Zaza
PARIS, MONDAY, 4 NOVEMBER 1929
My dear Simone,
I saw P. [Merleau-Ponty] on Saturday, his brother is leaving this very day for Togo; until the end of the week, he’ll be busy with classes or the desire to keep his mother company for a while as she is finding this separation so difficult. We would be very, very happy to meet you on Saturday at the “Bar Sélection” and to see you, whom I always miss, in your delightful grey dress. I know that our little friends are going out together on Saturday, why not bring them around to see us, do they feel such a great revulsion at seeing us, are you afraid that we’ll tear each other apart? As for me, I am eager to meet Sartre as soon as possible, I found the letter you read me infinitely pleasing, and the poem beautiful, which, despite its awkwardness, made me think a lot. Between now and Saturday, for family reasons that would be too long to explain, I won’t be able to see you alone as I had hoped. Wait a little.
I think of you always and love you with all my heart.
Zaza
NOTE: This is the last letter from Simone de Beauvoir to Zaza, written on 13 November 1929; Zaza was already very ill and probably unable to read it. In it is the final use of the expression “My inseparable friend.” Zaza died on 25 November.
WEDNESDAY (13 NOVEMBER 1929)
Dear Zaza,
I’m counting on you for Sunday at 5 o’clock. You’ll see Sartre who is on leave.* I’d really like to see you before then. What if we went to the Salon d’Automne* on Friday from 2:00–4:00 or Saturday around the same time? If you can, send me a note right away saying where we should meet. I’m going to try to see Merleau-Ponty one of these days when he finishes classes. In any case, send him my most affectionate regards if you see him before I do.
I hope that all the problems you told me about the other day are over. I was happy, so happy about the times we spent together, my very dear Zaza. I’m still going to the B.N.,* are you going to come too?
I find happiness on every page, happiness in bigger and bigger writing. And I am closer to you now than ever before, my dear past, dear present, my dear inseparable friend. Lots of love, Zaza dearest.
S. de Beauvoir
Acknowledgments
WITH THANKS to Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir and the Association Élisabeth Lacoin for their gracious collaboration.
About the Author and Translator
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, a French existentialist philosopher, novelist, essayist, editor, and groundbreaking feminist, was born in Paris, where she lived most of her life. She was the author of the feminist classic The Second Sex, several volumes of autobiography, and highly acclaimed novels, including The Mandarins, winner of the Prix Goncourt.
SANDRA SMITH has published over thirty translations, including Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky, and The Stranger, by Albert Camus. She has won the French-American Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the Independent British Booksellers Book of the Year Prize, and the National Jewish Book Award.
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Copyright
INSEPARABLE. Copyright © 2021 by Éditions de L’Herne. English translation copyright © 2021 by Sandra Smith. Introduction copyright © 2021 by Margaret Atwood. Afterword copyright © 2021 by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover photograph: Élisabeth Lacoin (Zaza) and Simone de Beauvoir at Gagnepan, September 1928 © Association Élisabeth Lacoin/L’Herne
Overlay: letter from Simone to Zaza, September 15, 1920 © Collection Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir
Originally published as Les inséparables in France in 2020 by Éditions de L’Herne.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-307506-1
Version 07282021
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-307504-7
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*The École Polytechnique is one of the world’s leading universities for science and engineering. [Trans.]
*This was the nickname for the German howitzer cannon. [Trans.]
*Camille Desmoulins (1760–1794) was a journalist and politician who was executed along with Danton. [Trans.]
*Marie-Jeanne Roland (1754–1793) was a writer who held a literary “salon” and became involved in politics. She was executed for treason and, as she climbed the steps of the guillotine, said, “O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name.” [Trans.]
*A Royalist, nationalistic newspaper founded in 1908 and censored after the Liberation in 1944. [Trans.]
*Marc Sangnier (1873–1950) was a Roman Catholic thinker and politician. [Trans.]
*A monthly magazine with literary, political, and cultural articles, first published in 1829. [Trans.]
*Louis Veuillot (1813–1883) was a journalist and author who helped to popularize “ultramontanism,” a philosophy that favored papal supremacy. [Trans.]
*Charles de Montalembert (1810–1870) was a prominent supporter of liberal Catholicism. [Trans.]
*Jean-Baptiste Lacordaire (1802–1861) was a theologian and political activist who re-established the Dominican Order after the French Revolution. [Trans.]
*Albert, Count de Mun (1841–1914), was a Christian Socialist leader who advocated Roman Catholicism as an instrument of social reform. [Trans.]
*Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) was a philosopher and moralist who advocated conservatism. [Trans.]
*Eugénie de Guérin (1805–1848) was a French poet and diarist, the sister of the writer Maurice de Guérin, whom she attempted to lead into a religious life. [Trans.]
*The “Cartel des Quatre” was formed in 1927 by four famous directors working in the Paris theater: Louis Jouvet, Charles Dullin, Gaston Baty, and Georges Pitoëff. [Trans.]
*The reference here is to the “Course des vaches,” a kind of nonviolent bullfight in which cows whose horns had been filed down charged at the young men. [Trans.]
*Montaigne had an intense relationship with the poet Étienne de La Boétie, who, like Zaza, died suddenly, at the age of thirty-three. [Trans.]
*Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), French philosopher and one of the leading proponents of phenomen
ology in postwar France. [Trans.]
*This is a reference to a traditional event in the Landes region where the animals are not hurt. The men jump on the bulls’ backs and tie a ribbon to their horns. In French, it is called la course des vaches. [Trans.]
*Maurice de Gandillac (1906–2006) was a philosopher born in French Algeria. He was a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne (1946) and supervised Foucault and Derrida, among others. [Trans.]
*The “Bar Sélection” was the name given to the room that Simone de Beauvoir rented from her grandmother in September 1929, located at 91 Avenue Denfert. It was the first time she lived independently.
*Sartre’s military service had just begun.
*The Salon d’Automne is an annual art exhibition held in Paris. [Trans.]
*The Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library). [Trans.]
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