Paris Post War

Six years ago I was writing to you from here and it was wartime. It seems strange to remember that. In a sense, it seems much longer to me than six. I feel somehow beyond all that, as though in a second life. I no longer really recognise either myself or the old world. Yet there are the memories - the memories with yourself, in that former life. But they have a strange effect, rather harrowing, because they're so little related to the present.

Goodbye, dearest love. I don't know where to tell you to write to me. To Paris perhaps, from where everything will be forwarded. I'll send a wire to the consulate as soon as I know that I'm leaving for Tunis. Be happy over there, and come back to me soon. You and I

are as one, and I kiss you with all my might.

Your charming Beaver.

From Letters to Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir, trans: Quintin Hoare, Hutchinson

(Research by Kate Oldfield)