The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.

Beauvoir herself was deeply religious as a child —- at one point intending to become a nun -— until Simone de Beauvoir experienced a crisis of faith at age 14 after which Simone de Beauvoir remained an atheist for the rest of her life. Debates rage on about the extent to which they influenced each other in their existentialist works such as Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Beauvoir's She Came to Stay. Beauvoir used Les Temps Modernes to promote her own work and explore her ideas on a small scale before fashioning essays and books.

"La Beauvoir" redirects here; also see: Beauvoir (disambiguation). She is best known for her novels including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins as well as her 1949 treatise The Second Sex a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. Beauvoir wrote novels essays biographies an autobiography monographs on philosophy politics and social issues.