The Woman Destroyed

Simone de Beauvoir

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780007405596
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

First published in 1967, this book consists of three short novellas on the theme of women's vulnerability – in the first, to the process of ageing, in the second to loneliness, and, in the third, to the growing indifference of a loved one.

THE WOMAN DESTROYED is a collection of three stories, each an exquisite and passionate study of a woman trapped by circumstances, trying to rebuild her life.

In the first story, 'The Age of Discretion', a successful scholar fast approaching middle age faces a double shock – her son's abandonment of the career she has chosen for him and the harsh critical rejection of her latest academic work. 'The Monologue' is an extraordinary New Year's Eve outpouring of invective from a woman consumed with bitterness and loneliness after her son and her husband have left home. Finally, in 'The Woman Destroyed', Simone de Beauvoir tells the story of Monique, trying desperately to resurrect her life after her husband confesses to an affair with a younger woman.

Compassionate, lucid, full of wit and knowing, Simone de Beauvoir's rare insight into the inequalities and complexities of women's lives is unsurpassable.

THE WOMAN DESTROYED

Monday 13 September. Les Salines.

It is an astonishing setting, this rough draft of a town lying deserted here, on the edge of a village and outside the flow of the centuries. I went along one half of the hemicycle and climbed the steps of the central building; for a long while I gazed at the quiet splendour of these structures that were put up for functional purposes and that have never been used for anything at all ‘They are solid; they are real: yet their abandoned state changes them into a fantastic pretence—of what, one wonders. The warm grass under the autumn sky and the smell of dead leaves told me that I had certainly not left this world; but I had gone back two hundred years into the past. I went to fetch things out of the car: I spread a rug on the ground, cushions, the transistor, and I smoked, listening to Mozart. Behind two or three dusty windows I could make out people moving to and fro—offices, no doubt. A lorry stopped in front of one of the massive doors; men opened it; they loaded sacks into the back. Nothing else disturbed the silence of that afternoon: I travelled away, a great way off, to the shores of an unknown river; and then when I looked up there I was among these stones, far from my own life.

For the most surprising thing about it is my being here, and the cheerfulness of my being here. I had not looked forward to the loneliness of this drive back to Paris at all. Hitherto, if Maurice were not there, the girls were always with me, in all my journeys. I had thought I was going to miss Colette’s raptures and Lucienne’s demandingness. And here I am with happiness of a forgotten kind given back to me. My freedom makes me twenty years younger. So much so that when I closed the book I began writing just for myself, as I did when I was twenty.

I never part from Maurice with a light heart. The congress is only going to last a week, yet there was a lump in my throat as we drove from Mougins to the Nice airfield. He too, he was moved. When the loudspeaker summoned the travellers for Rome he squeezed me tight. ‘Don’t get killed on the road.’—‘Don’t get killed in the plane.’ Before he vanished he turned round to look at me again: there was anxiety in his eyes, and I caught it at once. The take-off seemed to me dramatic. Four-engined planes rise gently into the air—it is a long-drawn-out au revoir. This jet left the ground with the violence of a last good-bye.

But presently I began to bubble with happiness. No, my daughters’ absence did not sadden me at all—quite the reverse. I could drive as fast or as slowly as I liked, go where I liked, stop when the whim took me. I made up my mind to spend the week wandering about. I get up as soon as it is light. The car is waiting for me in the street or in the courtyard like a faithful animal; it is wet with dew; I wipe its eyes and full of delight I tear away through the growing sunlight. Beside me there is the white bag with the Michelin maps, the Guide Bleu, some books, a cardigan and my cigarettes—a reticent companion. No one grows impatient if I ask the owner of the little hotel for her receipt for chicken with crayfish.

Dusk is about to fall, but it is still warm. It is one of these heart-touching moments when the world is so well attuned to mankind that it seems impossible that they should not all be happy.

Tuesday 14 September

One of the things that really pleased Maurice was the intensity of what he called ‘my awareness of life’. It has revived during this short colloquy with myself. Now that Colette is married and Lucienne is in America I shall have all the time in the world to cultivate it ‘You’ll be bored. You ought to look for a job,’ Maurice said to me at Mougins. He went on and on about it. But I do not want one; not for the moment, anyhow. I want to live for myself a little, after all this time. And for us, Maurice and I, to make the most of this double solitude that we have been deprived of for so long. I have plans by the dozen in my mind.

Friday 17 September

On Tuesday I telephoned Colette: she had ’flu. She protested when I said I was coming straight back to Paris—Jean-Pierre was looking after her very well. But I was worried and I got back that same day. I found her in bed, much thinner: she has a temperature every evening. When I went into the mountains with her in August—even then I was anxious about her health. I can’t wait for Maurice to examine her, and I should like him to call Talbot in for a consultation.

Here I am with still another protégée on my hands. When I left Colette after dinner on Wednesday it was so mild that I drove down to the Latin quarter: I sat on the terrace of a café, and I smoked a cigarette. At the next table there was a teen-age girl who gazed longingly at my packet of Chesterfields: she asked me for one. I talked to her; she evaded my questions and got up to go. She was about fifteen, neither a student nor a prostitute and she aroused my curiosity—I suggested giving her a lift home in my car. She refused, hesitated, and then in the end confessed that she did not know where she was going to sleep. She had escaped that morning from the Centre where the Public Assistance had put her. I kept her here for two days. Her mother, who is more or less mentally deficient, and her step-father, who loathes her, have given up their rights over her. The judge who is in charge of her case promised to send her to a Home where she will be taught a trade. Meanwhile for these six months past she has been living ‘provisionally’ at this Centre, where she never goes out—except on Sunday, to church, if she wishes—and where she is given nothing to do. There are some forty of them there, adolescent girls, physically well looked-after, but pining away from boredom, weariness and despair. At nights each is given a sleeping-pill. They manage to keep them by. And one fine day they swallow all they have saved. ‘Running away or trying to commit suicide—that’s what you have to do in our place for the judge to remember you,’ Marguerite told me. It is easy to run away; it often happens; and if it does not last long the escapee is not punished.

I promised her I should move heaven and earth to get her transferred to a Home and she let herself be persuaded to go back to the Centre. I boiled with anger when I saw her go through the door, her feet dragging, her head bowed. She is a pretty girl, not stupid at all, very sweet-tempered, and all she asks is to work—her youth is being hacked to pieces: hers and the youth of thousands like her. Tomorrow I shall ring up Judge Barron.

How hard Paris is! Even on these balmy days this hardness weighs me down. I feel obscurely low-spirited this evening. I have made plans for changing the girls’ room into a cosier place to sit in than Maurice’s consulting-room or the waiting-room. And I am coming to see that Lucienne will never live here any more. The house will be quiet, but very empty. But above all I am racked with anxiety about Colette. What a good thing Maurice is corning home tomorrow.

Wednesday 22 September

Here is one of the reasons—indeed the main reason—why I have not the least wish to be tied down to a job: I should find it hard to bear if I were not entirely free to help the people who need me. I spent almost all my days at Colette’s bedside. Her temperature will not go down. ‘It’s nothing serious,’ says Maurice. But Talbot wants analyses. Terrifying notions run through my mind.

Judge Barron saw me this morning. Very friendly. He thinks Marguerite Drin’s case heart-breaking; and there are thousands like it. The shocking thing is that there is no place designed for these children and no staff capable of looking after them properly. The government does nothing. So the efforts of the juvenile courts and the social workers come to nothing—run up against a wall. The Centre where Marguerite is staying is only a transit-point; after three or four days she ought to have been sent on elsewhere. But where? It is a complete vacuum. These girls stay on at the Centre, where nothing has been arranged in the way of occupation or amusement. But still he will try to find Marguerite some sort of a place somewhere. And he is going to advise the workers at the Centre to let me see her. The parents have not signed the paper that would finally do away with their rights, but there is no question of their taking the child back: they do not want her and from her point of view too it would be the worst possible solution.

I left the law courts vexed with the system’s ineptitude. The number of juvenile delinquents is rising: and the only measure contemplated is greater severity.

I happened to find myself in front of the door of the Sainte Chapelle, so I went in and climbed the spiral staircase. There were foreign tourists and a couple gazing at the stained glass, hand in hand. For my part I could not concentrate upon it. I was thinking of Colette again, and I was worried.

And I am worried now. Reading is impossible. The only thing that could ease my mind would be talking to Maurice: he will not be here before midnight. Since he came back from Rome he spends his evenings at the laboratory with Talbot and Couturier. He says they are getting near to their goal. I can understand his giving up everything to his research. But this is the first time in my life that I have a serious worry that he does not share.

Saturday 25 September

The window was black. I had expected it. Before—before what?—when by some extraordinary chance I went out without Maurice there was always a streak of light between the red curtains when I came back. I would run up the two flights of stairs and ring, too impatient to look for my key. This time I went up the stairs without running; I pushed my key into the lock. How empty the flat was! How empty it is! Of course it is, since there is no one in it. No, that’s not it: usually when I come home I find Maurice here, even when he is out. This evening the doors open on to wholly empty rooms. Eleven o’clock. Tomorrow the results of the analyses will be known and I am afraid. I’m afraid and Maurice is not here. I know. His research must be carried through. Still, I am angry with him. ‘I need you, and you aren’t here!’ I feel like writing those words on a piece of paper and leaving it in an obvious place in the hall before I go to bed. Otherwise I shall be bottling it in, as I did yesterday, and as I did the day before that. He always used to be there when I needed him.

… I watered the pot-plants; I began to tidy the books and I stopped dead. I had been astonished by his lack of interest when I talked to him about arranging this sitting-room. I must tell myself the truth; I have always wanted the truth and the reason why I have had it is that I desired it. Well then. Maurice has changed. He has let himself be eaten up by his profession. He no longer reads. He no longer listens to music. I used so to love our silence and his attentive face as we listened to Monteverdi or Charlie Parker. We no longer go out together in or around Paris. It might almost be said we no longer have any real conversation. He is beginning to be like his colleagues who are merely machines for getting on and for making money. I’m being unfair. He doesn’t give a damn for money or social success. But ever since he decided, ten years ago, against my wishes, to specialize, gradually (and that was what I had been afraid of) he has grown hard. Even at Mougins this year I thought him remote—intensely eager to get back to the hospital and the laboratory, absent-minded and indeed moody. Come! I might as well tell myself the truth right through to the end. The reason why my heart was so heavy at Nice airfield was those dismal holidays behind us. And the reas...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Age of Discretion
• The Monologue
• The Woman Destroyed
• P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features…
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• About the Publisher