The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir Read Free Book Online

indifference. I had felt it so distinctly that I had almost refused, but he would have taken the refusal as a mark of ill will. What was happening to us? There had been quarrels in our life, but always over serious matters—over the bringing up of Philippe, for example. They were genuine conflicts that we resolved violently, but quickly and for good.This time it had been a great whirling of fog, of smoke without fire; and because of its very vagueness two days had not quite cleared it away. And then again in former times bed was the place for our stormy reconciliations. Trifling grievances were utterly burned away in amorous delight, and we found ourselves together again, happy and renewed. Now we were deprived of that resource.
    I saw the signpost: I stared and stared again. “What? Milly? Already? We only set off twenty minutes ago.”
    “I drove fast,” said André.
    Milly. When Mama used to take us to see Grandmama, what an expedition it was! It was the country, vast golden wheat fields, and we picked poppies at their edges. That remote village was now nearer to Paris than Neuilly or Auteuil had been in Balzac’s day.
    André found it hard to park the car, for it was market day—swarms of cars and pedestrians. I recognized the old covered market, the Lion d’Or, the houses and their faded tiles. But the square was completely changed by the stalls that were set up in it. The plastic pots and toys, the millinery, tinned food, scent and jewelry, were in no way reminiscent of the old village fairs. It was Monoprix or Inno shops spread out in the open air. Glass doors and walls: a big glittering stationery shop, filled with books and magazines with shiny covers. Grandmama’s house, once a little outside the village, had been replaced by a five-story building, and it was now right inside the town.
    “Would you like a drink?”
    “Oh, no!” I said. “It’s not my Milly anymore.” Nothing is the same anymore, and that’s certain: not Milly, not Philippe, not André. Am I?
    “Twenty minutes to reach Milly is miraculous,” I saidas we got back into the car. “Only it’s not Milly any longer.”
    “There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time.”
    I reflected. “You’ll laugh at my optimism again, but for me it’s above all miraculous.”
    “But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.”
    “I don’t think so. You do lose in yourself as well, but you also gain.”
    “You lose much more than you gain. To tell you the truth, I don’t see what gain there is, anyhow. Can you tell me?”
    “It’s pleasant to have a long past behind one.”
    “You think you
have
it? I don’t, as far as mine is concerned. Just you telling it over to yourself.”
    “I know it’s there. It gives depth to the present.”
    “All right. What else?”
    “You have a much greater intellectual command of things. You forget a great deal, certainly; but in a way even the things one has forgotten are available to one.”
    “In your line, maybe. For my part, I am more and more ignorant of everything that is not my own special subject. I should have to go back to the university like an ordinary undergraduate to be up to date with quantum physics.”
    “There’s nothing to prevent your doing so.”
    “Perhaps I will.”
    “It’s strange,” I said. “We agree about everything; yet not in this. I can’t see what you lose in growing old.”
    He smiled. “Youth.”
    “It’s not in itself a valuable thing.”
    “Youth and what the Italians so prettily call
stamina
. Thevigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything.”
    He had spoken in such a tone that I dared not accuse him of self-indulgence. There was something gnawing at him, something I knew nothing about—that I did not want to know about—that frightened me. It was perhaps that which was