She and Sartre were antiestablishment and prosocialist but played no political roles until after World War II. In the 1930s her life was essentially that of a provincial professor with intellectual leanings, a wide circle of friends and acquaintances (some of them writers) and a somewhat bohemian life-style. Having successfully passed the examination, placing second (to Sartre's first place), Beauvoir taught philosophy in French lycées at Marseilles, Rouen, and Paris from 1931 to 1943. But when that eventuality did not materialize and she realized that they did not want to have children, they resolved to maintain their free union, which would not exclude what they called "contingent" loves, some of which became important in their lives. Once, she said, they briefly considered marriage-when there was some possibility that Sartre would go to Japan in the 1930s. They were lovers but not monogamous by any means. Sartre and she remained intimate friends and intellectual companions from that initial collaboration until his death in 1980. They studied for the examination together and also spent considerable time with a group of friends, all witty and brilliant it was this group who gave her her nick-name Castor (French for beaver). This same year, 1929, she met Jean-Paul Sartre, a student at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure, who was preparing, as she was, for the agrégation de philosophie. It also seems to have reinforced her hostile attitude toward the bourgeoisie and toward marriage and motherhood as institutions. This death, the first of many that Beauvoir was to report on both clinically and dramatically, seems to have reinforced her sense of writing as a mission, the obligation to communicate with her readers by revealing the discrepancies between ideological constructs and the ambiguities of human existence. She died, according to Beauvoir's interpretation, a victim of Monsieur and Madame Mabille's Catholic prejudices and their convictions about appropriate behavior for young Catholic women from good families. Her death was due perhaps to meningitis but occurred after she had fallen in love with a fellow student and realized that her parents would never approve of her marriage to him or to anyone else whom they had not selected. Their friendship lasted until Zaza's death in 1929. At the age of nine she met Elisabeth Mabille (Zaza), who was to inspire the first significant passion of her life outside the family circle. It was a patriotic story about a young and heroic Alsatian orphan who attempted to cross over into France with her brothers and sisters.īeauvoir portrays herself as a dutiful daughter and a brilliant student, first at the Catholic Cours Désir, then at the Sorbonne. She wrote her first story, "Les Malheurs de Marguerite" (The Misfortunes of Marguerite), at the age of eight. In this work, one follows Beauvoir as she becomes an avid reader of fiction, a devotee of Louisa May Alcott and George Eliot, and a precocious writer. Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée traces her development from an adored baby in love with her mother to a child who began at an early age to rebel against the order imposed by her mother, particularly in religious matters. Beauvoir attributed her becoming an intellectual to the discrepancy between her mother's piety and her father's disbelief coupled with his admiration for certain French writers. In spite of the personal and ideological tensions between her parents, Beauvoir and her younger sister, Hélène de Beauvoir, called Poupette, who became a painter, developed a passion for living and an insatiable curiosity about the world. Yet Beauvoir's childhood, as she described it retrospectively in Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée (1958 translated as Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter , 1959), was a happy one. There was considerable conflict in the Beauvoir marriage, which the straitened circumstances only increased. Her mother, Françoise Brasseur de Beauvoir, came from a hardworking family that had been prosperous until the family bank failed in 1909. Her father, Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir, a lawyer from a respectable, upper-middle-class family, had little personal ambition and preferred to spend his time and limited resources pursuing the pleasures of the age, especially amateur theatricals and the racetrack. She was born in Paris in 1908 into an upper-middle-class but impoverished family whose religious and social values she rejected at an early age.
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