Simone de Beauvoir’s Lost Novel of Early Love

The legend of Simone de Beauvoir—of how an obedient Catholic schoolgirl cast off her rigid, patriarchal upbringing to become the high priestess of existential feminism—is often narrated as a love story. Her biographers trace her escape from the bourgeois Parisian milieu into which she was born, in 1908, first to the Sorbonne and then to the École Normale Supérieure. There, among the “graceless faces” of the agrégation candidates of 1929, she spied Jean-Paul Sartre, twenty-four years old and—as she rhapsodized in “Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter” (1958), the first of four autobiographical volumes—“still young enough to feel emotional about his future whenever he heard a saxophone playing after his third martini.” Together, she and her “Playboy,” her “Leprechaun,” as she called him, chased life’s pleasures up the steps of Boulevard du Montparnasse, down the Avenue d’Orléans, and all around the woodland parks of Paris, where her parents had forbidden her and her sister to speak with children outside their social class. Beauvoir’s mother was devoted to the Church and its rigid moralism; her father detested intellectuals and wanted his oldest daughter to “marry a country cousin.” By the time she met Sartre, Beauvoir had different aspirations. “Never have I so loved to read and think, never have I been so alive and happy or envisioned a future so rich. Oh! Jean-Paul, dear Jean-Paul, thank you,” she wrote in her diary.

For all the romance of the city blooming before her eyes, Beauvoir always played the love story itself—her dawning attraction to this garrulous, cross-eyed, funny little man—remarkably cool. She liked Sartre’s face and company but disliked his “false eye.” She was more painfully and earnestly attracted to her friend the philosopher René Maheu, and even to her rakish cousin Jacques. But she exulted in Sartre’s attention to her; it was an opportunity to define herself and the force she longed to be in the world. “We used to talk about all kinds of things, but especially about a subject which interested me above all others: myself,” she wrote. “Whenever other people made attempts to analyse me, they did so from the standpoint of their own little worlds, and this used to exasperate me. But Sartre always tried to see me as part of my own scheme of things, to understand me in light of my own set of values and attitudes.” With him, she was not “the Other,” the subordinate female position that she described in her 1949 feminist classic, “The Second Sex”: a timid and imaginatively impoverished creature for whom love was simply something provided to a husband as a matter of course. Beauvoir’s relationship with Sartre, as she recounts it in her autobiographical writings, led her from a state of alienation, in which she was only a bit player in other people’s “little worlds,” to the assurance that she was a singular and irreducible “Self.” She could define and interpret the meaning of her life through the energetic exercise of her “sovereign consciousness.”

Beauvoir’s autobiography, in a sense, accorded perfectly with the principles of French existentialism—its insistence on the freedom of every person’s consciousness and its Sartrean slogan that “existence precedes essence.” Perhaps the correspondence is a little too neat. True, intellectuals often pride themselves on living and loving by their theories—“There is no divorce between philosophy and life,” Beauvoir famously avowed—but it is hard to believe the story of their early days quite as she tells it. Not a hair is out of place, not a moment of shock or doubt ripples the surface of her triumphant self-determination. “Every woman in love recognizes herself in Hans Andersen’s little mermaid who exchanged her fishtail for a woman’s legs for love, and then found herself walking on needles and burning coals,” she claims in “The Second Sex.” How to reconcile such self-abnegating masochism with her joyous recollection of discovering herself with Sartre?

As careful readers of Beauvoir’s memoirs and diaries have noted, the strategically plotted romance between postwar France’s greatest male and female philosophers is haunted by the presence of a shadowy third—a friend. The most extreme feelings of agitation and rapture are reserved not for Sartre but for Elisabeth Lacoin, a brilliant and mercurial classmate whom Beauvoir called Zaza, and whose name Beauvoir underlined in black or brown ink throughout her diaries, casting a pall over all that surrounded it.

They met when they were around ten, under the uncharitable eyes of the nuns at the Cours Désirs school and the contemptuous gaze of Zaza’s “odious mother,” as Beauvoir described her. Whereas the Beauvoirs lived in genteel poverty, Zaza was a member of the haute bourgeoisie, the third of nine children, and “very high-strung, like a sleek and elegant racehorse ready to bolt out of control,” as Beauvoir’s sister sniffed to the biographer Deirdre Bair. Zaza had been bred to marry, and to marry well. Nothing could convince Madame Lacoin otherwise: not Zaza’s nimble, mischievous mind, which won her a place at the Sorbonne; not her enthusiasm for literature or her talent for music; not her love for Beauvoir’s classmate the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, called Jean Pradelle in Beauvoir’s memoirs. Zaza, torn between her fealty to her mother and her thirst for freedom, grew wretched, frantic, and frighteningly thin, until one day, in the autumn of 1929, while Beauvoir and Sartre were embarking on their affair, she came down with a fever and an agonizing headache—a case of viral encephalitis, the doctors suspected. She died in a clinic at Saint-Cloud, where she kept calling out for her “violin, Pradelle, Simone, champagne.”

“I loved Zaza with an intensity which could not be accounted for by any established set of rules and conventions,” Beauvoir recalled in her memoirs, almost thirty years after her friend’s death. “The least praise from Zaza overwhelmed me with joy; the sarcastic smiles she so frequently gave me were a terrible torment.” She describes her “subjugation” to her beloved as plunging her “into the black depths of humility.” It was in these depths that Beauvoir’s abject “little mermaid” swam: her idea of love as a state of sacrifice and suffering was provoked not by a man but by what the literary critic Lisa Appignanesi describes, with delicacy, as one of Beauvoir’s “amorous friendships” with a woman. Others have been bolder about calling a spade a spade. “Simone was in the throes of her first great love affair,” her adopted daughter and literary executor, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, writes in an afterword to “Les Inséparables,” a novel about Zaza’s radiant life and swift death, which Beauvoir wrote in the winter of 1954 and then abandoned. It finally appeared in France last year, and now, as if to make up for lost time, appears in not one but two English translations—in the U.K. as “The Inseparables” (Vintage), translated by Lauren Elkin, and in the United States as “Inseparable” (Ecco), translated by Sandra Smith. The story, described in France as “a tragic lesbian love story,” has been billed as “too intimate” to be published during Beauvoir’s lifetime.

“The Inseparables” begins as most love stories do, with the meeting of two young people, each alien to the other. One day, at the Collège Adelaïde, a nine-year-old girl with startlingly dark, fervent eyes and a hollow little face sits next to Sylvie Lepage. The girl’s name is Andrée Gallard, and it is her first time at school. Immediately, she offers Sylvie a glimpse of the pain and the pleasure of the flesh inflamed. When she was younger, she reveals, her skirt caught fire as she stood too close to some potatoes roasting on a campfire. She burned her thigh right down to the bone, and the wound still bulged under her skirt. This incident establishes the asymmetry that defines their relationship. “Nothing so interesting had ever happened to me,” Sylvie thinks. “It suddenly seemed as if nothing had ever happened to me at all.”

About Sylvie, our first-person narrator, we learn very little; on the surface, she is a conventional child of the Parisian middle class. Underneath, her tremendous powers of observation are fixed on Andrée, who appears to her a splendid and uncanny creature. Andrée addresses their teachers as equals, in a voice that is polite but insouciant. She plays the piano and the violin with easy mastery, speaks of “Don Quixote and Cyrano de Bergerac as if they had existed in flesh and blood,” and turns somersaults and cartwheels with unexpected vigor. Her every word is cause for Sylvie’s turmoil; the idea of her absence is, quite simply, unbearable. “Life without her would be death,” Sylvie reflects when they are reunited after a summer apart. “It was in those moments that I was most troublingly aware of the gift she had received from heaven, which I found so enthralling: her personality.”

Sylvie’s feeling for Andrée as they grow up is not just love; it is a transcendent love, the love by which all other loves must be defined and judged. “I could only conceive of one kind of love: the love I had for her,” Sylvie thinks. “The kind of love where you kiss”—by which she means kiss men—“had no truth for me.” Yet Sylvie’s love is not reciprocated, because Andrée’s “love for her mother made her other attachments pale by comparison.” In turn, Andrée’s filial love is not reciprocated, either, because Madame Gallard sees her daughter not as dazzlingly and inimitably alive but as a performer of “social duties,” a girl of marriageable age whose piety and obedience to her family must be preserved if she is to become a respectable woman. “No doubt she loved Andrée in her way, but what way was that?” Sylvie wonders. “That was the question. We all loved her, only differently.”

The drama of “The Inseparables” lies in the tension between these competing and imperfectly requited loves for Andrée: first the loves of Sylvie and Madame Gallard, then the love of Pascal, a joyful Catholic philosopher (the Merleau-Ponty figure) who allows Andrée to imagine that she might reconcile duty and happiness—at least until he begins to delay proposing marriage to her. The problem that preoccupies the novel is not who loves Andrée best but what kind of love would grant her the freedom she craves. As the girls grow, Sylvie finds herself repulsed by the religiosity of the Gallard family and Pascal, and her faith in God is replaced by her quasi-spiritual devotion to Andrée. The novel leaps from one glorious tableau to another of Andrée in divine solitude, praying or playing her violin in a park. Alongside Sylvie, we, as readers, stop, stay, and bear witness to an outpouring of reverence:

When I sometimes went to pray in the chapel, often I would find she had arrived there first, on her knees before the altar, her head in her hands, or reaching her arms towards a station of the cross. Was she contemplating one day taking her vows? And yet she so loved her freedom, and the joys of this world. Her eyes shone when she told me about her holidays, how she spent hours galloping on horseback through the forests of pine trees, getting scratched by their branches as she went, how she swam through still waters in ponds, or in the freshwater of the Adour river. Was she dreaming about that paradise when she sat motionless before her notebooks, with a lost look in her eye?

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