ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Fallaize was unfailingly generous in her support of other women. Back in 1988 she was one of the co-founders of the organization called Women in French, which still continues to encourage women in French studies in Britain. Readers wishing to acknowledge Monique's pain must take it seriously. People cannot, like the critics of the 1960s, brush it off as insignificant wailings of a sentimental and very ordinary woman, as if only extraordinary women deserve people's sympathy. Simone de Beauvoir's investigation of otherness always took the form of a preoccupation with the self and the other. The theme is already apparent in her student diary, written when she was nineteen. Beauvoir herself has pointed out that this end is not realistic, in the sense that Francoise is not really a character capable of murder. Her last act in novel is extraordinary, melodramatic, extreme, but that does not prevent it from being exemplary in a philosophical sense.
