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 SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908.

In 1929 she became the youngest person ever
to obtain the agrégation in philosophy at the
Sorbonne, placing second to Jean-Paul Sartre.
She taught at the lycées at Marseille and Rouen
from 1931–1937, and in Paris from 1938–1943.
After the war, she emerged as one of the leaders of
the existentialist movement, working with Sartre
on Les Temps modernes. The author of several
books including The Mandarins (1957), which
was awarded the Prix Goncourt, de Beauvoir
was one of the most influential thinkers of her
generation. She died in 1986.

LAUREN ELKIN

Lauren Elkin is the author of several books,

including Flâneuse: Women Walk the City. Her
co-translation (with Charlotte Mandell) of Claude
Arnaud’s biography of Jean Cocteau won the
2017 French-American Foundation’s translation
award. After twenty years in Paris, she now lives
in London.

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ALSO BY SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Fiction
She Came to Stay
The Blood of Others
All Men are Mortal
The Mandarins
Les Belles Images
The Woman Destroyed

Non-Fiction
The Ethics of Ambiguity
The Second Sex
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
The Prime of Life
The Force of Circumstance
A Very Easy Death
All Said and Done
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre
Letters to Sartre

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 SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

The Inseparables
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY

Lauren Elkin

INTRODUCED BY

Deborah Levy

AFTER WORD BY

Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir

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 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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Afterword © Éditions de L’Herne, 2020

English translation of novel, afterword and captions
© Lauren Elkin, 2021
Introduction © Deborah Levy, 2021
Simone de Beauvoir has asserted her right to be identified as the
author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright,
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This edition first published in Great Britain by Vintage Classics, 2021
First published as Les inséparables by Simone de Beauvoir © 2020,
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 Introduction

This introduction contains plot spoilers.

In every decade of my life since my twenties, I have been

awed, confused, intrigued and inspired by Beauvoir’s
attempt to live with meaning, pleasure and purpose. ‘Be
loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody,’ she insisted
in her autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.
The act of her writing what has now been titled The
Inseparables cannot be extricated from this epic endeavour.
It is a valuable part of the long conversation that Beauvoir’s
many books have begun with old and new readers.
After she’d won the Goncourt Prize for the immense
reach of The Mandarins, I can see it must have been appeal-
ing for Beauvoir to write an intimate novella. The Inseparables
once again returns to her friendship (from the age of nine)
with Elisabeth Lacoin, nicknamed Zaza. Beauvoir’s readers

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know that this friendship had long haunted her, not only
in her books, but in her dreams.
In my view she never quite managed to write up the
spectre of Zaza entirely convincingly, which is why she
kept returning to try and catch her on the page. Maybe
this is because her own fierce desire for Zaza to finally
claim the life she deserved might have been stronger than
Zaza’s own desire to risk all she would lose in doing so:
God, her family, bourgeois respectability.
Given that childhood is the beginning of everything
we experience most deeply, it is not surprising that Beau-
voir’s strong feelings and hopes for Elisabeth Lacoin were
also the beginning of her political education.
At the time they were at school together, women could
not vote, were coerced into marriage and societally encour-
aged to accept an existence that mostly involved servicing
the needs of their future husbands and children.
So, what sort of girl was Elisabeth Lacoin? Her avatar
in The Inseparables is named Andrée, Beauvoir is Sylvie.

In her very first encounter at a private Catholic school

with Sylvie, new pupil Andrée announces she was ‘burned
alive’ while cooking potatoes at a campfire. Her dress
caught alight and her right thigh was ‘grilled to the bone’.
Andrée’s bold and playful tone is captured perfectly in
Lauren Elkin’s translation from the French. Elkin skilfully

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manages to convey, in pared-down prose, Andrée’s beguil-
ing sensibility and the ways in which Sylvie is enraptured
by her forthright manner: her confidence, her cartwheels,
her talent for literature, for playing the violin, riding a
horse, mimicking teachers. Sylvie is bored and intellectually
lonely, so meeting this clever, devout, but irreverent girl
changes her life. Sylvie tells us, ‘Nothing so interesting
had ever happened to me. It suddenly seemed as if nothing
had ever happened to me at all.’
Andrée tends to say tragic things in a way that deliber-
ately does not invite sympathy. This is a clever narrative trick
on Beauvoir’s part. It means that Sylvie can do all the feeling
for Andrée. She observes that her new friend does not speak
to teachers in a humble manner, nor is she discourteous. In
fact, she tells the female teacher that she is not intimidated
by her. Why is that? It’s not because she is above being
intimidated, it’s just that the teacher is not intimidating.
There is much that society will throw at Andrée to
intimidate and flatten her, not least religion and the desire
to not disappoint her controlling, conservative mother. And
to make life as complicated as it actually is – which n
­ ovelists
must do – Andrée loves her mother. Sylvie can jealously
see that all other attachments are not as important to her
friend. How can she compete with this maternal bond,
even usurp it?
When Sylvie, who hates needlework, goes to great
effort to sew Andrée a silk bag for her thirteenth birthday

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present, she suddenly realises her friend’s mother, Madame
Gallard, doesn’t like her anymore. Beauvoir hints that
Andrée’s mother understands that the sewing of the silk
bag is a labour of love, and disapproves of these strong
feelings for her daughter.
Sylvie falls in love with Andrée’s mind. Obviously, her
manner and liveliness make her body attractive too. Yet,
this kind of cerebral love is subversive because for Beau-
voir’s generation (she was born in 1908) the minds of girls
and women were not what made them valuable. The girls
have long conversations together. They continue talking
for twelve years. ‘We could lose ourselves for hours in
discussions of property, justice and equality. We had zero
respect for our teachers’ opinions, and our parents’ ideas
didn’t satisfy us either.’
The talking cure between Andrée and Sylvie is nothing
less than a revolution at a time when girls and women
were encouraged to keep their thoughts to themselves.
‘They teach you in catechism to respect your body. So
selling your body in marriage must be as bad as selling it
on the street,’ Andrée says.
The enigma of female friendship that is as intense as a
love affair, but that is not sexually expressed, or even particu-
larly repressed, is always an interesting subject. Yet, while Sylvie,
who is now a teenager, listens to Andrée speaking of her
passion for her male cousin – she has taken up kissing him
and now smokes Gauloises – she also owns her emotions.

..

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 ‘I suddenly understood, in a joyful stupor, that the
empty feeling in my heart, the mournful quality of my
days, had but one cause: Andrée’s absence. Life without
her would be death.’
Sylvie is endearingly vulnerable because she risks
loving Andrée – and of course, any kind of love involves
a fair dose of fantasy, projection, imagination. The idolised
subject of her affection does not reciprocate the strength
of her feelings, nor does she believe herself to be lovable.
Meanwhile, Andrée’s older sister, Malou, is being groomed
for marriage with ‘stupid and ugly’ male suitors.
Madame Gallard’s message to her daughters is clear:
‘Join a convent or get a husband; remaining unmarried is
not a vocation.’

What I find most touching in The Inseparables is the

description of Sylvie losing her faith. In various interviews,
Beauvoir described the experience of suddenly not believ-
ing in God as ‘a kind of awareness’. Literature would
eventually take the place of religion in her life and fill
the void of an evaporated God.
When Sylvie is fourteen she realises during confession
with the school priest that her relationship with God is
changing. ‘I don’t believe in God! I said to myself . . . The
truth of it stunned me for a moment: I didn’t believe in
God.’

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 The priest picks up on this new mood and chastises her.

‘I have been told that my little Sylvie is not the

same girl she was,’ said the voice. ‘It seems she has
become distracted, disobedient and insolent.’

Instead of being apologetic, Sylvie becomes rebellious.

With caustic wit, Beauvoir tells us that Sylvie was more
shaken by her new lack of respect for this priest than by
the man who had recently flashed her on the metro.
Andrée asks Sylvie an important question.
‘If you don’t believe in God, how can you bear to be
alive?’
Sylvie replies, ‘But I love being alive.’
Does Andrée love being alive? We know that she was
nearly burned alive as a young girl. At her family’s country
house, to which Sylvie is invited, Andrée pushes herself
so perilously high on a swing that Sylvie fears it will
topple over. She wonders anxiously if ‘something had
broken inside her mind, and she couldn’t stop’.
When she is again in dispute with her harassing mother
and wishes to get out of a tedious family engagement,
Andrée cuts a deep wound into her foot with an axe
while chopping wood.

Suddenly someone cried out. The voice was Andrée’s.

I ran to the woodshed. Madame Gallard was leaning

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 over her; Andrée was lying in the sawdust, bleeding
from her foot; the edge of the axe was stained red.

When Andrée opens her eyes, she says, ‘The axe got
away from me!’
In the fairy tale, ‘The Red Shoes’, by Hans Christian
Andersen, the female protagonist wears a beloved pair of
red shoes to church. She is told that it is improper to do
so, but she cannot resist. To cure her vanity, a magic spell
is cast, in which, not only can she never take off her red
shoes, but she is doomed to dance non-stop in them for
ever. Eventually, she finds an executioner and asks him to
chop off her feet. He obliges, but her amputated feet
continue to dance on their own accord. ‘Something had
broken inside her mind and she couldn’t stop.’ Is Andrée
her own executioner?
She needs to use the axe to separate from her mother,
but instead turns it on herself. This scene is a prelude to
what Beauvoir saw as the execution of Andrée Gallard
by society.
By the time they study together for their exams at
the Sorbonne, Andrée begins a romance with a fellow
student, Pascal Blondel, the avatar for the phenomenolo-
gist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This relationship is disapproved
of by her parents, who are keen to marry off their clever
daughter. When Sylvie and Andrée meet for tea to discuss
this forbidden (chaste) romance, Sylvie observes: ‘All

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around me perfumed women ate cake and talked about
the cost of living. From the day she was born, Andrée was
fated to be like them. But she was nothing like them.’
Andrée does not become like them. She dies from
meningitis instead, broken-hearted and defeated. Beauvoir
saw her death as nothing less than murder. At the funeral,
as Madame Gallard sobs, while her husband says, ‘We have
been but instruments in the hands of God’, Sylvie places
three red roses amongst the white roses heaped on her
coffin, red as the blood that dripped from the axe. If she
had always secretly thought that ‘Andrée was one of those
prodigies about whom, later on, books would be written’,
she was correct.
Simone de Beauvoir would write it, and here it is.

Deborah Levy, 2021

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 Translator’s note

‘So, is it any good?’ people have asked me when I’ve told

them I’m translating a ‘lost’ novel by Simone de Beauvoir,
one she didn’t publish in her lifetime, but didn’t destroy
before she died, either. And I am relieved to say: yes. It is
more than good. It is poignant, chilling and eviscerating.
Beauvoir tells her story straightforwardly, without filler,
building momentum as it reaches its inevitable conclusion,
which will surprise no one familiar with Beauvoir’s
memoirs or diaries. ‘For a long time, I believed that I had
paid for my own freedom with her death,’ she wrote of
her childhood friend Elisabeth ‘Zaza’ Lacoin at the end
of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958). But in that book
Zaza’s story is one strand of a thickly braided account of
Beauvoir’s upbringing. The Inseparables, on the other hand,
finished four years earlier, reads like the testimony of a
witness to her murder.

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 I recognised more than a few passages from the memoirs.
But here, they are given urgency by the taut, harrowing
tale from which they emerge. In this sense it also feels like
a statement Beauvoir has had to give several times to some
authority – and in the absence of God there is no more
punishing authority in this case than Beauvoir, condemning
Zaza’s family; her lover, the future famed phenomenologist
Maurice Merleau-Ponty; and, not least, herself. Readers of
a more psychoanalytic bent may find the repetitions in the
stories to be telling. But nowhere else does Beauvoir tell
her story with Zaza so fully, imagining with such love
(though utterly without nostalgia) the life they shared and
the vanished world that contained her friend.
Nevertheless, it would be doing Beauvoir as novelist
a disservice to read The Inseparables only as a work of
memoir or therapy. This is a deliberately patterned, atten-
tively sculpted narrative, streamlined and disciplined where
the memoirs are digressive, and unified in its plot, its
treatment of the girls’ friendship and its religious, punitive
vocabulary. An accident that might elsewhere be described
(sarcastically) as ‘fortuitous’ is instead ‘providential’; the
word ‘reproach’ or its corollary ‘irreproachable’ figures
some eleven times in the original French, and on eight
of those occasions I chose to keep rather than vary it.
Devoir, which can mean ‘homework’ or ‘obligation’, appears
many times in the text; English unfortunately does not
allow us to preserve the way the meaning of that word

.  .

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