Beauvoir wrote Zaza’s death in fiction before learning the true cause

Evidence

Chantal concludes in a predictably dramatic vein: “A beautiful but tragic story weighed down forever on her life… . [S]he already felt transfi gured by its heft , from now on she would love and understand better … and perhaps one day she would be able to transform her painful experience into a work of serene beauty” (W, 165–66; A, 280–81 [transl. changed]). Ironically, and just like Roquentin in La Nausée, who projected the writing of an “adventure that could not take place,” Chantal never wrote the magnifi - cent volume that she felt Anne so richly deserved. Beauvoir’s Mémoires d’une jeune fi lle rangée provide some of the biographical underpinnings for Anne/ Zaza’s tragic death, but as Deirdre Bair points out, Beauvoir only discovered all the facts behind her story aft er its publication and had remained unaware of the reasons for Zaza’s (Elisabeth Lacoin’s) mother’s objections and the true nature of Pascal (based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s) family situation until that time: … For years in La Rochelle, Madame Merleau-Ponty had supposedly been the mistress of a very well-known, highly respected professor who was also married. Sartre’s mother, who had also lived in La Rochelle told me that everyone there knew about it, and that it was a public scandal to see this man seated at dinner parties with his wife on one side and his mistress on the other. It was he who was the father of the other two children, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his sister, Monique. It was an extremely serious liaison which lasted for years and years, and this gentleman took care of his two children, even though for their mother’s protection they took the name of her husband. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 564

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Beauvoir-Sartre influence debate and the relationship between autobiography and fiction in French existentialism; also cross-refs Deirdre Bair’s biography as a source.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what exactly was the true cause of Zaza’s death, and how did discovering it reshape Beauvoir’s retrospective account of her own formation?