“You made me as I am today”

“” Dear Simone de Beauvoir “, but also “ Madam “,” Dear madam “: Thus start the letters addressed to Simone de Beauvoir by Blossom Margaret Douthat Segaloff, Mireille Cardot, Colette Avrane, Claire Cayron and Huguette-Céline Bastide, which Marine Rouch brings together and publishes here. “” Dear Simone de Beauvoir “, It is also the title of a research book held by the same Navy Rouch, and especially his doctoral thesis, supported on December 6, 2022,” Dear Simone de Beauvoir: Voices and Writings of Women “ ordinary ». Contribution to a history of the letter to the writer (1948-1970) ». There is no doubt that this work, as well as all of the work of its author, constitutes an extremely precious contribution for those who are interested in correspondence to writers, in the history of ordinary women, but also, and without completeness, to Simone de Beauvoir, or to the sociology of reception.

Wrote to a writer

Literature specialists go up correspondence with a writer to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. If Descartes, Montaigne, Boileau or Voltaire have also received letters, it is indeed with The New Héloïse that the mail of readers and readers would have developed “ ordinary ». It is also at XVIII^e Century-century that invented the archive and which sacraged the writer-that authors, like Rousseau or Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, will begin to keep these letters, even the drafts of their own answers. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the literary field is reconfigured, with writers and writers caught in mass consumption and media coverage: television, radio, magazines make them more accessible (many are the examples in these letters where the letter -loopers comment on events of Simone’s life – holidays, travel, diseases – that they learned by the media) and or writer spreads. These letters provide an exceptional material: they make it possible to enter, in acts, the mechanisms of reading, reception, appropriation, whether it is the correspondence received by Balzac or Eugène Sue, by Annie Ernaux … or by Simone de Beauvoir.

Write to Simone

Marine Rouch estimates that around 20,000 the number of letters received by Simone de Beauvoir between 1944 and 1986, tabled in 1995 at the National Library by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, and today classified in forty-four archives of what is called “ The Simone of Beauvoir-Lettres Fund received ».

Literary history underlines how much the “ Letter to the writer ” – Here to the writer – written by people” ordinary »Depends on the autobiographical content of the writings, which then allows the reader or the reader to identify themselves, to see in the other an alter ego, which one admires certainly, but with the sensitivity of which one can confide. The autobiographical work thus transforms the “ great writer “Or the” large writer », In an accessible person, with his feelings, his doubts, his misfortunes, his impulses. The mail that Simone de Beauvoir receives, in the same way, has an inflection after the publication of Memoirs of a tidy young girl. Marine Rouch distinguishes three moments: between 1949 (publication of the Second sex) and 1953, the letters are few, and come from the public “ enlightened “, intellectual. The mail is gaining momentum with obtaining the Goncourt price for Mandarinsin 1954, but he widen and feminized himself with the memorial and autobiographical moment of the 1960s. Extracts from Memoirs of a tidy young girlas The Age Force Then appear in She. An extract ofSo sweet death appears in Marie-Claire. The experienced woman will be prepublished by extracts in She Between October and November 1967. The number of letters – as we inform the letters preserved – flies: 85 in 1956, 107 in 1957, 200 in 1958, 244 in 1959, 319 in 1960, 460 in 1961, 503 in 1962, 644 in 1963, 1,046 in 1964, 1,000 in 1965, then between 500 and 800 until 1974.

Five women “ ordinary »»

In this work, Marine Rouch focuses on five correspondence, whose conversation she restores, intertwining the letters with those of Simone de Beauvoir when they were preserved, and each introducing by a biographical story … and a portrait. Why these five ? No doubt because Marine Rouch has a strong emotional link with their history, in particular because she met them, they or their daughters. The emotion also imprinted the preface to the work, where Marine Rouch remembers the first time she consulted the Simone de Beauvoir fund at the National Library ten years ago. “” Upset “,” intimidated “,” In turn amused, moved, angry “,” passionate “, Marine Rouch also explains the effect of this reading on her own journey, since she believes that she was literally” transfigured By these meetings, paper and also, for some of flesh. If I insist on this dimension, it is that it situates the book project in abyme: in their differences- they are not the same age (Colette and Mireille are young girls, the other young women), do not have the same living conditions, are for some single, for other brides, for others alone with children …- They all tell how the reading of the works of Simoneuvoir, then the correspondence, even, transfigure them: “ You made me as I am today “,” Your books torn me out of a species of thick skin that stuck to me », Writes Huguette-Céline Bastide. In reverse of the thesis of the Thirty Glorious Years, including Marine Rouch, in her preface, recalls the blind points and the shortcuts, these letters describe over long course the difficulty of growing up girl and being a woman: certainly, certain events, certain reflections anchor words in their historical context or in biographical particularities (Gaullism, the War of Vietnam, but also the reading by the mothers of the letters The impossibility in these bourgeois environments to say or live his homosexuality, uncontrolled pregnancies, marriage with a violent madman who threatens his wife with a knife and holds the accounting of the amortization of his wife’s body …), but number of words cross the chapters: the feeling of engraving, suffocation, imprisonment in domestic life, fear of seeing his aspirations, but also revolt, passion for reading, writing, the thirst to live (“ I feel a curious force in me and I’m afraid to let it lose », P. 236). Not all revolts do not lead to changes in life, and the impression of reading is often gentle. If I knew the letters of Huguette, for the work done with Karine Bastide, her daughter, to find them here, among the letters of Blossom, Claire, Colette and Mireille gives them another echo, amplifies the subject: you must then imagine Simone de Beauvoir sometimes read them sometimes in the same month, the same week, and answer them.

Because to each, and to their surprise, Simone de Beauvoir answers, Marine Rouch specifies it in her preface, unlike Jean-Paul Sartre who had a secretary to manage his mail. The letters are never very long (and for having seen the originals addressed to Huguette, they are often difficult to decipher), but the philosopher thanks, consoles, confirms, and above all encourages to write: she recades blossom in her “ love-Idolish “, Is without complacency for the writings that are sent to him,” fierce Even in his assessments, enjoining his correspondents to work more, to chase received ideas, to go even further, more deeply. They sometimes rebiff, Claire teases the great lady when Huguette is still afraid of disturbing her, Colette at the age of 17 is trying to comfort her on the thought of death (“ Do not think of the hell carved on the eardrums of the Romanesque churches but of the princess with the black gloves of the books of Cocteau », P. 170), they also allow themselves remarks on this or that work of the writer, also distributing good and bad points, they discuss their readings, advise a book, a film, a disc: they write it, Simone is often the only one to which they can confide, the only one with whom they can discuss. It is the one that gives meaning to their lives, which saves life (quote) or in any case, allows them to exist. She also makes them feel less banal, less “ ordinary », Give everyone the feeling of being a little exceptional ; It is also terrible, conversely, to read their fear, sometimes, not to be up to the task, their shame of “ become a little more like everyone else, like any woman (P. 69), because they have married, have had children, have “ concerns of good woman “(P. 353), were also caught” wacky “(P. 169, 210), this shame resulting in words, but also by silence, some interrupting correspondence for many years (“ I had not become a writer, so what good is it to bother her »P. 160), before coming back, for example like Colette, during a jazz air…

We can only share the phenomenological approach advocated by Marine Rouch, especially in her very beautiful defense speech, and at the end of her preface, when she delivers, superbly, the identifications with these five young women (p. 32): if the reading of the writings of Simone de Beauvoir has changed these women, if reading letters emotional and “ transfigured »Marine Rouch, reading her book, in turn, is particularly moving: in these restored conversations, and just as the portrait at the start of the chapter allows them to give them a face, she gives voice to these women, each in her stamp, between bursts and whispers, with their clean intonations (Claire and her joy of living, Huguette and her melancholy, Blossom and her” neurosis », Colette often sad and enthusiastic mireille). She demonstrates how the adjective “ ordinary Can not abstract from these quotes which give him, on the contrary, his relief. “” The energy and the strategies deployed by these women to (y) face are an invaluable and inexhaustible source of inspiration », She writes in conclusion of her preface: dear Marine Rouch, thank you for giving us, too, sweetness, and courage, to continue forward.