All people are mortal

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All people are mortal (French: "Tous les hommes sont mortels") is a novel by Simone de Beauvoir , which was published in 1946 by the Paris publisher Éditions Gallimard . The first German edition was published by Rowohlt Verlag in 1949 .

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The beautiful, successful, but also richly vain and selfish actress Regine met the strange Italian Raymond Fosca in France in the 1930s . At first he is reluctant to become acquainted, but then seems to fall in love with Regine and soon reveals his secret to her: He is immortal. Regine does not understand the dimension of this revelation and initially only thinks that through the liaison with him - in his memory - she could achieve immortality. Fosca then withdraws from her, but when she visits him and confronts him, he tells her his story.

Born as the son of a patrician in the (fictional) northern Italian city of Carmona in the 13th century, Fosca sees the world as a mixture of violence and intrigue: While the influential families fight for supremacy in the city, this battle is repeated in the The outside world as a permanent state of war between the then city and small states of Italy and their ever-changing alliance constellations. However, neither the respective rulers nor their subjects achieve any real progress. Fosca gets the impression that these struggles only went on forever because no party had the time to permanently consolidate the power and rule they had gained - and so he developed the desire for a life that would last forever and thus the decisive advantage should provide. In return for his pardon, he receives a magical potion from a beggar in his hometown who has been sentenced to death. After trying it on a mouse, he drinks it himself and promptly becomes immortal - but the hoped-for success does not materialize. Again and again a new opponent arises; even his own son (when he has long since grown up and wants to inherit his father) finally fights against him, and Fosca kills him with his own hands. Regardless of this, he does not want to give up and initially fought for two centuries, but never got beyond his role as lord of the city of Carmona.

Outside of Italy, however, the world has changed during this time, and when a new, influential warlord appears in Italy in the form of the Habsburg Maximilian I , Fosca had the idea of ​​putting his powers at the service of a successful ruler rather than longer try to become one yourself. He left his hometown, for which he had fought for so long, to the Habsburgs and served Maximilian and later his son Philipp and grandson Charles V as advisors. At the imperial court, however, he found that here, too, the eternal intrigues about power and influence were spun without the people necessarily feeling better. On a trip to the American colonies, Fosca is shown the whole misery of the inhabitants of this apparently glamorous empire. Realizing this, he flees into the wilderness of North America.

There Fosca met the adventurer Pierre Carlier by chance, who managed to infect him with his joy of discovery: The young man set himself the ambitious goal of traveling to China and on his way there as the first European to cross the North American continent to the Pacific traverse. Fosca joins him. Thanks to his immortality, he can save his new friend from dangerous situations several times, but they don't get any closer to their goal. The adventurer eventually dies, and Fosca is put off his search for further discoveries. He retreats to the indigenous people for several generations.

Reached out there, he ends up with a bag “full of gold and diamonds” in the Paris of absolutism . In the decadent circles of the local aristocracy, he initially becomes a ruthless player who trumps all opponents and cannot be killed in a duel - but this behavior does not give him any lasting distraction. He became interested in science and became a great chemist. In this capacity he first won the affection of young Marianne, who ran an intellectual salon. He falls in love and marries her, but almost loses her when she discovers his secret. And even he does not understand them correctly regardless of all love, for their actions and motives are those of a mortal person; and Fosca is literally "free" from such motives, whereas no one else can understand his growing fear of infinity, which cannot be tamed permanently by no activity. As long as Marianne lives, Fosca clings to her, but he becomes more and more aware of the insurmountable opposition to his fellow man, and he becomes more and more indifferent to life. After Marianne's death he finally gives up his scientific interests.

One last time Fosca was able to call himself up in Paris during the July Revolution of 1830 to gain an interest in the new trends of the time, which was also due to the fact that one of the revolutionaries was his descendant. But as before, in his efforts to improve people's lives, he mainly perceives the recurring failure. Nor can he find any consolation in it for his personal fate. Even the love of the revolutionary Laure cannot reach him now. So one day he marches out of the city and lies down to sleep in the forest for sixty years. When he is found, he is not believed and he is sent to an asylum.

When Fosca has finished his story, he says that he suffers from nightmares in which the whole world is white and dead and is populated only by two living beings: him - and the mouse on which he tested the immortality potion. Regine finally understands the enormity of his fate; but she also realizes that she means nothing to him. Fosca gives her cold comfort with the words “Oh! She! That'll pass. ”Then he walks away.

literature