Music: Lullaby of the Leaves, Layton and Johnstone. Marseille, I murmured. Under a clear blue sky I saw sun-warmed tiles, patches of shadow, autumnal plane trees, and in the distance hills and the azure sea. A buzz of activity drifted up from the city to me, mingled with a whiff of scorched grass. Down in those dark, sunken streets people hurried to and fro. I was in Marseille โ alone, empty-handed, cut off from my past and everything I loved. I stood staring at this vast unknown city, where I now had to make my own way, unaided, from one day to the next.
The year Simone de Beauvoir spent teaching in Marseille was pivotal. Following a difficult period in her life, she was determined to start afresh. Simone had just parted from her beloved Jean-Paul Sartre, who was on his way to begin teaching at Le Havre.
He gave her the courage to explore her sensuality and helped complete her liberation from the stiff formality and prudishness of her bourgeois upbringing. Just before he died, Maheu remembered how Simone had seemed to him at the beginning:. What a heart! She was so authentic, so courageously rebellious, so genuineโฆAnd she was so distinctively attractive, her own genre, her own style, no woman has ever been like herโฆ.
Maheu had kept her away from his womanising friend as long as he could but eventually she was invited to join their study group. When the legendary meeting took place in July , Simone was more than a little nervous. Simone found the group mercilously judgemental. She had thought herself exceptional but their cultural knowledge seemed deeper, wider and more solidly grounded than hers.
While her ideas were diffuse and jumbled, theirs were methodically organised, finely honed from hours of debate amongst themselves and by the type of educational privileges that she had not received until recently.
