ABSTRACT
Simone de Beauvoir was not in touch with her feelings. In her novels and essays, they feel stunted and are clumsily expressed. But her letters to her Chicago lover Nelson Algren tell a different story. “Paris seems dull, dark, and dead” she writes on 18 May 1947, after their first separation.
Maybe it is my heart that is dead to Paris. My heart is yet in New York, at the corner of Broadway where we said good bye; it is in my Chicago home, in my own warm loving place against your loving heart … With you pleasure was love, and now pain is love too. We must know every kind of love. We’ll know the joy of meeting again.
(de Beauvoir, 1998, p. 18)