Simone de Beauvoir One chilly day in February I discovered St-Gervais, just behind the Hôtel de Ville in the fourth arrondissement. It was built in the mid-seventeenth century, a French baroque church with Greek columns, a cupola and painted wooden statues. Madame de Sévigné attended St-Gervais – it was only about ten minutes’ walk from her house – and commented on the sermons in her letters, but I had only gone in because I was tired from wandering and wanted to sit for a while. At a side altar there was a continual ‘Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament’, a white host, or flat circle of bread, visible in the centre of an elaborate golden spiked monstrance with people praying in front of it. I sat there, musing, looking at the people kneeling, their hands clasped, their heads bent. What was happening in their minds? What stories were they telling themselves? In my childhood and teenage years I had tried to believe that the white round of bread was Christ and whenever I swallowed it in Holy Communion I tried to believe I was being filled with His spirit.
