"burgeoning . . . feminism" (Bair 425). However, this hardly means that de Beauvoir is anti-marriage, and, in fact, her conclusions are quite conventional and traditional as expressed in the choices made by Anne. Anne is a "'free,' intellectual woman" (Okely 114), but, again, her choices for the stability of her marriage and against the passion of her affair mark her as far from revolutionary.
In The Mandarins something of a dichotomy emerges between relationships in which men and women share the same commitments to political values or moral concerns), and yet are not sexually active partners, and those couples in which sexual passion and attraction is a major, if not the single, factor in the relationship (Evans 81).
The relationship between Anne and Robert is of the first type, while that between Anne and Lewis is of the second. And "side by side with . . . Anne's romance with Lewis, de Beauvoir portrays the end of the romance between Henri . . . and his mistress of ten years, Paula" (Evans 81).
The end of the latter relationship is well under way at the beginning of the book. Henri in those pages is trying to influence Paula's choice of dresses for the evening, and the two reflect separately:
It was all so useless, he told himself. In green or yellow he would never again see in her the woman who, that day ten years earlier, he had desired so much when she had nonchalantly held out her long violet gloves to him. . . . Their life had been so dismal during the past year that Paula herself had seemed to be losing her taste for it (de Beauvoir 14).
The Henri-Paula relationship is doomed, despite a burst of passion from Paula, probably as a result of her recognition that their passion is dying and that the two do not have enough in common aside from the passion to sustain the relationship. As Evans writes, "The moral of the history of the relationship between Paula and Henri is quite clearly that, for women, to live for...