Simone Beauvoir de

The Mandarins


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      SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

       The Mandarins

      Translated by Leonard M. Friedman

      With an introduction by Doris Lessing

       COPYRIGHT

      Harper Perennial

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

      This Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published in 2005

      Harper Perennial

      Previously published in paperback by Flamingo 1993 (as a Flamingo Modern Classic) and 1984 (reprinted five times)

      First published in France in 1954 by Librairie Gallimard

      under the title Les Mandarins First English translation published in Great Britain by Collins 1957

      Copyright © Librairie Gallimard 1954

      English translation copyright © Collins 1957 Introduction copyright © Doris Lessing 1993 PS section copyright © Jon Butler 2005 except ‘Equals Not Sequels’ by Kathy Lette © Kathy Lette 2005

      PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      Ebook Edition © MAY 2018 ISBN 9780007405589

      Version: 2018-05-16

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

       DEDICATION

       To Nelson Algren

      CONTENTS

       Title Page

       Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       P. S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …

       About the Author

       Biography

       Did You Know?

       About the Book

       Equals Not Sequels

       After the War: The Intellectual ‘Mandarins’ of Paris Life

       Read On

       If You Liked This, You Might Like …

       About the Author

       By the Same Author

       About the Publisher

       INTRODUCTION

       by Doris Lessing

      Even before The Mandarins arrived in this country it was being discussed with the lubricious excitement used for fashionable gossip. Everyone knew the novel was about the political and sexual lives of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and their friends, a glamorous group for several reasons. First, they were associated with the French Resistance, and of all the heroic myths of the Second World War the Resistance was the most potent. Then, they were French, and it is hard now to explain the degree of attractiveness France had for the British after the war. It was only partly that we knew our cooking and our clothes to be inferior, that they had a style and panache we lacked. The British had been locked up in their island for the long years of the war, could not refresh themselves outside it, and France wore the features of some forbidden Paradise. And, too, intellectual communism, intellectuals generally, were glamorous in a way they never have been here, not least because what The Mandarins were debating along the Left Bank were questions about the Soviet Union scarcely acknowledged in socialist circles here, or, if so, only in lowered voices. There was another reason why The Mandarins was expected to read like a primer to better living,