Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre

Beauvoir wrote La Cérémonie des adieux in the year after Sartre's death — 1980 into early 1981 — and Gallimard published it in Paris in November 1981. Patrick O'Brian's English translation, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, appeared from Pantheon Books in New York and from André Deutsch in London in 1984. The chronological narrative section runs to about a hundred and thirty pages; the 1974 interviews run to another two hundred and fifty. In some French editions the two parts are separately volumed; in most editions they are printed together, the interviews framed by the memoir.

The book is Beauvoir's answer to the two problems any famous partnership has to face at the end. The first — how do you tell the story of someone else's decline honestly when that person is a public monument? — she answered by writing what she saw. She describes Sartre in the last three years in ways her readers found alternately essential and unforgivably plain. Her account of the loss of his eyesight, his difficulty with what he had thought of as his own work, his falls, and the final Broussais week is not softened by piety toward a philosophical career. The second — how do you introduce the private evidence for a partnership that had been public for fifty years? — she answered by publishing the 1974 conversations. The interviews are the direct evidence.

The book was widely and often bitterly discussed on publication. Sartre's adopted daughter and literary executor, Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, whose position Beauvoir describes coldly in the narrative section, wrote her own answer (Lettre ouverte à Simone de Beauvoir, 1993). Others in Sartre's circle objected to specific claims. Beauvoir stood by the book. It is her last published work of significant length and — with A Very Easy Death (1964) — one of the two books in which she wrote from within a specific grief rather than an argument.

Part One opens on 6 January 1971, the day of Sartre's eye operation for the retinal detachment that had begun to take his sight the previous autumn. Beauvoir is at the clinic. The operation is only partly successful, and Sartre's near-blindness from that point on becomes the shape the rest of the book will work around. Beauvoir then works chronologically through the 1970s: Sartre's continuing political work with Pierre Victor and the Maoist Gauche Prolétarienne, the collective editorship of Libération, the campaigns for Israel–Palestine dialogue, the June 1974 stroke that briefly paralysed his right side, the campaigns for Solzhenitsyn's release from Soviet imprisonment, the recording sessions with Beauvoir in the summer of 1974 (which she describes as she has decided will fill Part Two), the deepening dependence of the late 1970s on a small rotation of women — Beauvoir; Sartre's long-standing companion Michelle Vian; his adopted daughter Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre; his lover Wanda Kosakiewicz; a devoted secretary named Liliane Siegel — and, in the last three years, the 1978 campaigning for the Vietnamese boat people, the failing kidneys, and the return to intensive care at Broussais in March 1980.

Part Two, printed in the same volume in every edition, is the interviews. Beauvoir prepared a set of questions and recorded Sartre over roughly six weeks in the summer of 1974, in his own flat on the boulevard Edgar-Quinet, in her studio on the rue Victor Schoelcher, and on their annual holiday together at the Villa Le Bost in Junas (Gard). The interviews are Sartre's account, in his own voice, of his childhood, his schooldays, the École Normale, the 1929 pact with Beauvoir, his relationships with women, his political trajectory (the war, the postwar CP crisis, Algeria, May 1968, Maoism), his books, and his views on philosophical questions he had spent his career on. Beauvoir edited the transcripts down but did not, she says, alter Sartre's answers. She published them after his death because he had never assembled a systematic autobiography himself and because they are, she thought, the truest witness there will be of what his mind was actually working on.

Part One closes on the last week of Sartre's life. On 20 March 1980 he was hospitalised at Broussais with pulmonary oedema and failing kidneys. He remained partly conscious for the next three weeks. Beauvoir was at the hospital daily, and Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre; Sartre's friends visited in shifts. On 15 April 1980 at nine in the evening he died. On 19 April 1980 his funeral procession moved from Broussais through the boulevard Raspail and the boulevard du Montparnasse to the Cimetière du Montparnasse, followed by roughly fifty thousand people who had come out into the streets on their own accord — the largest French intellectual funeral of the century and the closest anything came to the Hugo funeral of 1885.