Free The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir

and more cheerful here than in Paris. It was quite clear that he had not missed me at all. How long would he have gone on cheerfully doing without me?
    He stopped the car. “You see that green patch down there? It’s the Gard. It makes a kind of basin: it’s perfect for bathing, and the place itself is entrancing.”
    “But come, isn’t it rather far? We shall have to climb up again.”
    “There’s nothing to it: I have often done it.”
    He darted down the slope, surefooted and very fast. I followed far behind, holding back and stumbling a little: a fall or a broken bone would not be at all amusing, at my age. I could climb quickly enough, but I had never been much good at going down.
    “Isn’t it pretty?”
    “Very pretty.”
    I sat down in the shade of a rock. As for bathing—no. I swim badly. And I am very unwilling to display myself in a bathing suit, even in front of André. An old man’s body, I said to myself, watching him splash about in the water, is after all less ghastly than an old woman’s. Green water, blue sky, the smell of the southern hills: I would have been better off here than in Paris. If only he had pressed me I should have come sooner: but that was the very thing he had not wanted.
    He sat beside me on the gravel. “You ought to have come in. It’s wonderful!”
    “I’m very happy here.”
    “What do you think of Mama? She’s astonishing, don’t you find?”
    “Astonishing. What does she do all day?”
    “She reads a great deal; she listens to the radio. I suggested buying her a television, but she refused. She said, ‘I don’t let just anyone into my house.’ She gardens. She goes to the meetings of her cell. She is never at a loss, as she puts it.”
    “All in all, it is the best time of her life.”
    “Certainly. It’s one of those cases in which old age is a happy period—old age after a hard life, one that has been more or less eaten up by others.”
    When we began to climb up again it was very hot: the way was longer and harder than André had said. He went up with long strides; and I, who used to climb so cheerfully in former days, dragged along far behind: it was intensely irritating. The sun bored into my head; the shrill death agony of the love-sick cicadas shattered my ears; I was gasping and panting. “You’re going too fast,” I said.
    “You take your time. I’ll wait for you at the top.”
    I stopped, sweating heavily. I set off again. I was no longer in control of my heart or my breathing; my legs would scarcely obey me; the light hurt my eyes; the pertinacious monotony of the love song, the death song, of the cicadas grated on my nerves. I reached the car with my head and my face all afire—I felt as though I were on the very edge of apoplexy.
    “I’m destroyed.”
    “You should have come up slower.”
    “I remember those easy little paths of yours.”
    We drove home without speaking. It was wrong of me to grow cross about a trifle. I had always been quick-tempered: was I going to turn into a shrew? I should have to take care. But I could not get over my vexation. And I felt so unwell that I was afraid I might have sunstroke. I ate a couple of tomatoes and went to lie down in the bedroom, where the darkness, the tiles on the floor and the whiteness of the sheets gave a false impression of coolness. I closed my eyes; in the silence I listened to the tick-tock of a pendulum. I had said to André, “I don’t see what one loses in growing old.” Well, I could see now, all right. I had always refused to consider life as Fitzgerald’s “process of dilapidation.” I had thought my relations with André would never deteriorate, that my body of work would grow continually richer, that Philippe would become every day more and more like the man I had wanted to make of him. As for my body, I never worried about it. And I believed that even silence bore its fruit. What an illusion! Sainte-Beuve’s words were truer than Valéry’s. “In some parts one