There is much that society will throw at Andrée to intimidate and flatten her, not least religion and the desire not to disappoint her controlling, conservative mother. And to make life as complicated as it actually is – which novelists must do – Andrée loves her mother. Sylvie can jealously see that all other attachments are not as important to her friend. How can she compete with this maternal bond? Yes,’ I said. Andrée’s confidence and rapid, precise speech unnerved me. She looked me over warily. Our relationship was not at all mother and daughter,” she says. “She adopted me so I could manage her work after she died but this and the fact she was so much older prompted people to talk of her as my ‘mother’. At the beginning that annoyed me, but now I accept it. It’s not that important.

One of the most infamous landmarks in Paris is the Eiffel Tower. Each year, the Eiffel Tower has almost 7 million visitors, and in 2010, the Eiffel Tower had its 250 millionth visitor. Paris Population Size They teach you in catechism to respect your body. So selling your body in marriage must be as bad as selling it on the street,” Andrée says. She described the archive as “a cultural artefact of the 20th century”. I found an outpouring of projection, identification, expectation, disappointment and passion Judith Coffin, University of Texas

The death of De Beauvoir’s mother, Françoise, three years later brought the two women even closer. “Something happened between us that, like love, is not explicable. She let me into her life and presented me to her friends in her entourage including Sartre. And then we began travelling together in the summers.” Earlier this year, Michael Peppiatt’s The Existential Englishman: Paris Among the Artists was published; the book displays namedropping and some Parisian familières, and ended up as quite the end note of what can be written about celebrities, and Paris. It is the kind of book that most people will forget about when asked of their favourite autobiographies, six months after having read it.

I also loved what Bair wrote about writing a biography and trying to stay level-headed in some way: Saint Augustine provided the answer for what drew me to Beauvoir: I had become “a question to myself. Not even I understand everything that I am.” And Rousseau gave me hope that sustained me during each biography, but especially within this bio-memoir: “My purpose is to display a portrait in every way true to nature, and the person I portray will be myself. Simply myself.” Before she died, in April 1986 – the day before the sixth anniversary of Sartre’s death – De Beauvoir, who never married or had children, formally adopted Le Bon to allow her to inherit her collection of unpublished correspondence, notebooks and manuscripts. Le Bon de Beauvoir, as she has since been known, says the adoption was a legal, not filial move. I told her how we had agreed that he would not read it before it was published, and I even told her how he had said he would neither help nor hinder me, which his family and friends interpreted as his agreement to cooperate fully. I told her that, having worked in such extraordinary circumstances, I didn’t see how I could work any other way. I hoped that she would be generous and gracious enough to give me whatever help I asked for, but that she would also allow me the independence to construct a full and objective account of her life and work. I am super proud of the effort that went into the week's preparation. Our ability to defend our line for 30-plus phases at the end, that's huge. What an atmosphere, what a game, what a tournament to be part of and I'm just really happy to have another week."Non, non, non,” she says emphatically. “History doesn’t repeat itself like that. The relationship I had with Simone was unique. It cannot be reproduced.”