Writer’s correspondence with film-maker Claude Lanzmann, 18 years her junior, is published and handed over to Yale University

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The French feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir’s “mad passion” for a lover 18 years her junior has been revealed in a letter published for the first time.



The letter also shows that she was never sexually satisfied by her partner, the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

The writer, who condemned marriage as an “obscene” institution that enslaved women in her classic book The Second Sex, wrote to the film-maker Claude Lanzmann in 1953 saying she would throw herself into his “arms and I will stay there forever. I am your wife forever.”

In De Beauvoir’s letter from Amsterdam published by Le Monde, she wrote: “My darling child, you are my first absolute love, the one that only happens once (in life) or maybe never.

“I thought I would never say the words that now come naturally to me when I see you – I adore you. I adore you with all my body and soul ... You are my destiny, my eternity, my life.”

The note is one of 112 love letters written to Lanzmann, the only man De Beauvoir ever lived with, which has been bought by Yale University.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The French writer and film-maker Claude Lanzmann. Photograph: Magali Delporte

It reveals that Sartre – who had many other lovers and always kept a separate apartment – was never able to satisfy her physically in the same way.

“I loved him for sure,” she wrote to Lanzmann, “but without it being returned – our bodies were for nothing.”

Nor did she find the same bliss with the American novelist Nelson Algren, author of The Man with the Golden Arm.

“I loved him because of the love he had for me, without any real intimacy and without ever giving to him from inside of myself,” she added.

Lanzmann was 26 and Sartre’s secretary when the pair met. De Beauvoir was 44.

The golden couple of French intellectual life had a famously open relationship, and enjoyed – and endured – a number of similar love triangles.

Lanzmann, now 92, who went on to make the acclaimed Holocaust documentary Shoah, told Le Monde newspaper that the full story of their love was only coming out because of a clash with Beauvoir’s adopted daughter.

He accused Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir of trying to write him out of her mother’s life.

Le Bon was De Beauvoir’s companion and remains her literary executor.

Fearing that Le Bon wanted to “purely and simply eliminate me from the existence of Simone de Beauvoir”, he sold the letters to Yale so that historians would have access to them.

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Lanzmann said he never had any intention to make them public until he realised that Le Bon was going to “publish all De Beauvoir’s letters except the correspondence between her and me”.

He feared he would die and no one would know about the letters.

The film-maker has previously written of their “mad passion” in his memoir The Patagonian Hare but the existence of such a torrid correspondence was not known.

Le Bon de Beauvoir could not be contacted by AFP. Le Monde said she did not reply to their requests for an interview.

The letters can now be consulted only by researchers at the Yale University library.