Adieux

THE FAREWELL CEREMONY
 
This is first of my books—the only one no doubt—that you will not have read before it was printed. It is wholly and entirely devoted to you; and you are not affected by it.
 
When we were young and one of us gained a brilliant victory over the other in an impassioned argument, the winner used to say, “There you are in your little box!” You are in your little box; you will not come out of it and I shall not join you there. Even if I am buried next to you there will be no communication between your ashes and mine.
 
When I say you, it is only a pretense, a rhetorical device. No one hears it. I am speaking to no one. In reality it is Sartre’s friends that I am talking to—those who would like to know more about his last years. I have described them as I lived through them. I have spoken about myself a little, because the witness is part of his evidence, but I have done so as seldom as possible. In the first place because that is not what this book is about, and then because, as I replied to a friend who asked me how I was taking it, “These things cannot be told; they cannot be put into writing; they cannot be formed as in one’s mind. They are experienced and that it all.”
 
This narrative is chiefly based on the diary I kept during those ten years, and on the many testimonies, I have gathered. My thanks to all those whose written or spoken words have helped me to recount Sartre’s last days.