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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.