Let us begin our journey with a gentle stroll through the corridors of Simone de Beauvoir’s childhood, where the echoes of velvet and laughter mingle with the quiet thud of loss. Imagine a young girl, Simonne Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, born into a Parisian apartment shimmering with the remnants of wealth—red moquette, mirrored walls, and the scent of her mother’s favorite flowers. Yet, beneath the surface, the family’s fortune is slipping away, and with it, the certainty that the world will always be as it is.
Her mother, Françoise, is a pillar of Catholic piety, her days structured by prayer and propriety, her love measured in acts of devotion. Her father, Georges, is her opposite: witty, irreverent, a lover of poetry and the theater, a man who sees intellect as the highest virtue. This home is a crucible of contradiction, where Simone learns early that to be a girl is to walk a tightrope between expectation and possibility.
Simone’s earliest joys are found in stories—first told to her by her father, then written by her own hand. At the age of seven, she fills a notebook with a story of misfortunes, a hundred pages long, the ink a testament to her determination to shape her world with words. Her mother, though proud, worries about what is proper for a girl; her father, proud of her intellect, reminds her that her mind is a rare gift—though he still expects her to marry well.
But the world outside is changing. The family’s wealth is lost in the collapse of her grandfather’s bank, and their elegant life contracts to a cramped apartment, the red velvet now a memory. Simone’s education, once the privilege of the elite, becomes a necessity. She is sent to a Catholic school, where she excels academically but feels the weight of rules designed to shape her into a “proper” woman.
Yet, even here, she finds moments of freedom: running through the Luxembourg Gardens, confiding in her beloved sister Hélène, forging a friendship with the spirited Zaza Lacoin—a friendship that will later become a touchstone for understanding love, loss, and the price of freedom.
Within the walls of her home, Simone observes the subtle dance of her parents’ marriage—a union of love and disappointment, passion and resignation. She sees her mother’s sacrifices, her father’s frustrations, and wonders: Is this the only script available to women?
As Simone grows, so does her awareness of the contradictions that define her world. She is praised for her intellect but reminded that it is not a woman’s place to outshine men. She is taught to be devout but questions the logic of faith. Her earliest stories are not just acts of imagination—they are acts of resistance, attempts to carve out a space for a self that refuses to be confined.
In this first section, we see how the seeds of Beauvoir’s later philosophy are planted in the fertile, if troubled, soil of her childhood. The lessons learned here—about loss, expectation, and the search for meaning—will echo throughout her life.
And so, as Simone steps from the safety of childhood into the uncertainties of adolescence, we follow her into the next chapter: the awakening of ambition and the forging of identity in the crucible of education.
