Inseparable Read online

  Dedication

  TO ZAZA

  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? I should dedicate this story to you: but I know that you are nowhere now, and that I am speaking to you here through literary artfulness. Besides, this is not truly your story but simply a story inspired by us. You were not Andrée and I am not the Sylvie who speaks in my name.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction by Margaret Atwood

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Afterword by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir

  Selected Letters Between Simone de Beauvoir and Élisabeth “Zaza” Lacoin, 1920–1929

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author and Translator

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  by Margaret Atwood

  How exciting to learn that Simone de Beauvoir, grandmother of second-wave feminism, had written a novel that had never been published! In French it was called Les inséparables and was said by the journal Les libraires to be a story that “follows with emotion and clarity the passionate friendship between two rebellious young women.” Of course I wanted to read it, but then I was asked to write an introduction to the English translation.

  My initial reaction was panic. This was a throwback: as a young person, I was terrified of Simone de Beauvoir. I went to university at the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, when, among the black-turtleneck-wearing, heavily eyelinered cognoscenti—admittedly not numerous in the Toronto of those days—the French Existentialists were worshipped as minor gods. Camus, how revered! How eagerly we read his grim novels! Beckett, how adored! His plays, especially Waiting for Godot, were favorites of college drama clubs. Ionesco and the Theatre of the Absurd, how puzzling! Yet his plays, too, were often performed among us (and some, such as Rhinoceros—a metaphor for fascist takeovers—are increasingly pertinent). Sartre, how bafflingly smart, though not what you’d call cute. Who hadn’t quoted “Hell is other people”? (Did we recognize that the corollary would have to be “Heaven is solitude”? No, we did not. Did we forgive him for having sucked up to Stalinism for so many years? Yes, we did, more or less, because he’d denounced the invasion of Hungary by the U.S.S.R. in 1956, then had written an incandescent introduction to Henri Alleg’s The Question (1958), an account of Alleg’s brutal torture at the hands of the French military during the Algerian war—a book banned in France by the government but available to us in the boonies, as I read it in 1961.)

  But among all these intimidating Existentialist luminaries there was only one female person: Simone de Beauvoir. How frighteningly tough she must be, I thought, to be holding her own among the super-intellectual steely brained Parisian Olympians! It was a time when women who aspired to be more than embodiments of assigned gender roles felt they had to comport themselves like macho men—coldly, with avowed self-interest—while seizing the initiative, even the sexual initiative. A bon mot here, a slapping away of a wandering hand there, an insouciant affair, or two, or twenty, followed by cigarettes, as in films . . . I never would have been up to it, struggling as I was with the lesser demands of the college debating club. In addition to which, smoking made me cough. As for those dowdy wartime suits with the durability and the shoulder pads, those would have been far too high a price to pay for a room of one’s own.

  Why was Simone de Beauvoir so frightening to me? Easy for you to ask: you have the benefit of distance—dead people are less innately scary than living ones, especially if they’ve been cut down to size by biographers, ever alert to flaws—whereas for me, Beauvoir was a giant contemporary. There was the twenty-year-old me in provincial Toronto, dreaming of running away to Paris to compose masterpieces in a garret while working as a waitress, and there were the Existentialists, holding court at Le Dôme Café in Montparnasse, writing for Les temps modernes, and sneering at the likes of mousy me. I could imagine what they might say. “Bourgeoise,” they would begin, flicking the ashes off their Gitanes. Worse: Canadian. “Quelques arpents de neige,” they would quote Voltaire. Moreover, a Canadian from the backwoods. And the worst kind of backwoods Canadian: an Anglo. The dismissive contempt! The sophisticated disdain! There is no snobbism quite like French snobbism, especially that of the Left. (The Left of the mid-twentieth century, that is; I am sure no such thing would happen now.)

  But then I grew somewhat older, and I actually went to Paris, where I was not rejected by Existentialists—I couldn’t find any, as I couldn’t afford to eat in Parisian cafés—and shortly after that I was in Vancouver, where I finally read The Second Sex from cover to cover, in the washroom so no one would see me doing it. (The year was 1964, and second-wave feminism had not yet arrived in the hinterlands of North America.)

  At this point, some of my terror was replaced by pity. What a strict upbringing had been imposed upon the young Simone. How constrained she had felt, in her supervised body and frilly girl’s clothing and rigidly prescribed social behavior. It seemed that there were advantages to being a backwoods Canadian girl after all: free from censorious nuns and demanding sets of highish-society relatives, I could run around in trousers—better than skirts, considering the mosquitoes—and paddle my own canoe and, once in high school, attend sock hops and go rollicking off to drive-in movies with slightly disreputable boyfriends. Such unconstrained and indeed unladylike comportment never would have been permitted to the young Simone. The strictness was for her own good, or so she would have been told. If she violated the rules of her class, ruin would await her, and disgrace would be the lot of her family.

  It’s worth reminding ourselves that France did not grant the vote to women until 1944, and then only through a law signed by Charles de Gaulle in exile. That’s almost twenty-five years after most Canadian women gained the same right. So Beauvoir grew up hearing that women, in effect, were unworthy of having a say in the public life of the nation. She would have been thirty-six before she could vote, and then only in theory, since the Germans were still in control of France at that time.

  Once she came of age, during the twenties, Simone de Beauvoir reacted strongly against her corseted background. I, being much less corseted, did not feel that the conditions described in The Second Sex applied to all women. Some of the book rang true to me, to be sure. Though by no means all of it.

  In addition, there was the generation gap: I was born in 1939, whereas Beauvoir was born in 1908, a year before my mother. They were of the same cohort, though worlds apart. My mother grew up in rural Nova Scotia, where she was a tomboy, a horseback rider, and a speed skater. (Try to picture Simone de Beauvoir speed skating and you will grasp the difference.) Both had lived through World War I as children and World War II as adults, though France was at the center of both, and Canada—though its wartime military losses were greatly out of proportion to its population—was never bombed and never occupied. 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.

  Thus my mother lacked the flinty gaze, having instead a cheerful, roll-up-your-sleeves, don’t-whine practicality that would have seemed offensively naive to any mid-century Parisian. Overcome by the oppressiveness of existence? Faced with a large rock that Sisyphus must roll uphill, only to have it roll down again? Plagued by the existential tension between justice and freedom? Striving for inner authenticity or, indeed, for meaning? Worried by how many men you’d have to sleep with in order to wipe t
he stain of the haute bourgeoisie from yourself forever? “Take a nice brisk walk in the fresh air,” my mother would have said, “and you’ll feel a lot better.” When I was waxing too depressingly intellectual and/or morose, this was her advice to me.

  My mother wouldn’t have been very interested in the more abstract and philosophical portions of The Second Sex, but I expect she would have been intrigued by much of Simone de Beauvoir’s other writing. From this distance it’s arguable that Beauvoir’s freshest and most immediate work comes directly from her own experience. Again and again she felt drawn back to her childhood, her youth, her young adulthood—exploring her own formation, her complex feelings, her sensations of the time. The best-known example is perhaps the first volume of her autobiography, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (1958), but the same material appears in stories and novels. She was, in a sense, haunted by herself. Whose invisible but heavy footfall was that, coming inexorably up the dark stairway? It usually turned out to be hers. The ghost of her former self, or selves, was ever present.

  And now we have a wellspring of sorts: Inseparable, unpublished until now. It recounts what was perhaps the single most influential experience of Beauvoir’s life: her relationship with “Zaza”—the Andrée of the novel—a many-layered and intense friendship that ended with Zaza’s early and tragic death.

  Beauvoir wrote this book in 1954, five years after publishing The Second Sex, and made the mistake of showing it to Sartre. He judged most works by political standards and could not grasp its significance; for a materialist Marxist, this was odd, as the book is intensely descriptive of the physical and social conditions of its two young female characters. At that time the only means of production taken seriously had to do with factories and agriculture, not the unpaid and undervalued labor of women. Sartre dismissed this work as inconsequential. Beauvoir wrote of it in her memoir that it “seemed to have no inner necessity and failed to hold the reader’s interest.” This appears to have been a quote from Sartre, one with which Beauvoir appears to have agreed at the time.

  Well, Dear Reader, Mr. “Hell is other people” Sartre was wrong, at least from this Dear Reader’s perspective. I suppose that if you’re keen on abstractions such as the Perfection of Humankind and Total Justice and Equality, you won’t like novels much, since all novels are about individual people and their circumstances; and you particularly won’t like novels written by your lady love about events that have taken place before you yourself have manifested in her life, and that feature an important, talented, and adored Other who happens to be female. The inner life of young girls of the bourgeoisie? How trivial. Pouf. Enough with this small-scale pathos, Simone. Turn your well-honed mind to more serious matters.

  Ah, but M. Sartre, we reply from the twenty-first century, these are serious matters. 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?

  Furthermore, how many versions of Zazas are living on the earth right now—bright, talented, capable women, some oppressed by the laws of their nations, others through poverty or discrimination within supposedly more gender-equal countries? Inseparable is particular to its own time and place—all novels are—but it transcends its own time and place as well.

  Read it and weep, Dear Reader. The author herself weeps at the outset: this is how the story begins, with tears. It seems that, despite her forbidding exterior, Beauvoir never stopped weeping for the lost Zaza. Perhaps she herself worked so hard to become who she was as a sort of memorial: Beauvoir must express herself to the utmost, because Zaza could not.

  Chapter 1

  When I was nine, I was a very good girl; I hadn’t always been. In my early childhood, the tyranny of adults threw me into such raging fits that one day, one of my aunts seriously declared: “Sylvie is possessed by demons.” War and religion had defeated me. I immediately proved my exemplary patriotism by stomping on a plastic doll that was “made in Germany”; I didn’t like it anyway. I was taught that my good behavior and piousness would determine whether God saved France: I couldn’t escape. I walked through the Basilica of Sacré Coeur with the other little girls, waving banners and singing. I started praying a very great deal and grew to like it. Father Dominique, who was the chaplain at Adélaïde, my school, encouraged my devotion. Wearing a tulle dress and a bonnet made of Irish lace, I took my First Communion: from that day onward, I was held up as an example to my younger sisters. My prayers were answered when my father was transferred to the War Ministry due to a heart condition.

  On that particular morning, however, I was very excited; it was the first day of school. I was eager to get back: the classes (as solemn as a church Mass), the silence of the corridors, the sweet smiles of the young ladies. They wore long skirts and high-necked blouses, and since a part of the building had been transformed into a hospital, they often dressed as nurses. Beneath their white veils stained here and there with blood, they looked like saints, and I was moved when they pressed me to their hearts. I quickly wolfed down the soup and tasteless bread that had replaced the hot chocolate and brioche we’d had before the war, and waited impatiently as Mama finished dressing my sisters. All three of us had on sky blue coats made of the same fabric that the officers wore and tailored exactly like military greatcoats.

  “Look, there’s even a little belt!” said Mama to her admiring or amazed friends. As we left the building, Mama held hands with the two little ones. We sadly passed the Café de la Rotonde that had noisily opened below our apartment and which was, said Papa, a hideout for defeatists; the word intrigued me. “They are the people who believe in the defeat of France,” Papa explained. “We should shoot them all.” I didn’t understand. You don’t believe what you believe on purpose: could you be punished because certain ideas come into your mind? The spies who gave poisoned candy to children, or the ones who stabbed French women with poisoned needles, obviously deserved to die, but the defeatists left me perplexed. I didn’t try to ask Mama: she always gave the same answers as Papa.

  My little sisters did not walk quickly; the gates of the Luxembourg Gardens seemed to go on forever. Finally, I got to school, climbing up the stairs and happily swinging my schoolbag full of new books. I recognized the faint odor of sick patients mixed in with the smell of floor wax in the freshly polished hallways; the supervisors hugged me. In the coatroom, I saw my friends from the year before; I wasn’t close with anyone in particular, but I liked the noise we made all together. I stood for a while in the large auditorium, in front of the display cases full of old dead things that managed to die a second time: stuffed birds lost their feathers, dried plants crumbled, shells faded. The bell rang and I went into the Sainte Marguerite classroom; all the classrooms were the same. The pupils sat around an oval table covered in black moleskin and were supervised by the teacher. Our mothers sat behind us, watching us as they knitted balaclavas. I headed to my seat and saw that the one next to mine was taken by a little girl I didn’t know; she had brown hair and hollow cheeks and looked much younger than I was. Her dark, shining eyes stared at me intensely.

  “Are you the best pupil?”

  “I’m Sylvie Lepage,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Andrée Gallard. I’m nine; if I look younger, it’s because I was burnt to a crisp and didn’t grow much. I couldn’t go to school for a year, but Mama wants me to catch up. Could you lend me your notebooks from last year?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Andrée’s confidence and her precise, rapid way of speaking unsettled me. She looked me up and down defiantly.

  “The girl next to me said
you were the best pupil,” she said, nodding slightly toward Lisette. “Is it true?”

  “I’m often at the top of the class,” I said somewhat shyly.

  I stared at Andrée; her dark hair fell straight down around her face, and she had an ink stain on her chin. You don’t meet a little girl who was burned alive every day, so I wanted to ask her a lot of questions, but Mademoiselle Dubois had come in, her long dress sweeping across the floor. She was a brisk woman who had a mustache and whom I respected a lot. She sat down and called out our names; she looked up at Andrée: “Well, my dear, we don’t feel too intimidated, do we?”

  “I’m not shy, Mademoiselle,” said Andrée confidently. “Besides,” she added pleasantly, “you’re not intimidating.”

  Mademoiselle Dubois hesitated for a moment, then smiled beneath her mustache and continued taking attendance.

  The end of classes finished with the usual ritual: Mademoiselle stood at the doorstep, shook the hand of each mother, and kissed every child on the forehead. She placed her hand on Andrée’s shoulder: “You’ve never been to school?”

  “No; until now I’ve worked at home, but now I’m too big.”

  “I hope you’ll follow in your older sister’s footsteps,” said Mademoiselle.

  “Oh! We’re very different,” said Andrée. “Malou takes after Papa, she loves math, but I especially love literature.”

  Lisette poked me with her elbow. You couldn’t say that Andrée was impertinent, but she didn’t use the tone of voice she should have when talking to a teacher.

  “Do you know where the study room is for day students? If no one comes to pick you up right away, that’s where you should go and wait,” said Mademoiselle.

  “No one is coming to pick me up; I’m going home by myself,” said Andrée, then quickly added, “Mama told the school.”