Simone de BEAUVOIR. Autograph manuscript (fragment) for La L - Lot 197

Lot n° 197
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600 - 800 EUR
Simone de BEAUVOIR. Autograph manuscript (fragment) for La L - Lot 197
Simone de BEAUVOIR. Autograph manuscript (fragment) for La Longue Marche. Essay on China, [1955-1957] ; 12 pages in-4 on squared paper. About China. Fragments of the account of the official trip she made with Jean-Paul Sartre to China from September 6 to October 6, 1955. Entire passages are crossed out; elsewhere there are small corrections. The first manuscript is headed: "September 2 to 5, 1955", and is paginated 25 to 30 (with an "a"). It opens with observations of travellers in the waiting room at Orly, where well-dressed travellers to the caricature, bound for Boston, contrast with those, soberly dressed, who will leave on an "official expedition" for Moscow . Notes on the Soviets, Hungarians and Czechs at the Moscow airfield, and on a South African, also an official guest of the Chinese government with whom they are conversing; glimpses of the landscape; reminder of the Western presence in Mongolia since the 17th century (scholars, monks, adventurers)... "How far away Paris is! Behind me time and space have become so blurred, the system of our needs - hunger, thirst, sleep - and of my whole life has been so radically smoothed out that it seems to me that I have not made a journey but completed a rite of passage, long, tiring, and which has imperceptibly thrown me elsewhere. I am listening to the kind speech in Chinese, which an interpreter translates. The bearers of tall scarlet flowers, the dampness of the air, the strong vegetable odor rising from the earth suffocates me. ...] Until now, when I thought of China, I thought of a history, a civilization, a regime ... but China is not a political entity; I happily guess that it has a sky, its colors, its trees, its flesh.. .. On December 16 and 18, 1956, she sent new texts (pages 476, 486 bis, 757, 781-782) on Chinese literature: "Under the Manchus, the decadence of the feudal world was reflected in literature; it began to escape from the formal rules; new genres developed. The novel became
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