The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir Page B

false teeth. You see what I mean!”
    I saw what he meant. Sometimes I dream that all my teeth fall to pieces in my mouth, and all at once there is senile decay enveloping me. False teeth.…
    “Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “There are some nasty little things one keeps to oneself.”
    “That may be a mistake. That’s how misunderstandings arise.”
    “Maybe.” He stood up. “Come on: we shall be catching cold.”
    I got up too. We walked gently down the grassy slope. “Yet to a certain extent you were right in saying that I was putting it on,” said André. “I overdid it. When I saw all those fellows so very much more decrepit than I am and yet still taking things just as they come, without moaning about it at all, I told myself that it really would not do. I decided to pull myself together.”
    “Oh, that’s it, then! I thought it was my not being here that had made you so good-tempered again.”
    “What a notion! Far from it: it was largely on your account that I determined to take myself in hand. I don’t want to be an old bore. Old is quite enough: bore, no.”
    I took his arm: I squeezed it. I had recovered the André I had never lost and that I never should lose. We walked into the garden and sat on a bench at the foot of a cypress. The moon and its little star were shining over the house.
    “Still,” I said, “it’s true that old age does exist. And it’s no fun telling oneself that one is done for.”
    He put his hand on mine. “Don’t tell yourself any such thing. I think I know why you did not succeed with this book. You set off with a sterile ambition—the ambition of doing something quite new and of excelling yourself. That is a fatal error. To understand Rousseau and Montesquieu and to make them understood, that was a solid plan and one that carried you a long way. If something really grips you again, you may still do good work.”
    “All in all, my literary work will remain what it is: I’ve seen my limits.”
    “From a self-regarding point of view you may not gomuch further, that’s true. But you can still interest readers, make them think and enrich them.”
    “Let’s hope so.”
    “For my part I’ve taken a decision. I shall go on for one more year and then stop. I shall go back to learning, bring myself up to date and fill in my gaps.”
    “You think that after that you will set off again with fresh strength?”
    “No. But there are things I don’t know and that I want to know. Just so as to know them.”
    “That will be enough for you?”
    “For some time, at all events. Don’t let’s look too far ahead.”
    “You’re right.”
    We had always looked far ahead. Should we now have to learn to live a short-term life? We sat there side by side beneath the stars, with the sharp scent of the cypress wafting by us; our hands touched. For a moment time stopped still. It would soon start flowing again. What then? Should I be able to work or not? Would my bitterness against Philippe die away? Would the dread of aging take hold of me again? Do not look too far ahead. Ahead there were the horrors of death and farewells: it was false teeth, sciatica, infirmity, intellectual barrenness, loneliness in a strange world that we would no longer understand and that would carry on without us. Shall I succeed in not lifting my gaze to those horizons? Or shall I learn to behold them without horror? We are together: that is our good fortune. We shall help one another to live through this last adventure, this adventure from which we shall not come back. Will that make it bearable for us? I do not know. Let us hope so. We have no choice in the matter.
    ----
    * A difficult, competitive postgraduate examination for university and lycée posts.

The Monologue
    The monologue is her form of revenge
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    F LAUBERT
    T HE silly bastards! I drew the curtains they keep the stupid colored lanterns and the fairy lights on the Christmas trees out of the apartment but the noises come in through the walls.