Product Description

Set in Paris on the eve of World War II and sizzling with love, anger, and revenge, She Came to Stay explores the changes wrought in the soul of a woman and a city soon to fall. Although Franoise considers her relationship with Pierre an open one, she falls prey to jealousy when the gamine Xavire catches his attention. The moody young woman from the countryside pries her way between Franoise and Pierre, playing up to each one and deviously pulling them apart, until the only way out of the triangle is destruction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #135153 in Books
• Published on: 1999-07-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 404 pages

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"One of the most acute and thoughtful achievements of French fiction at mid-century.

Sunday London Times
Behind the sympathy there is curiosity. . . . A writer whose tears for her characters freeze as they drop.

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

Customer Reviews

So Real!
This book made me sad, happy, angry, interested...pretty much everything. I was going from ''kick her out'' to ''kick him out'', to ''get real'' even if aware of existentialist ideas behind it and what I am 'supposed' to think about it.

A great read even if some were disappointed by De Beauvoir for preaching one thing an living the other. Hey, we are all just human and this book is so honest it is almost painful!

Intense love, hate, jealousy, despair, revenge!
Based on the real life trio of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sarte, and Olga Kosakievicz--a student of de Beauvoir, She Came To Stay is a tale of the complications that arise when a young, precocious woman is brought into a long-standing, deep, and intellectual relationship between two older, "open" lovers. "Open" meaning that they were ideally free to love and have affairs with others.

This novel brims with emotions vacillating from love to hate, jealousy to despair, self-controlled calmness to revenge! De Beauvoir gets inside her characters' thoughts and feelings with an intensity reminiscent of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.


The character of Xaviere stands out as the ultimate manipulative, volatile, and self-centered, young woman who doesn't care or think about the consequences of her actions and words upon others, and who also elicts the best and worst emotions out of everyone around her:

"Impulsively, she took Francoise's face between her hands and began to kiss her with fanatical devotion. They were sacred kisses, purifying Xaviere for all her defilement and restoring her self-respect. With these soft lips on her face, Francoise felt so noble, so ethereal, so sublime, that it sickened her heart; she longed for a human friendship, and not this fanatical and imperious worship of which she was forced to be the docile idol." (pg. 318)

My favorite character is Francoise, who valiantly struggles with her internal battles of reason, love, suspicion, and jealousy throughout the novel. After spending most of the novel trying so hard to be civil and responsible toward Xaviere, it was refreshing to read the beginnings of her change of heart:

"She drank a little wine. Her palms were moist. She had always made a point of disregarding her own dreams and desires, but this self-effacing wisdom now revolted her. Why didn't she make up her mind to go after what she wanted?" (pg. 360)

The ending surprised me, even though I had read from other reviews that Xaviere's demise would happen...I just didn't know HOW it would happen!

She Came to Stay is an engaging, emotional, rollercoaster of a ride tempered with some reason. Read it and discover how one woman finally decided she had had enough!

Existential relationships are never easy.
Relationships are never easy, even for intellectuals like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Set in pre-World War II Paris, de Beauvoir's first novel, SHE CAME TO STAY (1954) provides a fictional portrait of her unconventional relationship with her lifelong partner, Sartre, and her protege, Bianca Bienenfeld. Their menage a trois began in 1938, when de Beauvoir introduced Bienenfeld (aka Bianca Lamblin) to her partner/lover, Sartre, who was thirty-three, and ended in 1940 when, at de Beauvoir's encouragement, Sartre abandoned Lamblin on the eve of WWII. Although SHE CAME TO STAY may be read as a love story examining the complex dilemmas posed by love (demonstrating existential relationships are perhaps easier in theory than in reality) and the destructive powers of relationships, it also succeeds on a more philosphical level.

SHE CAME TO STAY tells the story of Francoise, her lover, Pierre, and Xaviere, an emotionally unstable young woman from Rouen who comes between them. The novel demonstrates that a relationship can lead not only to ecstasy, but also to a personal, life-changing crisis. The romantic threesome de Beauvoir creates for Francoise sears her protagonist "like a sharp burn" (p. 207). Francoise becomes angry, insanely jealous, and then disillusioned with her dream of "one life, one work, one love" (p. 233) with Pierre. Eventually, her relationship leads her to experience life without meaning: an existential "abyss of nothingness" (p. 291). "It was like death," de Beauvior writes, "a total negation, an eternal absence . . . the entire universe was was engulfed in it, and Francoise, forever excluded from the world, was herself dissolved in this void" (p. 291). By the end of the novel, Xaviere is destroyed by an act of revenge, and Francoise is alone and estranged from Pierre.

While SHE CAME TO STAY may not measure up to the writing standards de Beauvoir later set with THE MANDARINS and THE SECOND SEX, it is nevertheless a powerful novel. Readers interested in reading more about de Beauvoir's real-life triangle with Sartre and Lamblin may consider reading Lamblin's memoir, A DISGRACEFUL AFFAIR, in which Lamblin offers her first-hand account of her unconventional relationship with the two French existentialists.

G. Merritt