Maybe this is because her own fierce desire for Zaza to finally claim the life she deserved might have been stronger than Zaza’s own desire to risk all she would lose in doing so: God, her family, bourgeois respectability.ĭe Beauvoir’s strong feelings and hopes for Lacoin were also the beginning of her political education. In my view she never quite managed to write up the spectre of Zaza entirely convincingly, which is why she kept returning to try to catch her on the page. De Beauvoir’s readers know that this friendship had long haunted her, not only in her books, but in her dreams. The Inseparables once again returns to her friendship (from the age of nine) with Élisabeth Lacoin, nicknamed Zaza. After she’d won the Goncourt prize for The Mandarins, I can see it must have been appealing for her to write an intimate novella.
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