Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de
Beauvoir
My dear little girl
For a long time I’ve been wanting to
write to you in the evening after one of those outings with friends that I will
soon be describing in “A Defeat,” the kind when the world is ours. I wanted to
bring you my conqueror’s joy and lay it at your feet, as they did in the Age of
the Sun King. And then, tired out by all the shouting, I always simply went to
bed. Today I’m doing it to feel the pleasure you don’t yet know, of turning
abruptly from friendship to love, from strength to tenderness. Tonight I love
you in a way that you have not known in me: I am neither worn down by travels
nor wrapped up in the desire for your presence. I am mastering my love for you
and turning it inwards as a constituent element of myself. This happens much
more often than I admit to you, but seldom when I’m writing to you. Try to
understand me: I love you while paying attention to external things. At
Toulouse I simply loved you. Tonight I love you on a spring evening. I love you
with the window open. You are mine, and things are mine, and my love alters the
things around me and the things around me alter my love.
My dear little girl, as I’ve told
you, what you’re lacking is friendship. But now is the time for more practical
advice. Couldn’t you find a woman friend? How can Toulouse fail to contain one
intelligent young woman worthy of you*? But you wouldn’t have to love her.
Alas, you’re always ready to give your love, it’s the easiest thing to get from
you. I’m not talking about your love for me, which is well beyond that, but you
are lavish with little secondary loves, like that night in Thiviers when you
loved that peasant walking downhill in the dark, whistling away, who turned out
to be me. Get to know the feeling, free of tenderness, that comes from being
two. It’s hard, because all friendship, even between two red-blooded men, has
its moments of love. I have only to console my grieving friend to love him;
it’s a feeling easily weakened and distorted. But you’re capable of it, and you
must experience it. And so, despite your fleeting misanthropy, have you
imagined what a lovely adventure it would be to search Toulouse for a woman who
would be worthy of you and whom you wouldn’t be in love with? Don’t bother with
the physical side or the social situation. And search honestly. And if you find
nothing, turn Henri Pons, whom you scarcely love anymore, into a friend.
[…]
I love you with all my heart and
soul.
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