Did you grow up surrounded by people who talked about spirituality but lived in bad faith?
I remember sitting through Sunday masses as a teenager, watching the same people who preached charity and humility gossip viciously about their neighbors the moment they stepped outside. That gap between what people say they believe and how they actually live, Simone de Beauvoir understood this better than almost anyone.
I expected When Things of the Spirit Come First to be a straightforward philosophical treatise. What I found instead was something far more uncomfortable: five interconnected stories that expose how religious piety and intellectual pretension can become masks for selfishness, cowardice, and cruelty.
Written when Beauvoir was not yet thirty, this collection reveals the raw material that would later shape The Second Sex and her existentialist philosophy.
Published in France in 1979 as Quand prime le spirituel (originally titled Primauté du spirituel), the book only appeared in English translation in 1982. It represents Beauvoir’s first serious attempt to write about the world she knew, and to expose its defects.
Table of Contents
Overview
When Things of the Spirit Come First is a collection of five early tales by Simone de Beauvoir, written when she was in her late twenties. The stories trace how religious piety, mystical pretension, and intellectual vanity corrupt genuine human connection. Each tale features a different female protagonist navigating the suffocating environments of Catholic institutions, bourgeois families, and intellectual circles in 1920s-1930s France.
When Things of the Spirit Come First charts Beauvoir’s own journey away from the religiosity of her childhood toward clear-eyed engagement with reality. It’s a work of transition, raw, sometimes uneven, but filled with the sharp psychological insight that would define her later masterpieces.
Reader Recommendation
Read When Things of the Spirit Come First if you’ve ever felt suffocated by religious hypocrisy, if you’re fascinated by Simone de Beauvoir’s intellectual development, or if you enjoy character-driven literary fiction that exposes social pretensions.
Skip When Things of the Spirit Come First if you’re looking for polished, plot-driven novels, these are early works with loose connections between stories, more concerned with psychological excavation than narrative momentum.
Perfect for fans of Doris Lessing, Elizabeth Bowen, or early Margaret Atwood; students of feminist literature; anyone interested in the intellectual history of 20th-century France.
Background: Beauvoir’s Journey From Piety to Philosophy
Born in Paris in 1908, Simone de Beauvoir grew up in a devout Catholic household. The religiosity she describes in these tales was the very atmosphere she breathed during her childhood and early youth. Several of her friends never broke away from it, willingly or unwillingly, they had undergone the dangerous influence of that kind of spiritual life.
When Things of the Spirit Come First‘s original title was Primauté du spirituel, but Beauvoir changed it to Quand prime le spirituel after Jacques Maritain used the former for one of his works. This detail matters: Maritain was a prominent Catholic philosopher, and Beauvoir’s choice to avoid confusion with his title subtly signals her rejection of his framework.
Writing in her preface decades later, Beauvoir described the collection as “a beginner’s piece of work” but felt it had “merit enough” to publish. She connected the characters loosely, with each tale standing as “a self-sufficing entity”.
When Things of the Spirit Come First Summary
Marcelle: Where Piety Becomes Masochism
The first story introduces Marcelle Drouffe, a “dreamy, precocious little girl” who from infancy showed “signs of being extraordinarily sensitive”. As a child, Marcelle finds sensual pleasure in religious devotion, she loves crying in churches, offering her life to “a young fair-haired God,” and dreaming of “wiping soft bare feet with her long hair”.
Beauvoir draws a direct line between Marcelle’s piety and what she calls the “masochism of some of my games” in her own childhood. Marcelle reads stories of women “cruelly and harshly treated by an arrogant master” who “eventually wins his heart by her submissiveness and her love”.
She identifies with these heroines, imagining herself “quivering with repentance at the feet of a sinless, beautiful and terrible man”.
As an adult, Marcelle works as a social assistant at a welfare center in Paris’s rue de Ménilmontant. She finds the work unrewarding; the nurses are competent but “looked upon their calling merely as a means of earning a living”. Marcelle desperately wants to bring “beauty, love, and the meaning of pain and sorrow” to the poor, but she cannot connect with them.
She becomes involved with “Social Contact,” a movement that aims to bridge class divisions through cultural exchange. Here she meets Paul Desroches, a “practicing Catholic” who proposes marriage. Marcelle accepts, but she’s dissatisfied—she was “looking for giants, and there are only men”.
Then Denis Charval enters. He’s a poet who delivers a lecture on Rimbaud, describing him as a man who “refused to stifle his thirst for the infinite”. Marcelle is captivated. She breaks her engagement to Desroches and marries Denis.
The marriage is disastrous. Denis is lazy, unfaithful, and financially exploitative. Marcelle discovers he’s been seeing another woman. When Denis leaves her, Marcelle experiences a strange liberation: “My life is finished,” she thinks, but with “a kind of indifference”. She decides she is “a woman of genius”.
The irony is devastating. Marcelle has simply replaced religious delusion with artistic delusion. She hasn’t escaped her pattern, she’s just found a new costume for it.
Chantal: The Self-Deceiving Intellectual
Chantal Plattard is a young teacher who keeps a diary documenting her life in the provincial town of Rougemont. She sees herself as a sophisticated, sensitive woman—”a fashionable young woman of former times who, touched by grace, [is] beginning a retreat in the peace of a nunnery”.
Her diary reveals a profound gap between self-image and reality. She writes about her pupils in breathless, romantic terms—Rosa is “a fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter of the Vikings”, Monique is “so like a Lippi virgin” with a “graceful neck rising—as from a calyx”. She sees herself as the enlightened teacher who truly understands these young souls.
But the teachers’ meeting reveals a different reality. When Chantal proposes Monique Fournier for honors, her colleagues object: Monique has “a most undesirable attitude in class” and “always looks as though she were making fun of people”. Chantal dismisses their concerns, seeing herself as the only one capable of “understanding those young beings’ turn of mind”.
Chantal cultivates friendships with Monique and her friend Andrée. She positions herself as their mentor, their confidante. But when Monique becomes pregnant by her boyfriend Serge and comes to Chantal for help, Chantal’s response is telling.
She’s “deeply shocked” and “horrified”. She lectures Monique about morality and refuses to help her find an abortion.
Chantal’s broad-mindedness is entirely performative. She loves the idea of being an enlightened, emancipated woman, but when faced with real human suffering, she retreats to conventional morality.
Beauvoir’s innovation here is showing Chantal “both as she longed to be and as she really was” through the diary format. We see Chantal constructing her own myth in real-time.
Lisa: The Withering of a Soul
Lisa Nardec is a student at the Institution Saint-Ange, a Catholic boarding school run by “a fervent Catholic”. Mlle Lambert, an agrégée of philosophy, provides intellectual direction. Lisa was once promising, “a fine, healthy girl” with “unusual turn and acuity”, but has “sink[en] gradually into a sterile, wasting scepticism”.
Lisa’s story captures what Beauvoir describes in her preface: “the withering away of a girl whose shy attempts at living were crushed by the mysticism and the intrigues of the pious institution”.
Lisa is trapped. She needs to pass exams to earn a living, but intellectual work “undermined her body” and “far from enriching this thin and unproductive soil, cultivation had made it barren”.
She’s in love with Pascal, Marguerite’s brother, but he avoids her. She suspects Marguerite has “passed on her confidences” to him. Lisa’s friendships are poisoned by envy and suspicion: “I have never been able to make an act of faith”.
The story’s most haunting scene occurs when a woman mistakes Lisa for her husband’s mistress. Lisa is briefly amused—”So my virginity is not written on my forehead, then”. But the encounter dissolves into nothing. Later, when she tells Thérèse about it, Thérèse responds with a banal story about being mistaken for someone else. “A great weariness came over Lisa: she could no longer see what had given the trifling events of the day their value”.
Lisa retreats into masturbatory fantasy, imagining Pascal’s “hands stroking hair and neck, the lovely crystal melting away, warm breath, hands moving over the secret flesh”. She finds pleasure in a fantasy that can never be fulfilled.
Lisa’s tragedy is that she has no agency. She’s crushed by a system that demands intellectual achievement while denying her the conditions for genuine life.
Anne: The Saint Who Died of Love
Anne Vignon is the most autobiographical character in the collection. Beauvoir drew her from Zaza, “the friend who had meant so much to me”. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Beauvoir would later give “an exact account of both” Anne’s unhappiness and death.
Anne is torn between her mother’s Catholic conservatism and her own desire for intellectual and emotional freedom. Mme Vignon, a devout Catholic, sees Anne’s friendship with Chantal and correspondence with Pascal Drouffe as threats to her soul.
The story unfolds through multiple perspectives: Mme Vignon’s prayer to God, Anne’s conversations with Chantal and Pascal, and finally the scene of Anne’s breakdown.
Mme Vignon’s prayers are chilling in their self-righteousness. She thanks God for having “descended upon me, the humblest of Thy servants”. She agonizes over Anne’s secret correspondence with “one of those youths at the Sorbonne”. She blames Chantal: “an unbeliever, an adventuress”. She insists Anne must “submit to guidance again”.
When Mme Vignon confronts Anne about the letters, Anne offers to show them to her. “No,” Mme Vignon says. “I’m quite sure they are full of nothing but fine phrases and noble sentiments; but those who start as angels finish up as brutes”.
Anne tries to resist. She tells Chantal she “struggled” against her mother. But she’s exhausted. “I can’t bear it any longer, Chantal,” she says. Chantal pushes her to continue the fight, but Anne’s resistance is crumbling.
The climax comes when Anne appears at Pascal’s apartment, clearly unhinged. She tells Marcelle (Pascal’s sister) that she’s “very miserable”. She says, “Don’t force me to go away: it’s just not possible”. Marcelle realizes: “She is mad”.
Pascal takes Anne home. Her mother agrees to their engagement. But it’s too late. Anne dies, from inflammation of the brain, or perhaps from “want of love”.
Anne’s death is the book’s most devastating indictment of religious hypocrisy. Mme Vignon turns her daughter into a saint, publishing “a very simple little memento: a portrait of Anne and a few extracts from her private diaries and favourite prayers”. She underlines passages where Anne wrote about “submission” and “acceptance”. She kneels, praying to “my little saint”.
But Chantal knows the truth. Anne “died from want of love”. The people who claimed to love her most—her mother, Pascal, even Chantal herself—had all, in their different ways, failed her.
Marguerite: The Survivor
The final story is the most autobiographical. Beauvoir gives Marguerite “my own childhood at the Cours Desir and my own adolescent religious crisis”.
Marguerite grows up in a family where “the things of the spirit came first”. She’s a pious child, taking Communion “three times a week” and confessing “every fortnight”. She loves “kneeling at a prie-dieu in a dark chapel at dawn”.
But she also discovers sensual pleasure—climbing ropes, rubbing her thighs with pumice stone. She begins to doubt God. “When you have been living in a world peopled with angels and saints, under the eye of an all-powerful being, it is strange suddenly to find yourself alone amidst mere blind things”.
Marguerite is drawn to Denis, Marcelle’s husband. He represents freedom: “You can do anything at all, once you do not hope for anything”. She begins haunting Montparnasse bars, drinking gin fizzes, adopting the pose of a bohemian.
But she’s a fraud. She tells men she’s a model or a prostitute, but “I fooled nobody”. A writer tells her: “You are a little bourgeoisie trying to act the bohemian”.
Marguerite’s relationship with Denis intensifies. They plan to go to Saigon together to smuggle opium. But Denis betrays her. he returns to Marcelle, his wealthy wife.
This is where the story takes its unexpected turn. Instead of despairing, Marguerite has a revelation. Walking through the streets, she suddenly sees the world differently: “I saw around me a host of objects that seemed to exist in their own right”. She no longer needs Denis to give meaning to her life. “There in the centre of things, in the place Denis had left empty, I had found myself”.
Marguerite is the only character who achieves genuine self-knowledge. She rejects “oracles or ready-made values” and decides to “look things straight in the face”.
When Things of the Spirit Come First Analysis
Characters: The Architecture of Self-Deception
Marcelle is the most complex character in the collection. Her trajectory, from pious child to romantic idealist to masochistic wife to self-proclaimed genius, reveals how easily one form of bad faith can replace another.
Beauvoir doesn’t condemn Marcelle; she shows her with a “veiled irony” that allows readers to draw their own conclusions. Marcelle genuinely believes she’s chosen a higher path. The tragedy is that she’s chosen nothing, she’s simply repeated the same pattern in different costumes.
Chantal represents intellectual pretension. Her diary reveals her constructing a fictional self—”a broad-minded, unprejudiced, intensely sensitive woman”. Beauvoir “succeeded in conveying that distance between a person and himself which is the essence of bad faith”. Chantal isn’t evil; she’s just self-deceived. She believes her own mythology.
Lisa is the most sympathetic character. She’s crushed by circumstances she can’t control—poverty, a rigid institution, unrequited love. Her retreat into fantasy is understandable, even if it’s a dead end. Beauvoir shows us “a girl whose shy attempts at living were crushed by the mysticism and the intrigues of the pious institution”.
Anne is the tragic heroine. She’s torn between love for her mother and desire for freedom, between religious faith and intellectual honesty. She can’t resolve these contradictions, and they destroy her. Beauvoir “drew a more faithful and a more engaging portrait of her than I had done in the earlier versions”, but even so, “one does not quite believe in her unhappiness and her death”. The story feels incomplete, perhaps because the real Zaza’s story was too painful to fully render.
Marguerite is Beauvoir’s stand-in. She’s the only character who learns and grows. Her final revelation—that she can find meaning in the world itself, not in abstractions—represents Beauvoir’s own conversion “to the real world”.
Themes and Symbolism: The Dangers of the Spiritual
Bad Faith and Self-Deception. Every character in When Things of the Spirit Come First is in bad faith, pretending to be something they’re not, believing their own myths. Marcelle thinks she’s a genius. Chantal thinks she’s an enlightened teacher. Mme Vignon thinks she’s a saintly mother. Beauvoir shows how these self-deceptions become prisons.
The Corruption of Religion. Religious institutions in this book are engines of oppression. The Institution Saint-Ange grinds Lisa down. Mme Vignon uses religion to control Anne. The Abbé Mirande’s “kind, sugary voice” represents a God who’s “on the side of Mama and of the old fusspots”.
The Gap Between Ideals and Reality. Everyone in When Things of the Spirit Come First talks about higher things—spirituality, art, love. But their actions betray them. Marcelle’s piety shades into masochism. Chantal’s broad-mindedness is performative. Pascal’s mysticism is a form of cowardice.
Beauvoir’s title is ironic: when “things of the spirit come first,” real human needs get ignored.
Women’s Entrapment. Every protagonist is a woman trapped by social expectations. Marcelle can only find meaning through men. Chantal’s intellectual pretensions are a mask for her inability to connect. Lisa is crushed by poverty and institutional pressure. Anne is destroyed by her mother’s expectations. Marguerite only escapes by rejecting the entire framework.
The Search for Authenticity. Marguerite’s final revelation, “in the place Denis had left empty, I had found myself”, represents Beauvoir’s existentialist ideal. Authenticity means rejecting external authorities and finding meaning in one’s own engagement with the world.
When Things of the Spirit Come First Evaluation
When Things of the Spirit Come First is an uneven collection, but it’s also a vital document in Beauvoir’s intellectual development.
Strengths
Psychological insight. Beauvoir’s understanding of self-deception is remarkable. She shows how people construct elaborate fantasies to avoid facing uncomfortable truths about themselves.
Sharp social critique. When Things of the Spirit Come First exposes the hypocrisy of Catholic institutions, intellectual pretension, and bourgeois family life. Beauvoir doesn’t just criticize, she shows the human cost of these systems.
Autobiographical honesty. Beauvoir includes herself in the critique. Marguerite’s story is a confession: “I was a dreary little bourgeoisie” trying to act the bohemian.
Experimental form. The shifting perspectives—diary entries, interior monologue, third-person narration—show Beauvoir experimenting with techniques that would serve her later work.
Weaknesses
Loose structure. The connections between stories are “loose” and each tale is “self-sufficing”. This works in some ways, each story can be read independently, but the collection lacks narrative cohesion.
Uneven execution. Beauvoir admits this is “a beginner’s piece of work”. Some stories are more successful than others. The Anne story feels incomplete; the Marguerite story is the strongest.
Didactic tendencies. Beauvoir’s critique is sometimes too obvious. Characters like Mme Vignon are almost caricatures. The subtlety of Beauvoir’s best work isn’t always present.
Dated language. The translation, while serviceable, sometimes feels dated. The prose can be mannered, even melodramatic.
Impact and Controversy
The book was written “a little before I was thirty” but not published until 1979, when Beauvoir was in her seventies. Why did she wait so long? Perhaps because the stories were too close to home, too autobiographical, too revealing of her own struggles with faith and self-deception.
The book’s original title, Primauté du spirituel, was also the title of a work by Jacques Maritain, the Catholic philosopher. Beauvoir changed it to avoid confusion. But the choice is revealing: Maritain meant it sincerely; Beauvoir meant it ironically.
Comparison With Similar Works
Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Both books explore women’s intellectual and emotional lives, and both use experimental forms to do so. But Lessing’s novel is more ambitious and more successful.
Mary McCarthy’s The Group. Both books critique educated women’s pretensions. But McCarthy is funnier, more satirical.
Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. The memoir covers similar ground—Beauvoir’s childhood, her religious crisis, her education—but with more emotional power and narrative control.
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. When Things of the Spirit Come First reads like a fictional dress rehearsal for the themes Beauvoir would later explore philosophically: the social construction of femininity, the traps of bad faith, the search for authentic existence.
Personal Insight With Contemporary Educational Relevance
What makes When Things of the Spirit Come First so relevant today is its unflinching examination of how we use “spiritual” or “intellectual” pretensions to avoid genuine engagement with reality.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the danger was religious piety masking cruelty. Today, it might be performative social justice, wellness culture, or intellectual posturing. The pattern remains the same: we construct elaborate belief systems that allow us to feel superior while avoiding real moral accountability.
Five Lessons From When Things of the Spirit Come First
Bad faith isn’t always obvious. Marcelle doesn’t know she’s using piety to justify masochism. Chantal doesn’t know she’s using intellectualism to avoid connection. Self-deception is invisible to the self-deceived.
Institutions that claim to care for souls often crush them. The Institution Saint-Ange grinds Lisa down. Mme Vignon’s religion destroys Anne. We should be skeptical of any institution that claims moral authority.
Performance of virtue isn’t virtue. Chantal talks about broad-mindedness but can’t handle real human complexity. Mme Vignon prays fervently but can’t love her daughter. What we say and what we do often diverge.
Authenticity requires rejecting external authorities. Marguerite only finds herself when she stops looking to Denis, Pascal, or anyone else for meaning. We have to create our own values.
The personal is philosophical. Beauvoir’s stories show that abstract questions—about faith, freedom, authenticity—play out in concrete human lives. Philosophy isn’t just for seminars; it’s for living.
Contemporary Connection
According to a 2023 Pew Research study, approximately 30% of French adults identify as atheist, and nearly 40% say religion is “not at all important” in their lives. Beauvoir’s critique of institutional religion seems prophetic. But the deeper question she raises- how do we find meaning without external authorities?- remains urgent.
The rise of “spiritual but not religious” identity, wellness culture, and political tribalism suggests we haven’t escaped the pattern Beauvoir identified. We’ve just found new costumes for our self-deception.
When Things of the Spirit Come First Quotes
“When you hurt yourself, it wasn’t the pain that made you cry. It was because you felt the world had betrayed you.”
“I am different from the others.”
“There’s more than one woman in me.”
“He only saw things from a contemplative point of view.”
“To be strong, and to wear oneself out in base, unworthy occupations.”
“I give, I give, and who will give to me?”
“I was looking for giants, and there are only men.”
“You can do anything at all, once you do not hope for anything. And sometimes you come upon the miracle.”
“I have never been able to make an act of faith.”
“If I were told that I was going to die, I should not feel any regret.”
“Who will ever be capable of loving me?”
“Higher than happiness.”
“I am a woman of genius.”
“My life is finished.”
“In the place Denis had left empty, I had found myself.”
Conclusion
When Things of the Spirit Come First is not Beauvoir’s best book. It’s uneven, sometimes melodramatic, and the structure is loose. But it’s essential reading for anyone interested in her intellectual development, and it offers a devastating critique of religious and intellectual pretension that remains urgently relevant.
When Things of the Spirit Come First‘s title is ironic. When “things of the spirit” come first, Beauvoir shows us, real human beings get crushed. Marcelle’s spirit-first attitude leads to self-destruction. Chantal’s destroys her capacity for genuine connection. Mme Vignon’s destroys her daughter. Lisa’s leaves her hollow. Only Marguerite, who rejects the whole framework, finds any kind of authenticity.
Beauvoir’s achievement is showing us how easily we deceive ourselves, how easily we adopt beliefs that make us feel virtuous while allowing us to avoid real moral demands. It’s an uncomfortable lesson, but an essential one.
Recommendation: Read this if you’re interested in Simone de Beauvoir’s intellectual development, if you enjoy character-driven literary fiction that exposes social pretensions, or if you’ve ever wondered how people can be so religious and so cruel at the same time.
Skip it if you’re looking for a polished, plot-driven novel, this is a work of transition, raw and sometimes uneven.
