‘Very well,’ said Françoise. ‘Goodbye.’
She took a step towards the door and silently looked at this livid, childlike face that she would never again see alive.
‘Goodbye,’ she repeated.
‘And don’t come back,’ said Xavière with fury.
Françoise heard her leap from her bed and bolt the door. The ray of light filtering beneath it went out.
‘And now?’ Françoise thought.
She stood staring at Xavière’s door: alone; unaided; relying now entirely on herself. She waited for some time. Then she walked into the kitchen and put her hand on the lever of the gas meter. Her hand tightened – it seemed impossible. Face to face with her aloneness, beyond space, beyond time, stood this alien presence that had for so long overwhelmed her by its blind shadow: Xavière was there, existing only for herself, entirely self-centred, reducing to nothingness everything for which she had no use; she encompassed the whole world within her own triumphant aloneness, boundlessly extending her influence, infinite and unique, everything that she was, she drew from within herself, she barred all dominance over her, she was absolute separateness. And yet it was only necessary to pull down this lever to annihilate her. ‘Annihilate a conscience! How can I?’ Françoise thought. But how was a conscience not her own capable of existing? If it were so, then it was she who was not existing. She repeated ‘She or I.’ She pulled down the lever.
She went back to her room, gathered up the letters strewn on the floor and then threw them into the fireplace. She struck a match and watched the letters burn. Xavière’s door was locked on the inside. They would think it was an accident or suicide. ‘In any case, there will be no proof,’ she thought.
She undressed and put on her pyjamas. ‘Tomorrow morning she will be dead.’ She sat down, facing the darkened passage. Xavière was sleeping. With each minute her sleep was deepening. On the bed there still remained a living form, but it was already no one. There was no longer anyone. Françoise was alone.
Alone. She had acted alone: as alone as in death. One day Pierre would know. But even his cognizance of this deed would be merely external. No one could condemn or absolve her. Her act was her very own. ‘It is I who will it.’ It was her own will which was being accomplished, now nothing at all separated her from herself. She had at last made a choice. She had chosen herself.
P.S. Ideas, insights & features …
About the Author
* * *
Finding a Voice by Louise Tucker
Life at a Glance
About the Book
* * *
The Pain of Freedom by Fay Weldon
Read On
* * *
Have You Read?
If You Loved This, You Might Like …
Find Out More
About the Author
Finding a Voice
by Louise Tucker
‘The unfortunate episode of the trio did much more than supply me with a subject for a novel; it enabled me to deal with it.’
The Prime of Life, Simone de Beauvoir
Students the world over have relied on biography as an easy, and lazy, way to interpret fiction ever since studying literature became an exam subject. But de Beauvoir herself claimed that writing She Came to Stay helped her ‘deal with’ the trauma of Sartre’s affair: just as Françoise finishes off Xavière in order to prove that she is second to no one, so by finishing the book de Beauvoir finished off any notion of herself as second to her philosopher boyfriend.
Françoise decides not to have an affair with Gerbert at the beginning of the book, even though she is attracted to him. She thinks about telling him she loves him but then stops herself: ‘She could not say: “I love you.”… She loved Pierre. There was no room in her life for another love.’ Even though Pierre has affairs, she does not want to: she and Pierre are one, indivisible from each other, united by love and work. However, it is obvious to the reader, if not to Françoise, that she is always second to him, not equal. Pierre’s work dominates their lives, whilst her novel is only worked on when he doesn’t need her at the theatre; whereas she decides not to play the field, he does so consistently, defending himself by saying, ‘“I no longer enjoy these affaires’”. When she is jealous and he asks her if she minds, she doesn’t tell him the truth, because it compromises the image of their ‘free’ relationship, thus compromising herself. In existentialist terms she is ‘inauthentic’.
Pierre and Françoise’s relationship is similar to de Beauvoir and Sartre’s – freedom and openness is prized above all else; the woman places his work and desire for other women above her own wishes, in de Beauvoir’s case forgoing the man that she considered her ‘American husband’ Nelson Algren because she couldn’t leave Sartre – and the novel was based on the trio formed by the writers when Sartre began seeing Olga Kosakievicz. Much to the frustration of later critics who see her as one of the mothers of feminism on paper but a traitor in her life, de Beauvoir always considered herself as less important than Sartre. She, like the Sex she later wrote about, was always second. Perhaps de Beauvoir saw herself as secondary to Sartre because of their relative placings in the extremely competitive agrégation exam when they were students. He came first, she second. However, he was three years older than her, had failed the year before and had a privileged education in the most competitive and exclusive of establishments, the ENS, Ecole Normale Supérieure, whereas she had been to the Sorbonne, which despite its romanticized view outside France, is a free-access, non-entrance-exam university. She was also, and remains, the youngest ever agrégée in philosophy. So why did she consistently put him and his work first? Did she, like Françoise, convince herself that her contribution to his philosophy was equal to his, if not headlining: ‘Pierre was on the stage, she was in the audience, and yet for both of them it was the same play being performed in the same theatre. Their life was the same.’? Could she only write the theory, not live it? Or, as She Came to Stay suggests, did the mere fact of having a choice – in her case to devote herself to his work in a country which was one of the last in the world to give women the vote – matter more than what she chose?
* * *
Interviewer:
‘And how do you rank yourself among contemporary writers?’
Simone de Beauvoir:
‘I don’t know. What is it that one evaluates? The noise, the silence, posterity, the number of readers, the absence of readers, the importance at a given time? I think that readers will read me for some time. At least, that’s what my readers tell me. I’ve contributed something to the discussion of women’s problems. I know I have from the letters I receive. As for the literary quality of my work, in the strict sense of the word, I haven’t the slightest idea.’
Interview, ‘The Art of Fiction’ 35, The Paris Review, 1965
* * *
Françoise and her creator most resemble each other by choosing and acting, thus being ‘authentic’ in terms of themselves. Françoise finally chooses not to come second and murders her opponent. If she had chosen second place and had accepted Xavière, as she pretends to do throughout the narrative, that choice would also have been ‘authentic’ because she made it. Neither choice is judged better, but without one the protagonist/writer doesn’t exist: ‘Her act was her very own … She had at last made a choice. She had chosen herself.’ Similarly de Beauvoir, in finishing her first novel, chooses to be a writer, separate from Sartre, no longer just his ‘audience’ and starts her journey to modern iconhood: ‘Before writing She Came to Stay I spent years fumbling around for a subject. From the moment I began that book I never stopped writing’ (The Prime of Life). As Françoise recognizes the need to act alone, to take responsibility for what she wants by murdering Xavière, so de Beauvoir recognizes that by completing her first novel she will become a writer independent of her relationship with Sartre: ‘By releasing Françoise, through the agency of a crime, from the dependent position in which her love for Pierre kept her, I regained my own
personal autonomy … writing remains an act for which the responsibility cannot be shared with any other person’ (The Prime of Life).
De Beauvoir needed to finish this novel in order to find her voice – ‘From now on I always had something to say’ – and She Came to Stay starts her process of intellectual thought for the next half-century: a woman who allows a man to take responsibility for her choices, for her life, as Françoise does with Pierre until the last pages, deprives herself of independence and language. De Beauvoir, now known as much for her writing as for her relationships, may have placed herself as less important than Sartre but history and criticism have considered them as equals, as performers both.
* For a more detailed psychoanalytic discussion of Françoise’s murder of Xavière, see Chapter 4 in Toril Moi’s Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman.
LIFE
at a Glance
BORN
* * *
Paris 1908
EDUCATED
* * *
At the Sorbonne, Paris. She was the youngest person ever to pass the agrégation, a high-level graduate exam, in philosophy.
CAREER
Teacher, writer, founder of Les temps modernes (with Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron and Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
BOOKS
* * *
Novels include The Mandarins (winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1954, even though de Beauvoir was, at 46, not eligible for a prize awarded to authors under 35), The Blood of Others and Les Belles Images. Non-fiction includes The Second Sex, four volumes of memoir and A Very Easy Death, the story of her mother’s death from cancer.
RELATIONSHIPS
* * *
Simone de Beauvoir was Jean-Paul Sartre’s friend, companion, editor and lover from their time together at the Sorbonne until his death in 1980. She is buried with him in Montparnasse, where they both lived for most of their lives. She also had a long love affair with the American writer Nelson Algren (on which The Mandarins is said to be based) which ended when she would not give up Sartre for him.
DIED
* * *
Paris 1986
About the Book
The Pain of Freedom
by Fay Weldon
It is understandable that my editors should ask me to write this piece about She Came to Stay, inasmuch as I have just published a novel called She May Not Leave. And there are similarities. It is about what happens when you invite a young woman into your life. It does not work out as planned. They do tend to stay. They do tend not to leave. And that can be very, very painful.
I read de Beauvoir’s novel when I was a student – I remember to this day the shock of recognition: this is what life for a clever woman in a man’s world is like. Youthful appeal and looks are valued above all other qualities. What use is intelligence when there’s a pretty girl about? Eyes, male and female both, shift at once from Germaine Greer to Kate Moss.
Then, of course, I identified with the girl: now I identify with the woman. Otherwise not so much has changed in sixty years as one might hope. Except these days we are more strapped for time and money: Paris may not be collapsing around our ears, but few of us, alas, have time to sit around in bars contemplating the minutiae of our feelings and the nature of existentialism; we have to get back to the e-mail or the babysitter. But at least we have novels – we can read She Came to Stay if only on the train on the way to work, and immerse ourselves in these other, distant, still compelling lives.
When you come to read this, you will either have finished She Came to Stay and want to share your reaction to it with someone, anyone, or you will be leafing through the volume wondering if it is worth your while reading it or not. (It is, of course. It quite takes your breath away with its particular mixture of pain, excitement and description, and affects the way you think, feel and act. Classics do not become classics for nothing.)
Should you come into the second category of casual, page-hopping reader, best not to read on. Turn back to the beginning, or where you left off. There is a shock at the end of She Came to Stay it is better not to know in advance. And since it is the end which both makes and breaks the novel, be content to read this in its proper place, as a postscript.
But for those of you who have read it, probably, like me, you felt outraged by the ending. Novels need some other outcome, some other more subtle conclusion, than the murder of one of the protagonists on the last page. It’s cheating: it’s gross. Sure, Françoise was driven to the deed by her own confusions and Pierre’s particular pattern of self-justification and self-indulgence, and Xavière deserved no better for having such a bottomless fund of undeserved self-esteem – but it is still no way for anyone, let alone a feminist, to end a novel. There must be, there is, some other conclusion to sexual jealousy than murder.
It’s as if Simone de Beauvoir is using the pages (and us) to say to her real-life lover, the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Now see what you made me do!’ The novel is thinly disguised autobiography – it charts de Beauvoir’s three-way relationship with Sartre, who appears in the book as Pierre, his young protégée Olga Kosakievicz (Xavière), and Simone herself (Françoise). And the ending she gives the novel seems almost like an attempt to win Sartre’s approval, in this as in so much else. A deed done for the sake of the deed, an existentialist act! It is literature bent into the service of a theory, of a philosophy, and this is why it jars. It is a product of love, not art.
In real life of course de Beauvoir didn’t do it: she didn’t take a life because ‘her act was her very own’: no, she lived to be 78, at one with Sartre to the end. Olga, left to her own devices, drifted off soon enough. Simone continued with Sartre – the ‘essential love’ intact, surviving his many affairs and her own few, writing, thinking, obsessing, her wonderful powers of expression and persuasion never quiet. She went on to win the Prix Goncourt with The Mandarins, much public favour worldwide with the feminist classic The Second Sex, to lose reputation temporarily with the pro-communist tract La Marche Longue – remaining to the end wrong-headed, deluded, passionate in her integrity, drinking too much, and changing the world.
Existentialism is all very well – a life in which the values are to do with exactitude of thought and the minute examination of emotion and action – but is all too easily interpreted as an elaborate excuse for predatory male behaviour in which women collude. Françoise and Pierre’s relationship with Xavière is monstrous – exploitative, voyeuristic and sadistic – when seen through the eyes of the twenty-first century. But what a novel!
‘Women, you owe her everything,’ was said upon de Beauvoir’s death in 1986. If not everything, certainly a great deal. Others worked for political and practical equality for women – her concern was for their emotional and intellectual dignity. If women could only reason their way out of their emotional dependency on men, all would yet be well between the genders.
Throughout the novel Françoise struggles to subdue jealousy, seen as the most despicable of emotions, almost to the point of denying its existence – let alone as a justification for thought or deed. If women need no longer be rivals for male affection, the theory went, and settle for the higher good of intimacy and a close companionship of thought, then women could surely be set free.
True enough: but how this freedom hurts in practice! So much so that since those days female pride has taken a different route: rather than claim sexual freedom for themselves, they claim a right to a faithful man. Infidelity, taken seriously, ends in divorce, upset children, the breakdown of the old society – and, alas, it seems we are not born to be monogamous.
But how they live, Pierre, Françoise and Xavière, in a Paris on the brink of war. Taut, extreme, nervy, watchful. They work in the theatre, sleep in rented rooms in cheap hotels, live in cafés, worry about the approaching cataclysm, gossip, tear one another to bits, investigate their own feelings immoderately, find themselves in the wrong bed, on the wrong side of a too-thin wall – and how I long for François
e to say to Pierre, oh get lost, because she’s worth ten of him, but of course she won’t. She loves him.
Read On
Have You Read?
Other books by or about Simone de Beauvoir
The Woman Destroyed
Three stories of three women at different stages of their lives. In the first, ‘The Age of Discretion’, a successful academic must find a way to face the dwindling of her career and her life as old age approaches. In the second, ‘Monologue’, a young mother alone on New Year’s Eve rails against her husband who has left her, taking their son with him. Finally, in the title piece, middle-aged Monique discovers the cost of investing her whole self in her marriage when her husband starts an affair with a younger woman.
The Mandarins
The Second World War has ended and a group of French intellectuals must re-examine their loves and lives. Said to be based on de Beauvoir’s own relationships with Camus, Sartre and Nelson Algren, it offers both a love story and philosophical debate.
Simone de Beauvoir: Memoirs
(various volumes)
Although de Beauvoir is perhaps best known for The Second Sex and The Mandarins, in the latter part of her career she produced many extraordinary volumes of memoir. These give a fascinating insight into such subjects as her upbringing (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter), her experience of the ageing process (Old Age), and her time with Jean-Paul Sartre (Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre).
The Second Sex
De Beauvoir’s landmark feminist text weaves together contemporary interviews, facts and myths to create a hugely comprehensive overview of what it meant, in post-war France and America, to have been born a woman. Centred around de Beauvoir’s theory of ‘otherness’, whereby women have only ever been defined in relation to men, The Second Sex uses a breathtaking range of examples from anthropology, literature, mythology and politics to explore the changing role of the female gender throughout history.
She Came to Stay Page 50
