age target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_bfac5278-a3ce-5e70-8161-dc08fbd53d2b.png" alt="image"/>
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Woman Destroyed
Translated by Patrick O’Brian Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2006 Previously published in paperback by Flamingo 1994 (as a Flamingo Modern Classic) and 1984, and by Fontana 1971 First published in Great Britain by Collins 1969 First published in France by Editions Gallimard under the title La Femme Rompue 1967 Copyright © in the French edition, Editions Gallimard 1967 Copyright © in the English translation, William Collins Sons & Co Ltd, London and Glasgow, and G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1969 PS Section copyright © Louise Tucker 2006 PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library 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 9780007405596 Version: 2018-05-16 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. 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. Contents
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features…
‘The Art of Fiction’ 35, The Paris Review, 1965 Have You Read? If You Loved this, You Might Like … Has my watch stopped? No. But its hands do not seem to be going round. Don’t look at them. Think of something else—anything else: think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting. Tender awakening. André was in an odd, curled-up position in bed, with the bandage over his eyes and one hand pressed against the wall like a child’s, as though in the confusion and distress of sleep he had needed to reach out to test the firmness of the world. I sat on the edge of his bed; I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘Eight o’clock.’ I carried the breakfast-tray into the library: I took up a book that had arrived the day before—I had already half leafed through it. What a bore, all this going on about non-communication. If you really want to communicate you manage, somehow or other. Not with everybody, of course, but with two or three people. Sometimes I don’t tell André about my moods, sorrows, unimportant anxieties; and no doubt he has his little secrets too; but on the whole there is nothing we do not know about one another. I poured out the China tea, piping hot and very strong. We drank it as we looked through our post: the July sun came flooding into the room. How many times had we sat there opposite one another at that little table with piping hot, very strong cups of tea in front of us? And we should do so again tomorrow, and in a year’s time, and in ten years’ time … That moment possessed the sweet gentleness of a memory and the gaiety of a promise. Were we thirty, or were we sixty? André’s hair had gone white when he was young: in earlier days that snowy hair, emphasizing the clear freshness of his complexion, looked particularly dashing. It looks dashing still. His skin has hardened and wrinkled—old leather—but the smile on his mouth and in his eyes has kept its brilliance. Whatever the photograph-album may say to the contrary, the pictures of the young André conform to his present-day face: my eyes attribute no age to him. A long life filled with laughter, tears, quarrels, embraces, confessions, silences, and sudden impulses of the heart: and yet sometimes it seems that time has not moved by at all. The future still stretches out to infinity. He stood up. ‘I hope your work goes well,’ he said. ‘Yours too,’ I replied. He made no answer. In this kind of research there are necessarily times when one makes no progress: he cannot accept that as readily as he used to do. I opened the window. Paris, sweltering beneath the crushing summer heat, smelt of asphalt and impending storms. My eyes followed André. Maybe it is during those moments, as I watch him disappear, that he exists for me with the most overwhelming clarity: his tall shape grows smaller, each pace marking out the path of his return; it vanishes and the street seems to be empty; but in fact it is a field of energy that will lead him back to me as to his natural habitat: I find this certainty even more moving than his
