Many of those who frequented it did not even know. Later, we heard rumors and one day someone told us that he had a companion for many years, but who lived a life quite independent.
We never saw her in the tours we did on the streets of the Odéon and he never talked about it. His image of incorrigible ascetic, solitary, skeptical, stateless until the end of his life, iconoclastic and ironic to all the provisions leave no room for a woman who shared his attic full of books and papers, although one of the two chambres de bonnes, who was his "living" and where he received the visits, had a double bed ... ("The State of Loneliness is my religion," he always shown).
However, she was. And these lines are a tribute to the woman, a little enigmatic, invisible to our eyes, which, occupying second place over 50 years, accompanied Cioran in his tormented existence.
They met when she was a student and he already had 30 years in the dining room of a university, where he first saw and hit him in line to talk and, incidentally, we assume, to win a privileged place in the long wait.
His name was Simone Boué, she taught English different schools of France and was the person who, with patience and a remarkable approach, machine passed all the writings of Cioran.
When, recently, it was learned that two years after the death of Cioran (occurred in 1985), Simone's body was found dead under a cliff, in Vendée, where he spent his holidays, probably after drowning at sea, the impact was so great that we decided to investigate something about this woman so important to him and so hidden, so shrouded in shadows, and his life was over, a strange way.
But how do you start? Resort in this case a second woman, who is Simone but, through its publications, is much more explicit than her and who appeared in the last years of life Cioran (ie, early 80). The person in question in Germany has just published a book about their relationship, which was translated into several languages. She called Friedgard Thoma, is German, and the book is titled A Love Cioran. For all the world. She teaches philosophy and, according to his story and his extensive correspondence discloses between the teacher and she was the love of Cioran in the fall of the philosopher's life. It was by then a young woman in her thirties with a son and he was over seventy when they met and struck up a close relationship, according to the disclosure by it through its history and letters.
addition to the chronicle of those early and passionate encounters and feelings (especially those of Cioran), there are descriptions and interesting comments by the author on situations and people, including quite a few references to Simone Boué, the faithful Cioran's companion. Once the first fire of passion subsided, Friedgard Thoma came to know personally to Simone, the summer home that she shared with her former husband in the Italian-Swiss Soglio. "Simone was a beautiful, tanned, high sixties, elegant, very warm brown eyes, "writes the German on the first impressions that caused his" rival. "
since been established a bond of sympathy between the two women, which made the Friedgard relationship with Cioran was changing dramatically, to become more space, more temperate and tended to become a loving friendship rather than the passionate relationship that had been at first.
Since then, every time the German going to the City of Light, passed through the rue de l'Odéon. And what has this: "Every time I visited them in Paris, Simone just had to prepare herring, salmon, all kinds of vegetables, desserts, fine wines, etc., Which should give you a lot of work [...]. Simone was always the same interlocutor charming, intelligent, well read, with lots of humor (always speaking for or against Cioran), with a remarkable sensitivity to music, literature and other physical and spiritual pleasures.
Following the death of Simone, in 1987, Fernando Savater wrote in the daily El Pais:
Simone Boué, a professor at the Lyceum and EM Cioran's companion for 50 years, died drowned in a French beach last summer. Stendhal said:
"It takes at least ten lines in French to praise a woman gently." I need to do more in English Simone justice fairly in this farewell. He was intelligent, lively, wry, discreet. Above all was elegance itself, the embodiment of the chic Parisian catwalks that can be passed and not wasting money is acquired. She had to be enough was enough, because they were poor, with a handkerchief, a simple blouse with a flower move. In the tiny house in the rue de l'Odéon everything was perfect and humble, as painted by Vermeer.
For Philippe Sollers, Simone Boué was compagne lumineuse (the companion light ") of the philosopher.
After the death of Cioran, in those two years of life remaining, Simone Boué made a painstaking task, step by machine (an electric typewriter this time!) And he published numerous Cahiers ( 1957-1972) who had been on the desk of Romanian-French thinker, with a preface by her, and donated the manuscripts to the Library Doucet.
She was a kind of Max Brod, because on many of the books that she never had been (since, except for a maid, no one could enter the workplace with him), Cioran had written: "To destroy." When asked how she was to pass the contents of these books, he replied: "It was a way for me to continue being with Cioran."
Savater That concludes the text published in El País:
the end, when Cioran was losing his head (we know the sadness of their Alzheimer's), she completed the sentence without noticing the babble, and had two roles, the censor bitter and kind reply. The last saw in June in the first anniversary of the death of Cioran. Then we said goodbye and was forever.
At the request of Marie-France Ionesco, whose father was a close friend of Cioran, Simone Boué granted a single interview he gave to Norbert Dodille. One reads that Cioran met at the Home International Students boulevard Saint-Michel on 18 November 1942, Simone's birthday. He was 31 and she 23.
After France and other countries toured by bicycle, or walking for miles. Simone was sent to different destinations (Mulhouse, Orleans, Fenelon, Versailles) to teach English. Cioran would sometimes see other was she who made a visit to Paris. After the school assigned Montaigne, for which I simply had to cross the Luxembourg Gardens.
"All the transcribed texts I Cioran" he says. At that did have merit. Typographical errors drove him crazy. " Norbert
Dodille stresses that she kept discretion about his private life, about themselves and their relationships with Cioran and Simone says: "I was wild and shy [...]. He never spoke to me. [. ..] And I did not, for anything in the world would have I talked to his family. [...] On the other hand, we had separate lives, very different. I was the teacher, he returned home did not speak to anything that happened in high school anyway because I know I have not interested. "
When the interviewer shows you surprised to learn that parents Simone knew nothing of Cioran, she answers: "No, I was not going to say anything, what say?, I know someone who is stateless, which has no profession, no money. For more open than they were in spirit, my parents had not ever admitted. "So, I never knew, never saw it.
Thanks to this great story is known to Cioran never flew in an airplane, which was very fearful with his health, he always had problems with their ears, they feared the air currents, their diet was very strict due to gastritis , which almost did not sleep at night, wandering through the city, which was happy, anxious, very good storyteller, but he was unsuccessful, which twice rejected invitations Mitterrand, who was fascinated by the English literature and learned English reading Shakespeare and Shelley, who was anxious to read what young people in paperback and which, according to Simone Boué, died without knowing I was a renowned intellectual. Not watching television because "I wanted to walk in the Luxembourg and to be left in peace." It appears that, in general, in the street when someone asked if it was Cioran, he replied: "No". And later, when the disease had affected his memory and, if asked: "Are you Cioran?", He replied: "I was."
In a small shelter that had been bought at Dieppe, "Cioran was perfectly happy, pruning trees, repairing walls. I loved working with his hands. For him, the garden was happiness." In the same article speaks of his close friendship with taciturn Beckett who, in their last meeting in Luxembourg, said: "We have to meet again before the final curtain" of his good and close links with Ionesco, who lived afflicted (which moved much Cioran) of passionate talks with Michaux.
As they came to be regarded-in form-the best of French writer, Simone says, "I often think that Cioran taught me French. In any case, made me aware of what is my own language. "
In June 1995, after accompanying a Romanian friend who had gone to the hospital, and closed the car door behind him, Simone Boué stood alone for a while and began to mourn. "And then I returned to the room Cioran, who was lying. I can not say what happened, no word was spoken. I looked, he looked at me and I read things in his eyes that he could not read in a long time. "
The September 11, 1997 Simone Boué died where he was born in Vendée, embraced and swallowed by the waters of the Atlantic, and delivered a wave of eternity. Strange coincidence between the beginning and end.
Following this decline, we recall that time that we laugh with the teacher because he lived recommending suicide and critics asked why, then, committed suicide. "No, we are not," he said, people get confused. I do not recommend suicide. What I am saying is that life is tolerable only because the idea of \u200b\u200bsuicide. "
Simone Boué Is suicide in the Vendee, their place of origin, or was it an accident? Ignore it and maybe ignore it forever. In this way the mystery of death follows us still alive and disturbing and provocative. We only know that the remains of both were reunited two years later in the same grave in the cemetery of Montparnasse.
SIMONE TRAVEL PARTNER IN CYCLING
Simone Boué was born in Vendée, 18 November 1919. He studied at the University of Poitiers. In 1940-and thanks to a scholarship, went to Paris to prepare an English teacher, after obtaining a degree in Philology.
In Paris, Simone was installed in a Home International Students and the chair of that institution met Emile Cioran in 1942. By then, he still written in Romanian. With rotting Breviary (1947), he decided to finally topple the French. Simone
was received as a teacher in 1945, after the war, and was named in a school in Mulhouse (Alsace). For that reason, I spent much time traveling to Paris by train. Paths were twelve hours, and that the Allies had bombed the viaduct of Nogent and so there was a big detour on the road. Boué
spent his first Christmas in Paris with Cioran and then the two went to Alsace by bike. The following year was appointed professor at Orleans, and in 1947, male high school Hoche in Versailles.
When I went to Paris, lived with the little Majory Cioran, a cheap hotel cheap. There he rented a room at his side, to give her own address. Like Cioran, suffered from insomnia.
Later, he was sent as a teacher Michelet, where I had to give 13 hours, and must also travel a lot. He then worked at the Lycée Fénelon and finally got the high school named in the Montaigne in Paris, near the Luxembourg Gardens, where he was walking.
Every so often, she traveled to Vendée to see his parents. At that time moved to the street from Odeon, the famous attic, on the sixth floor with no elevator, which paid a very cheap rent. They lived together until the end of both.
With Cioran traveled to Spain, Italy and England, mostly by bicycle. Traveled alone to America when, in 1951, won a Fulbright scholarship.
accompanied Cioran in his illness until his death in 1995. With dedication read, became prefaced machine and more than 30 books he found on the desk of Cioran after his disappearance. Delivered to the publisher L'Herne, who published under the title of Cahiers.
finally met Simone Boué death, drowned in the sea of \u200b\u200bVendée, 11 September 1997.
