[The Ceremony of Farewells] is an account of the decade preceding Sartre's death. The title is itself a recollection of a poignant moment, as Beauvoir explains: "'Then this is the ceremony of farewells!' Sartre said to me as we were leaving each other for a month at the beginning of one summer. I had a presentiment of the meaning these words would one day assume. The ceremony lasted ten years. It is these ten years that I recount in this book." The record is annalistic, the same kind of detailed year-by-year account of events and her reactions to them that Beauvoir employed in the first three volumes of her autobiography. But there her stated intention was to keep herself as the center of focus and to speak of Sartre only insofar as his existence was intertwined with her own. In the preface to The Ceremony of Farewells...