The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir Read Free Book Online Page A

keeping us apart.
    “I shall never believe that you can no longer create,” I said.
    “Bachelard says, ‘Great scientists are valuable to science in the first half of their lives and harmful in the second.’ They consider me a scientist. All I can do now is try not to be too harmful.”
    I made no reply. True or false, he believed what he was saying: it would have been useless to protest. It was understandable that my optimism should often irritate him: in a way it was an evasion of his problem. But what could I do? I could not tackle it for him. The best thing was to be quiet. We drove in silence as far as Champeaux.
    “This nave is really beautiful,” said André as we went into the church. “It reminds me very much of the one at Sens, only its proportions are even finer.”
    “Yes, it is lovely. I have forgotten Sens.”
    “It’s the same thick single pillars alternating with slender twinned columns.”
    “What a memory you have!”
    Conscientiously we looked at the nave, the choir, the transept. The church was no less beautiful because I had climbed the Acropolis, but my state of mind was no longer the same as it had been in the days when we systematically combed the Ile de France in an aged secondhand car. Neither of us was really taking it in. I was not really interestedin the carved capitals, nor in the misericords that had once amused us so.
    As we left the church, André said to me, “Do you think the Truite d’Or is still there?”
    “Let’s go and see.”
    The little inn at the water’s edge, with its simple, delightful food, had once been one of our favorite places. We celebrated our silver wedding anniversary there, but we had not been back since. This village, with its silence and its little cobbles, had not changed. We went right along the main street in both directions: the Truite d’Or had vanished. We did not like the restaurant in the forest where we stopped: perhaps because we compared it with our memories.
    “And what shall we do now?” I asked.
    “We had thought of the Château de Vaux and the towers at Blandy.”
    “But do you want to go?”
    “Why not?”
    He did not give a damn about them, and nor indeed did I; but neither of us liked to say so. What exactly was he thinking of, as we drove along the little leaf-scented country roads? About the desert of his future? I could not follow him onto that ground. I felt that there beside me he was alone. I was, too. Philippe had tried to telephone me several times. I had hung up as soon as I recognized his voice. I questioned myself. Had I been too demanding with regard to him? Had André been too scornfully indulgent? Was it this lack of harmony that had damaged him? I should have liked to talk about it with André, but I was afraid of starting a quarrel again.
    The Château de Vaux, the towers at Blandy: we carriedout our program. We said, “I remembered it perfectly, I did not remember it at all, these towers are quite splendid.…” But in one way the mere sight of things is neither here nor there. You have to be linked to them by some plan or some question. All I saw was stones piled one on top of the other.
    The day did not bring us any closer together; I felt that we were both disappointed and very remote from one another as we drove back to Paris. It seemed to me that we were no longer capable of talking to one another. Might all one heard about noncommunication perhaps be true, then? Were we, as I had glimpsed in my anger, condemned to silence and loneliness? Had that always been the case with me, and had it only been that stubborn optimism that had made me say it was not?
I must make an effort
, I said to myself as I went to bed.
Tomorrow morning we will discuss it. We will try to get to the bottom of it
. The fact that our quarrel had not been dissipated was because it was merely a symptom. Everything would have to be gone into again, radically. Above all, not to be afraid of talking about Philippe. A single forbidden