If you wish to read more about it, please look at the report I wrote on the French version of my website. I will write about it in English next week.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Martial Dauriac, one of Jeanne de Beauvoir’s children and to his wife Danièle Dauriac, who so kindly welcomed me in their property at Meyrignac, near Uzerche and Limoges, last week-end. I gave two lectures on the lives and commitments of Simone de Beauvoir and of her sister, the painter Hélène de Beauvoir.

Simone and Hélène used to spend all their summer vacations there as children, as Beauvoir recalls in Memoirs of a dutyful daughter.

Thank you also for the women’s rights committee of the region to have sponsored the event.

In front of a very large crowd of men and women who had come from all around the towns and counties, it was a pleasure to testify on their bodies of work and on their struggles for human and women rights all their lives.

It was very emtional to discover that Simone de Beauvoir’s goddaughter, a lady from the region, was in the audience. She told us that ” Françoise de Beauvoir, their mother, was nicer and sweeter than Simone’s description in her Memoirs”.

Pascale Bastin Charles-Lavauzelle, a woman historian  also specialist on gardening, nature, and writers, gave us an amazing tour of the parc of Meyrignac which countains so many unique flowers and plants that were planted by the Beauvoir ancestors at the end of the XIXth century. She quoted many writers and made this moment exceptional to us all.

Next week, I shall be in Newcastle, UK, for the international conference of the Simone de Beauvoir society where I shall testify on my conversations with Simone on the writers Marguerite Yourcenar, Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, Michel Foucault, and Henry Miller.