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Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was the elder of two
daughters born to attorney Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir and Françoise Brasseur
de Beauvoir. The noble-sounding “de” in their name indicated some family
prestige, but they were only comfortable, not wealthy. Apart from a five-year
period during adulthood, de Beauvoir spent her entire life in the Montparnasse
district of Paris. Her mother was a devout Catholic, and as a young girl
de Beauvoir regularly attended church and went to confession. She studied in a
Catholic school and considered God her personal companion. However, by
adolescence she had given up her faith. She later recounted that this loss of belief
was both freeing and terrifying: “Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible
significance of that word. Alone: without a witness, without anyone to speak to,
without refuge.”
After the World War I, de Beauvoir’s father suffered financial setbacks. He was
forced to tell his daughters he could not provide them a dowry and concluded,
“My dears, you’ll never marry; you’ll have to work for your livings.” De Beauvoir
decided to pursue a career as a philosophy teacher. She was drawn to philosophy
becauseIt went straight to essentials....I had always wanted to know everything;philosophy
would allow me to satisfy this desire, for it aimed at total reality.*She enrolled at the Institut Sainte-Marie in 1925 and studied there for the next
four years, simultaneously hearing lectures at the Institut Catholique and the
Sorbonne.SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
1908–1986
*Simone de Beauvoir,Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter(New York: Harper & Row, 1959), p. 158.