Paris, L’Esprit Frappeur, 136 pages.

Note: Awaiting annotation.

Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 192 pages.

In this intimate essay, Françoise returns to her passion for words. Not by navel-gazing, as René de Ceccatty rightly said in a literary review of Le Monde in 1997, but to remind us of Danièlle Sallenave’s saying: “The book does not replace anything, but nothing replaces the book”.

La Liseuse et la Lyre is a magnificent essay in which Françoise, again, touches on the universal. But in a detached and almost serene tone that we knew little about her, reminding us how wide her palette was. (Vincent)

The analogy of this too abstract passion with drug addiction inspired an author of the interwar period to denounce under this title: “This unpunished vice, reading”. How could he give this warning? With a text.

Paris, Encre, 366 pages.

Shocked by the disappearance of Simone de Beauvoir in 1986, in this book Françoise insisted on describing for us the one whose The Second Sex had marked her so much. The friendship that united them, Beauvoir’s literary work and his intimate relationship with Sartre, as well as the few theoretical disagreements that the two authors may have had are delicately approached. (Alain)

From L’Indicateur du réseau , part still unpublished:

It was during the turbulent period of the various “peace in Algeria” movements (…) that I entered, for the first time, Simone de Beauvoir’s place. I have known and been with since 1947 the author of Second Sex , but I lost sight of her long enough; she will recount our reunion in La Force de l’âge.

Paris, André Balland, 230 pages.

Note: Awaiting annotation.

Le Terrain Vague, 326 pages.

Note: Awaiting annotation.

Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1962, 158 pages.

Françoise saw in Flaubert the first of the bourgeois writers (with time and money) to have introduced what she considers to be the cardinal value of his class in literature:: investment in time (time is money).

If she doesn’t forget his misogyny and the atrocious pages he wrote against the defeated Paris Commune, she gives him credit for having devoted his time to trying to tear himself away from the mediocre thinking of his time and class (whether he succeeded is another story, editor’s note), and she distinguishes him from his contemporaries in that he was in epidermal rejection of the world (unlike Sand, Balzac, Stendhal…).

Françoise, Flaubertian? Certainly not. But she recognizes its literary merits and considers it an interesting textbook case. (Vincent)