Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Me – a Memoir

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Pascal had the perfect pensée to help me open up and confide my own experiences to the permanence of print. When he thought about how his life was “swallowed up . . . in the eternity that precedes and will follow it,” he “[took] fright.” Simone de Beauvoir, right, and Elisabeth ‘Zaza’ Lacoin, with whom the writer had an intense coming-of-age friendship, 1928. Photograph: Editions de L’Herne What Bair achieved by writing great biography was to reach rather different heights from the rather pedestrian hills of normal academic life, even that of life at a top university. That is mostly because the biographies themselves turned out to have such reach.

And so we began. I thought I would ease into my questioning by asking about her earliest childhood memories, but she went first because she wanted to thank me. “Women come from all over the world to write about me, but all they want to write about is The Second Sex.” It’s to make use of that kind of money that I buy things wherever I go all over the world. I bought an enormous Persian lamb coat when I was in Russia and had it remodelled by a good furrier in Paris. Look at the jet and gold buttons I found for it! I was very intimidated, but she succeeded in putting me at ease and asked me about my studies and my family. I was very moved by her interest and I remember very well that first rendezvous,” Le Bon de Beauvoir says.

That girl said you’re the best student in the class,’ she said, tilting her head a little at Lisette. ‘Is that true?’ Fearing for their safety, the police opened fire around 9:20 a.m. She was then injured in the stomach and evacuated immediately," said the source. Police have since said officers made the right decision to "neutralise the woman". Now that I’m getting older I have to watch what I eat. It’s all very well for a young girl to be a bit plump but it doesn’t do for ageing women. 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. Earlier this year, Michael Peppiatt’s The Existential Englishman: Paris Among the Artists was published; the book displays namedropping and some Parisian familières, and ended up as quite the end note of what can be written about celebrities, and Paris. It is the kind of book that most people will forget about when asked of their favourite autobiographies, six months after having read it.

Full of encounters, reflections, tribulations, and revelations—an enthralling account of a biographer’s lot, by one of the art’s most distinguished practitioners.”Indeed, there have been many times since then when I have been ready to lash out in retaliation for a bad review or an unkind comment, but every time I have remembered these words and I have never explained and never complained. According to recent estimates, the population of the city of Paris is 2,206,488, representing a small decline in population numbers from 2014. The relationship clearly haunted De Beauvoir, who attempted to resurrect Zaza in her writing, returning to her story on four occasions, most notably in the first volume of her four-part autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. But it is in The Inseparables that we see the full intensity and passion.