Beauvoir adopted to pass on her literary legacy.Īs De Beauvoir told a biographer: “You can explain my feeling for Sylvie by comparing it to my friendship with Zaza.
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