Her father, Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir, a lawyer from a respectable, upper-middle-class family, had little personal ambition and preferred to spend his time and limited resources pursuing the pleasures of the age, especially amateur theatricals and the racetrack. Her mother, Françoise Brasseur de Beauvoir, came from a hardworking family that had been prosperous until the family bank failed in 1909. There was considerable conflict in the Beauvoir marriage, which the straitened circumstances only increased. Yet Beauvoir's childhood, as she described it retrospectively in
Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée (1958; translated as
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 1959), was a happy one. In spite of the personal and ideological tensions between her parents, Beauvoir and her younger sister, Hélène de Beauvoir, called Poupette, who became a painter, developed a passion for living and an insatiable curiosity about the world. Beauvoir attributed her becoming an intellectual to the discrepancy between her mother's piety and her father's disbelief coupled with his admiration for certain French writers.
Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée traces her development from an adored baby in love with her mother to a child who began at an early age to rebel against the order imposed by her mother, particularly in religious matters.
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