The Woman Destroyed

by Simone de Beauvoir

  31 January.

  I am losing all grasp on things. I am falling lower, lower all the time. Maurice is kind, full of consideration. But he can hardly conceal his delight at having recovered Noëllie. Now he would no longer say to me, “Do I really love her?” Yesterday I was having dinner with Isabelle, and I collapsed onto her shoulder, sobbing. Fortunately it was in a fairly dark bar. She says I am overdoing the stimulants and the tranquilizers and that I am racking myself to pieces. (It is true that I am terribly out of order. I began bleeding again this morning, a fortnight earlier than I ought to have.) Marie Lambert advises me to see a psychiatrist—not for an analysis but an immediate palliative treatment. But what could he do for me?

  2 February.

  Once upon a time I had some strength of mind, and I should have turned Diana out of the house: but I am nothing but a limp rag nowadays. How can I ever have been friends with her? She amused me, and in those days nothing mattered.

  “Oh, how thin you’ve grown! How ill you look!”

  She had come out of curiosity, out of ill nature—I felt that at once. I ought not to have let her in. She started prattling away: I did not listen. Suddenly she attacked me. “It’s too painful to see you in this state. You must cope, pull yourself together—go off and travel, for example. Otherwise you’ll have a nervous breakdown.”

  “I am very well.”

  “Oh, come, come! You’re eating your heart out. Believe me, there comes a moment when one has to know how to give in.” She pretended to hesitate. “No one dares tell you the truth: for my part I think that trying to be too tactful with people often only does them harm in the end. You must get it firmly into your head that Maurice loves Noëllie—it’s very serious.”

  “Was it Noëllie who told you that?”

  “Not only Noëllie. Friends who saw a great deal of them at Courchevel. They seemed absolutely determined to make their life together.”

  I did my best to look unconcerned. “Maurice lies as much to Noëllie as he does to me.”

  Diana looked at me pityingly. “At all events I have warned you. Noëllie is not the sort of girl to let herself be trifled with. If Maurice doesn’t give her what she wants, she’ll drop him. And of course he knows it. I should be astonished if he doesn’t act accordingly.”

  She left almost immediately after that. I can hear her from here. “That poor Monique! How ghastly she looks! She still refuses to open her eyes.” The cow. Of course he loves Noëllie; he would not torture me for nothing.

  3 February.

  I ought not to ask questions. They are holds that I reach out to him and that he grasps at once. I asked Maurice, “Is it true what Noëllie says, that you have made up your mind to live with her?”

  “She certainly can’t be saying that, since it is not true.” He hesitated. “What I should like—I have not spoken of it to her: you are the one it concerns—is to live by myself for a certain time. There is a tension between us that would vanish if—just for the time being, of course—we were to give up living together.”

  “You want to leave me?”

  “No, of course not. We should see just as much of one another.”

  “I can’t bear it!”

  I screamed. He took me by the shoulders. “Stop! Stop!” he said gently. “It was just a thought in the air. If you find it so very disagreeable I will abandon it.”

  Noëllie wants him to leave me; she is pressing him; she is making scenes: I’m sure of it. It is her pushing him on. I shall not give way.

  6 February: then with no date.

  What useless energy you need for even the simplest things, when all liking for life is gone! In the evening I get the teapot, the cup and the saucepan ready; I put each thing in its place so that life may start in the morning with the least possible effort. And even so it is almost more than I can bring myself to do, creeping out of my bed, starting the day. I get the daily woman to come in the afternoon so that I can stay in bed as long as I like in the morning. Sometimes I get up just as Maurice is coming home to lunch at one o’clock. Or if he does not come back, then at the very moment Mme. Dormoy turns the key in the lock. Maurice frowns when he sees me at one o’clock in a dressing gown and with my hair undone. He thinks I am putting on a desperation act for his benefit. Or at least that I am not making the necessary effort “to live the situation decently.” He too tells me over and over again, “You ought to see a psychiatrist.”

  I go on bleeding. If only my life could run out of me without my having to make the slightest effort!

  There must exist a truth in all this. I ought to take the plane for New York and ask Lucienne the truth. She does not love me: she will tell me. Then I should wipe out all that is bad, all that does me harm: I should put everything between Maurice and me back in its place.

  Yesterday evening when Maurice came home I was sitting in the living room, in the darkness, wearing my dressing gown. It was Sunday; I had got up in the middle of the afternoon: I had eaten a slice of ham and drunk some cognac. And then I had stayed sitting there, following the thoughts that went around and around in my head. Before he came in I took some tranquilizers and went back to sit in the armchair, without even thinking of turning on the light.

  “What are you doing? Why don’t you turn on the light?”

  “Why should I?”

  He scolded me, affectionately, but with irritation behind his kindness. Why don’t I see my friends? Why haven’t I been to the cinema? He told me the names of five films worth seeing. It’s impossible. There was a time when I could go to the cinema and even to the theater all by myself. For I was not alone. His presence was there in me and all around me. Now when I am by myself I say to myself, I am alone. And I am afraid.

  “You can’t go on like this,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Not eating, not dressing, shutting yourself up in this apartment.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll get ill. Or go off your head. As for me, I can’t help you because I’m part of it. But I beg you, do see a psychiatrist.”

  I said no. He pressed me and pressed me. In the end he grew impatient. “How do you expect to get out of it? You do nothing to help.”

  “Get out of what?”

  “Out of this depression. Anyone would say you were sinking deeper into it on purpose.”

  He shut himself up in his study. He thinks I am trying to blackmail him with misery, so as to frighten him and prevent him from leaving me. Maybe he’s right. Do I know what I am? Perhaps a kind of leech that feeds on the life of others—on Maurice’s, on our daughters’, on the life of all those lame ducks I claimed to be helping. An egoist who will not let go: I drink, I let myself slide, I make myself ill with the unadmitted intention of softening his heart. Completely phony through and through, rotten to the bone, playacting, exploiting his pity. I ought to tell him to go and live with Noëllie, to be happy without me. I can’t bring myself to do so.

  In a dream the other night I had on a sky-blue dress and the sky was blue.

  Those smiles, looks, words—they cannot have vanished. They float here in the air of this apartment. As for the words, I often hear them. In my ear a voice says, very distinctly, “Darling; sweetheart, my sweetheart.…” As for the looks and the smiles, I ought to catch them as they pass and clap them suddenly onto Maurice’s face, and then everything would be the same as before.

  I still go on bleeding. I am afraid.

  “When one is so low, any movement must be upwards,” says Marie Lambert. What foolishness! You can always go lower, and lower still, and still lower. There is no bottom. She says that to get rid of me. She is sick of me. They are all sick of me. Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn’t advance, it grows dreadfully boring: it is so very boring, even for me. Isabelle, Diana, Colette, Marie Lambert—they are all fed to the teeth; and Maurice.…

  There was once a man who lost his shadow. I forget w
hat happened to him, but it was dreadful. As for me, I’ve lost my own image. I did not look at it often; but it was there, in the background, just as Maurice had drawn it for me. A straightforward, genuine, “authentic” woman, without mean-mindedness, uncompromising, but at the same time understanding, indulgent, sensitive, deeply feeling, intensely aware of things and of people, passionately devoted to those she loved and creating happiness for them. A fine life, serene, full, “harmonious.” It is dark: I cannot see myself anymore. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous.

  There are plottings that go on behind my back. Between Colette and her father, Isabelle and Marie Lambert, Isabelle and Maurice.

  20 February.

  I have ended up by yielding to them. I was afraid of my blood, and the way it flowed away from me. Afraid of the silence. I had taken to telephoning Isabelle three times a day and Colette in the middle of the night. And now I am paying someone to listen to me: it’s killingly funny.

  He urged me to take up this diary again. I see the gimmick perfectly well—he is trying to give me back an interest in myself, to reconstruct my identity for me. But the only thing that counts is Maurice. My self, what does that amount to? I have never paid much attention to it. I was safe, because he loved me. If he does not love me anymore.… It is only the transition that haunts my mind—how have I deserved it that he should no longer love me? Or have I not deserved it, and is he a swine—a swine that should be punished, and his accomplice with him? Dr. Marquet sets about it at the other end—my father, my mother, my father’s death: he wants to make me talk about myself, and I only want to talk to him about Maurice and Noëllie. Still, I did ask him whether he thought me intelligent. Yes, undoubtedly; but intelligence is not a quality with an independent existence: when I go on and on pursuing my obsessions, my intelligence is no longer available to me.

  Maurice treats me with that mixture of tactfulness and muffled irritation that one puts on for invalids. He is patient, so patient that I feel like shrieking; and indeed I do sometimes. Go mad. That would be a good way out. But Marquet assures me there is no danger of it—my structure is too sound. Even with drink and drugs I have never pushed myself very far off the middle line. It is a way out that is closed to me.

  23 February.

  The hemorrhage has stopped. And I manage to eat a little. Mme. Dormoy was delighted yesterday, because I got down the whole of her cheese soufflé. I find her touching. No one, throughout this long nightmare from which I am just beginning to emerge, has been more kind and helpful than she. Every evening I found a perfectly clean nightgown under my pillow. So sometimes, instead of going to bed fully dressed, I would put it on, and by its whiteness it would force me to wash and do my teeth. In the afternoon she used to say to me, “I have run you a bath,” and I would take it. She thought up appetizing dishes. Without the slightest remark or the least question. And I was ashamed; I was ashamed of the way I let myself go, I being rich and she having nothing at all.

  “Collaborate,” says Dr. Marquet. All right. I am quite willing to try to find myself again. I stand in front of the mirror: how ugly I am! How unlovely my body is! Since when? I seem quite agreeable in my photographs of two years ago. I don’t look so bad in those of last year; but they were amateur snapshots. Is it the misery of these five months that has changed me? Or had I begun to go downhill fast well before that?

  I wrote to Lucienne a week ago. She answered with a very affectionate letter. She is really distressed about what has happened to me, and she asks nothing better than to talk it over, although she has nothing particular to tell me. She suggests that I should come to New York to see her; she could arrange to spend two weeks there; we would talk, and then again it would take my mind off things. But I don’t want to leave now. I want to fight here, on the spot.

  When I think that I used to say, “I shan’t struggle!”

  26 February.

  I have obeyed the psychiatrist; I have accepted a job. I go to the periodicals room in the Bibliothèque Nationale and I comb through the back numbers of medical magazines for a fellow who is writing on the history of medicine. I can’t see how this can do anything toward solving my problems. When I have written up two or three index cards I don’t get the least satisfaction out of it.

  3 March.

  Here we are! I was sent to the psychiatrist, I was made to recover a little strength before the final blow was struck. It’s like those Nazi doctors who brought the victims back to life so that they could be tortured again. I shouted at him, “Nazi! Torturer!” He looked shattered. Really it was he who was the victim. He even went so far as to say to me, “Monique! Have some pity for me!”

  Once again, with innumerable precautions, he had explained to me that living together did neither of us any good; that he was not going to move into Noëllie’s apartment, no; but he was going to find a little place for himself. That would not prevent us from seeing one another or even prevent us from spending parts of the holidays together. I said no, I screamed, I insulted him. This time he did not say he would give up his idea.

  What stuff, their ergotherapy! I have dropped this idiotic job.

  I think of Poe’s tale—the iron walls that come together and the knife-edged pendulum that swings above my heart. At certain moments it stops, but it never withdraws. Now it is only a few inches from my skin.

  5 March.

  I told the psychiatrist about this last scene. He said to me, “If you have spiritual strength enough for it, it would certainly be better for you to be at a distance from your husband, at least for a while.” Did Maurice pay him to tell me this?

  I looked him straight in the eye. “It is strange that you should not have said that before.”

  “I wanted the idea to come from you.”

  “It doesn’t come from me, but from my husband.”

  “Yes. But still it is you that have spoken to me about it.” And then he began to muddle me with tales of lost and recovered personalities, distances to be taken, returns to oneself. Claptrap.

  8 March.

  The psychiatrist has put the last touches to my demoralization. I no longer have any strength; I no longer attempt to struggle. Maurice is looking for a furnished apartment—he has several in view. This time I did not even protest. Yet our conversation was appalling. Without any anger, totally reduced, empty, I said to him, “It would have been better if you had told me at the end of the holidays, or even at Mougins, that you had made up your mind to leave me.”

  “To begin with I am not leaving you.”

  “That’s quibbling.”

  “And then again I had not made up my mind about anything.”

  A mist floated in front of my eyes. “Do you mean you have been putting me on trial these six months and that I have wrecked my chances? That is atrocious.”

  “Not at all. It is me I was thinking about. I hoped I should manage somehow with Noëllie and you. And I’m going off my head. I can’t even work anymore.”

  “It’s Noëllie who insists on your leaving.”

  “She can’t bear the situation any more than you can.”

  “If I had stood it better, would you have stayed?”

  “But you couldn’t. Even your kindness and your silence tore my heart out.”

  “You’re leaving me because the pity you feel for me makes you suffer too much?”

  “Oh, I beg you to understand me!” he said in an imploring voice.

  “I understand,” I said.

  Maybe he was not lying. Perhaps he had not made up his mind this summer: indeed, in cold blood the idea of breaking my heart for me must have seemed to him appalling. But Noëllie has badgered him. Has she perhaps threatened to break? So that at last he is throwing me overboard.

  I repeated, “I understand. Noëllie says you must say yes or no. You leave me or she drops you flat. Well, then, quite candidly she is an odious beast! She might perfectly well have agreed that you should keep a little place for me in your life.”

  “But I
do keep one for you—a very big one.”

  He hesitated: was he going to deny that he was giving in to Noëllie or admit it? I spurred him on. “I should never have believed that you would yield to blackmail.”

  “There was no question of an ultimatum, nor of blackmail. I need a little solitude and quiet; I need a place of my own—you’ll see, everything will be better between us.”

  He had chosen the version that he thought would hurt me least. Was it true? I shall never know. But on the other hand what I do know is that in a year or two, when I have got used to it, he will live with Noëllie. Where shall I be? In my grave? In an asylum? I don’t care. I don’t care about anything at all.…

  He presses me to go and spend two weeks in New York: so do Colette and Isabelle; they have more or less plotted this together, and perhaps they even suggested her invitation to Lucienne—her invitation to spend two weeks in New York. They explain to me that it would be less painful if he were to move while I was away. And in fact if I were to see him emptying his cupboards I should not escape a nervous breakdown. All right. I give way once more. Perhaps Lucienne will help me understand myself, although now that has not the slightest importance.

  15 March. New York

  I can’t prevent myself from looking out for the telegram, the telephone call, from Maurice that will tell me, I have broken with Noëllie, or just, I have changed my mind. I am staying at home. And of course it does not come.

  To think that once I should have been so happy to see this city! And here I am, blind.

  Maurice and Colette took me to the airport; I was stuffed with tranquilizers: Lucienne would take delivery of me at the other end—a parcel that is trundled about, an invalid, or a half-wit. I slept, I thought about nothing, and I landed in a fog. How elegant Lucienne has grown! Not a girl anymore at all: a woman, very sure of herself. (She who loathed adults. When I used to say to her, “Admit I was right,” she would fly into a rage—“You’re wrong! You’re wrong to have been right!”) She drove me to a pleasant apartment on 50th Street that a friend had lent her for two weeks. And as I unpacked my bags I thought, I shall force her to explain everything to me. I shall know why I have been condemned. That will be less unbearable than ignorance.