At the beginning of October, Les Éditions de l'Herne published an unpublished short novel by Simone de Beauvoir, Les "Inseparables" 66 years after being completed, its author never wishing to publish it, for unknown reasons.

He tells about his relationship with his great friend, Elisabeth Lacoin, nicknamed Zaza, in the Roaring Twenties.

More than 60 years after being completed, an unpublished novel by Simone de Beauvoir,

Les Inséparables

, was published in early October by Les Éditions de l'Herne.

This story dates from 1954 and helps to understand the intellectual training of Simone de Beauvoir, who signed one of the founding texts of feminism,

The Second Sex, 

in 1949. The writer and philosopher recounts, in great detail, her relationship during the Great War and the Roaring Twenties with Elisabeth Lacoin (1907-1929) known as Zaza, and here renamed Andrée.

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"From the day I met you, you were everything to me"

It is the story of a passionate friendship.

At the start of the school year, Sylvie (Simone de Beauvoir) meets Andrée, who is a child who frightens her world with her independence of mind and her frankness.

Including the narrator, Sylvie: "I admired his casualness without being able to imitate him".

In this keyed-up novel, Simone de Beauvoir remembers how much she began to adore her fellow student, seen as the conventions of the Catholic institution wanted in 1916. "From the day I met you, you were everything to me" , she tells him.

The Inseparables

offers the portrait of two young women from different backgrounds, Zaza stifled by a very conformist Christianity and the aspirations of her family for a marriage worthy of her rank, while the novelist, from a penniless family, is free to to study.

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"This final fictitious transcription leaves Simone de Beauvoir unsatisfied"

The story is tragic, since Zaza dies at only 22 years old, when Simone de Beauvoir meets Jean-Paul Sartre.

She will remain haunted by this untimely death all her life and will not write this short autobiographical novel until 1954, 25 years later.

For reasons that are still a little mysterious, she will never publish

Les Inséparables

during her lifetime.

Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, daughter of the author, thinks that she has given up on this project on her own.

After several attempts to tell Zaza's story, "this final fictitious transcription leaves her unsatisfied," she says in the preface.