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“You don’t meet a little girl who burns alive every day,” Sylvie thinks. Andrée is hotter than Sylvie from the very beginning – a more passionate, more emotional creature.
A funny, intelligent, talented musician, without being intimidated by the nuns who teach them, seems to come from another world, one where the feminine codes of conduct demanded by his surroundings do not apply. Two girls compete for first place in the class, and heavy-duty Sylvie often wins, but only because Andrée doesn’t mind working as hard as she does.
However, the freedom that Sylvie admires in Andrée, who initially does not scold her cold and graceful mother when her seven children knock over the furniture in the house or shower each other with breadcrumbs at the dinner table, is an illusion. In adolescence, Andrée is caught in a vice whose grip quickly tightens as she approaches marriageable age. “Enter a monastery or get married; Being celibate is not a profession,” his mother, who has a long affluent, militant Catholic ancestry, tells Andrée’s sister, who is only a few years older than she is. A devout aunt believes in “love at first service”—the idea that an arranged marriage couple falls madly in love at the altar as soon as they read their vows.
Meanwhile, Sylvie loses her faith at an early age and is forced out of marriage when her father is no longer able to provide her with a dowry through a series of bad investments. Instead, she reads to earn a living as a teacher, giving her the independence she longs for.
Novelist Beauvoir, lined up at a library table in Andrée’s family estate, and “favorites men and bearded old men; Andrée’s ancestors,” or downstairs, the giant kitchen battery kitchen – “innumerable covered pots, frying pans, casseroles, casseroles, ovenware, porringers, soup pots, plates, metal cups, strainers, meat cutters, mills, molds and pestles! What kinds of bowls, cups, glasses, champagne flutes and pairs, plates, saucers, gravy vats, jars, jugs, jugs, jugs!” (It’s worth noting that Beauvoir lived in hotels for most of her adult life and ate in restaurants.)
Most disturbing are the ways in which Andrée, ardently religious and relentlessly devoted to her mother, internalizes the destructive impulses of a culture that consumes and limits her. “His mother put the work she had done on him like a penitent,” Sylvie notes sadly.
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