‘The Inseparables’: Simone de Beauvoir’s novella speaks of the crushing weight borne by women

On the 95th death anniversary of Simone de Beauvoir’s dear friend, Elisabeth Lacoin, we reread Beauvoir’s Les Inséparables or The Inseparables as a tribute to their friendship. Set in 1920s France, the novella captures an intense, transformative bond shared between the two. When they met at the age of nine at a Parisian school, Lacoin or Zaza, only two weeks older than Beauvoir, became an important agent of political socialisation for one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century.

Picture this – you find a friend who is a reflection of your own soul – a person who understands your deepest thoughts, aspirations, fears, and the desire to break free from the confines of society. Through Sylvie, who is based on Beauvoir herself, she paints a portrait of friendship that feels personal as well as revealing. And Andrée, inspired by Lacoin, is captivated by Beauvoir’s intellect, independence, and unwavering honesty – qualities that make her stand out from the rest of her world. In the novella, the duo challenge and seek solace in one another against the restrictive backdrop of post-war French conventions.

Female friendships

Written in 1954 and published in 2020, this “lost” novella offers a window into Beauvoir’s early experiences and a preview of the themes she would explore in her later works. The novella reveals the complexities of friendship, and the antagonistic role of matrimonial and gendered norms that surrounded them. Being a woman, Andrée is forced to toe the line of familial expectations that constantly limit her choices, despite her academic interest and scholarly brilliance. She is forbidden to appear for French agrégation, a prestigious exam that allowed graduates to teach secondary school, one that Beauvoir passed in philosophy, second only to Jean-Paul Sartre in 1929. This exploration of her tribulations is a sharp commentary on the larger, silent battles that the women of the time faced, where societal values took precedence over personal and intellectual freedom.

While The Inseparables celebrates friendship as a source of strength and empowerment, Beauvoir also reveals its hardships. Their bond is marked by admiration and frustration, love and jealousy, care and indifference. Beauvoir captures the bittersweet truth of close friendships: they can be liberating, but also demanding when they expose the vulnerabilities that come with emotional intimacy.

The tension between Sylvie and Andrée reflects this duality. Sylvie watches Andrée struggle with everyone's admiration and the constricting societal standards that she strives to meet. Andrée’s mother tries to regulate her days obsessively, the same way it was done with her by her mother in an attempt to keep her “innocent”. It tended to reinforce, in her words, a sort of moral sublimation that “the flesh is sinful; so, the flesh must be fled.” Kitchen work, working in the garden, or spending time with her younger siblings, which are otherwise part of typical household chores and modes of companionship, were calculated attempts to keep Andrée from thinking. This leaves her feeling helpless and tired.

“Must I spend my life fighting against the people I love?”, she asks Sylvie, exasperated. It is also a depiction of how Beauvoir herself felt powerless in trying to change her friend’s fate. Her portrayal of this powerlessness is painfully honest, showcasing a friendship that is a lucid mirror, reflecting back her own battles and her own limitations.

During such occasions, where she felt overburdened with housework, the conversations that took place between Sylvie and Andrée helped them in two ways: it made Sylvie understand her friend whom she thought she had lost to religion and social obligations; and for Andrée, it was a way of knowing the misery she felt was only natural. Intense discussions – about God, religion, war, writers, their families, flowers – were not unusual between them. But with one exception. They did not talk about romantic love due to their strict Catholic upbringing. They were friends who, in Andrée’s words, “you care for quite a lot but don’t kiss hello”. In a conversation about a cousin, Andrée says, “Guite says when you’re 28 years old it’s intolerable to spend your nights alone!” Sylvie shoots back, “And spending them with a man one doesn’t love, is that more tolerable?”

Reviving a friend

The book provides the reader with a certain reading list – starting from Horace, Polyeucte, Don Quixote, Cyrano de Bergerac, Gobineau, Hippolyte to Eugénie de Guérin, Pascal, Montaigne, Claudel, Bernanos, Mauriac, Dostoevsky, Proust, and Rilke, among many others. It also mentions belief systems like defeatism. The defeatists who believed France would lose the war intrigued Beauvoir in her childhood, as her father was critical of them. She was also intrigued by Jansenism, which is characterised by a morally strict and abstinent Catholicism that Andrée imbibed in her adulthood. At one point in the book, Sylvie remarks about Andrée, “She is their slave…not a single thought in her head isn’t answerable to God!” Being agnostic for long she also mentions, “Things would have been simpler if, like me, she had lost her faith when her faith lost its naïveté.” Beauvoir understood it was her friend’s internalised Catholicism that caused her to renounce her personality, and to adapt and unbecome the thinking person she once was.

Elisabeth Lacoin died a month before her 22nd birthday. Beauvoir tried to revive her four times through her literary works, to keep her from slipping into oblivion. Each of the four parts in Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiographical work, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, ends with a specific word: “Zaza,” “raconterais” (would tell), “mort” (death), and “sa mort” (her death). In the same book, she also wrote: “For a long time, I believed that I had paid for my own freedom with her death.” At the end of The Inseparables, she writes “Andrée suffocated in all this whiteness”. Beauvoir denounces this blancheur of religion, the whiteness that is cast upon the human body like a heavy veil.

Beauvoir’s writing of The Inseparables makes it clear that Lacoin’s tragic fate left a lasting impression on her life and philosophy. Andrée’s fate – toiling against forces that ultimately overpower her – epitomizes the crushing weight borne by women that prevents them from gaining a measure of agency over their lives.

Les Inséparables serves as a reminder of the necessity for women to form intimate bonds of care (often in unspoken ways) despite facing restrictive systems of power. This story speaks to all those who have experienced such friendships that challenge their beliefs and give them the courage to see the world, and themselves, clearly.

Kshipra Hada is a writer and Political Science graduate from Sophia College.

The Inseparables, Simone de Beauvoir, translated from the French by Lauren Elkin.