The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir

a few pages: they all of them had a taste almost as sickening as that of my own books—a taste of decay.
    Manette looked up from her paper. “I’m beginning to think that I’ll see men on the moon with my own eyes.”
    “Your own eyes? You’ll make the journey?” asked André, with laughter in his voice.
    “You know very well what I mean. I shall know they are there. And it’ll be the Russians, my boy. The Yankees missed by a mile, with their pure oxygen.”
    “Yes, Mama, you’ll see the Russians on the moon,” said André affectionately.
    “And to think we began in caves,” went on Manette meditatively, “with no more than our ten fingers to help us. And we’ve reached this point: you must admit it’s heartening.”
    “The history of mankind is very fine, true enough,” said André. “It’s a pity that that of men should be so sad.”
    “It won’t always be sad. If your Chinese don’t blow the world to pieces, our grandchildren will know socialism. I’d happily live another fifty years to see that.”
    “What a woman! Do you hear that?” he said to me. “She would sign on again for another fifty years.”
    “You wouldn’t, André?”
    “No, Mama: frankly I wouldn’t. History follows such very curious paths that I scarcely feel it has anything to do with me at all. I have the impression of being on the sideline. So in fifty years’ time.…”
    “I know: you no longer believe in anything,” said Manette disapprovingly.
    “That’s not quite true.”
    “What do you believe in?”
    “People’s suffering, and the fact that it is abominable. One should do everything to abolish it. To tell you the truth, nothing else seems to me of any importance.”
    “In that case,” I asked, “why not the bomb? Why not annihilation? Let everything go up and there’s an end of it.”
    “There are times when one is tempted to wish for it. But I prefer to hope that there can be life, life without suffering.”
    “Life to do something with,” said Manette pugnaciously.
    André’s tone of voice struck me: he was not so uncaring as he seemed. “It’s a pity that that of men should be so sad.”How feelingly he had said that! I looked at him and I felt such a wave of feeling toward him that all at once I was filled with certainty. Never should we be two strangers. One of these days, maybe tomorrow, we should find one another again, for my heart was already with him once more. After dinner it was I who suggested that we should go out. We climbed slowly toward the Fort Saint-André. I said, “Do you really think that nothing counts, apart from doing away with suffering?”
    “What else can count?”
    “It’s not very cheerful.”
    “No. Even less cheerful since one does not know how to set about it.” He was silent for a moment. “Mama was wrong in saying that we don’t believe in anything. But there’s virtually no cause that is entirely our own: we are not for the U.S.S.R. and its compromises; nor for China, either. In France we are neither for the regime nor for any of the parties in opposition.”
    “It’s a comfortless situation,” I said.
    “It goes some way toward explaining Philippe’s attitude: being against everything, when you are thirty, has nothing very exalting about it.”
    “Nor when you are sixty either. But there is no reason for betraying one’s opinions.”
    “Were they really
his
opinions?”
    “How do you mean?”
    “Oh, of course he is disgusted by flagrant injustice and gross corruption. But he has never been really politically minded. He took on our opinions because he could not do otherwise—he saw the world through our eyes. But just how deeply was he convinced?”
    “What about the risks he ran during the Algerian war?”
    “That did genuinely revolt him. And then the speeches and the protests and manifestos—it was all action and adventure. It does not prove that he was deeply committed to the left.”
    “It’s a quaint way of defending Philippe,