Beauvoir’s early worldview framed freedom as surrender to gratuitous miracles

Evidence

Denis explains that you must “even throw … freedom out of the window; the day you no longer value it or anything else, only then will you truly possess it.” … She drinks “a gin-fi zz,” observes other men and women “waiting for a miracle and ready to seize it.” Aft er a “second gin-fi zz,” she feels herself “linked to Denis in a bond of indissoluble complicity,” and now drunk, she perceives: “At all street corners, miracles burst out like fi reworks” (W, 178–81; A, 298–305). — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 567