Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir’s early novel, written in 1954. The book describes her first love, a classmate named Elisabeth Lacoin ("Zaza") who died before age 22, and had as a teenager a "passionate and tragic" relationship with Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, then teaching at the same school. Disapproved by Sartre, the novel was deemed "too intimate" to be published during Beauvoir's lifetime.

The Inseparables

Kat Albanese

I like roses. They are ceremonial flowers that die without fading, in a curtsy.

Do I have to spend my life fighting with the people I love?

At every instant, blessed eternity was in play, and no clear sign was given to indicate if you were about to achieve it or lose it.

I find happiness on every page. Happiness in bigger and bigger writing.

Nothing so interesting had ever happened to me. It suddenly seemed as if nothing had ever happened to me at all.

We spoke in banalities, like grownups, but 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.

Would Andrée have been sad if we have been prevented from seeing each other? Less than i would have been, to be sure. They called us the inseparables, and she preferred my company to that of the other girls.

The whole house was quiet; from the basement window came the distant sounds of the kitchen; the delphiniums and the honesties bordering the wall barely moved. But I was afraid. I didn’t dare seize the seat of the swing, or beg her too strongly, but I thought that the swing was going to go over or that Andrée would be overcome with dizziness and let go of the ropes; just watching her swing back-and-forth into the sky, like a pendulum gone mad was making me nauseous. Why does she keep at it for so long? She passed by me, her lips pressed together. Maybe something had broken inside her mind, and she couldn’t stop. The dinner bell rang, and Mirza began to howl. Andrée went flying up into the trees. “She’s going to kill herself,“ I thought.

marta

What would I have dreamed about? I loved Andrée more than anything, and she was here with me.

The Inseparables quotes

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