BEAUVOIR, Simone de Lot n° 383

Preparatory documents for Simone de Beauvoir's biography. 1984-1985. 688 ff. in-4 typescripts (including 18 ff. of bibliography, notes and table), 23 ff. of photocopies of corrected proofs of the first and last pages of the book; 15 audio cassettes and 2 CDs (9 hours of interviews). A paperback copy of Simone de Beauvoir is enclosed. Set of preparatory documents for the biography of Simone de Beauvoir by Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier. With this last biography, published during her lifetime, Simone de Beauvoir wanted to leave the image of a woman who was free, independent and sure of her choices, not hesitating to reshape her words even if "fiction" had to impinge on reality. The interviews, collected on 15 cassettes and 2 CDs, began in the winter of 1984 at her home. Recorded between December 1984 and March 1985, these interviews flesh out the biography currently being written. In turn, Simone de Beauvoir evokes her relationship with Sartre, "he said that I was porous, that I absorbed everything, the people [...], the landscapes", her "greatest and least explicable" friendship with Merleau-Ponty, and the future of feminism. On the sound recordings, an interview with the authors by Anne Zelinski completes the picture: "it was the meeting between the theoretician and her practitioners. " These recordings are accompanied by the original edition of the book signed by the authors, but above all by the typescript, abundantly corrected by Simone de Beauvoir. The erasures, comments and annotations bear witness to the ambiguous relationship of the philosopher with herself. She goes back over what she may have said during the interviews, she softens her remarks, corrects them, denies them. "This whole page is false" (p. 20), "Wrong, invented" (p. 83), "completely foreign to me" (p. 84). A valuable document in which Simone de Beauvoir and her biographers respond to each other through comments. In blue for the philosoph