The Impudent Ones

Notes

1

Gallimard archives.

2

The legend that Marguerite Duras created herself—that she grew up extremely poor and suffered at the hands of a dominating and indifferent mother and an abusive older brother—rests mostly on two of her books, The Sea Wall and Wartime Writings. Inspired by real-life family events, these are nevertheless mostly fictional accounts. Duras’s Wartime Writings, which include ostensible reminiscences about her youth, are not actual diaries and need to be analyzed carefully in order to separate fact from fiction.

3

Gallimard archives.

4

In a copy of her book that she gave to her companion Dionys Mascolo in 1943, Marguerite Duras wrote: “This book fell from me: the dread and the desire born from the hard part of a childhood no doubt not easy.”

5

Jean and Jacques Donnadieu, born respectively in 1899 and 1904, were the two sons Marguerite Duras’s father had from his first marriage. Although she knew Jean Donnadieu well at the time she wrote Les impudents, she would never meet his brother again after she returned to Indochina during World War I as a three-year-old child.

6

Henri Donnadieu died without leaving a will. The Platier estate became embroiled in a lengthy legal action initiated by his brother, intent on ensuring the rights of Marguerite Duras’s half brothers. In 1924, before going back to Indochina, Marie Donnadieu was able to buy back the property, but the main house had to be emptied of all its contents, which were sold at public auction. When they came back in 1931, the house had been sealed off for several years.

7

In 1971, Marguerite Duras joined a group of prominent women who signed a petition calling for the French law criminalizing abortion to be repealed. Simone de Beauvoir (who wrote the petition), Françoise Sagan, Catherine Deneuve, and Ariane Mnouchkine were among the one hundred and twenty-three women who revealed publicly that they had had an abortion.

8

Gallimard archives.

9

Gallimard archives.

10

Gallimard archives.

11

Gallimard archives.

12

We will probably never know how much rewriting Marguerite Duras did, as no manuscript or notes have survived; but Dionys Mascolo remembered that when he met her, she was still busy making improvements.

13

The same year, Simone de Beauvoir’s first novel L’invitée (The Guest) was published, as well as Sartre’s L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness) and Raymond Queneau’s Pierrot mon ami (Pierrot). The year before, Albert Camus’s L’étranger had been published by Gallimard.