The Woman Destroyed de Simone De Beauvoir

Date de parution : 08.1987
Format : Broché
Nombre de pages : 256
Résumé : In three "immensely intelligent stories about the decay of passion" (The Sunday Herald Times [London]), Simone de Beauvoir draws us into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises. Enthralling as faction, suffused with de Beauvoir's remarkable insights into women, The Woman Destroyed gives us a legendary writer at her best. Has my watch stopped? No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. 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 ned; 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, smelled of asphalt and impending storms. My eyes followed André. Maybe it ...