A bitter legacy

André and Simone Weil are hardly household names in Britain today, but in the world of mathematics the former is acknowledged as a genius for his work on number theory; and to many philosophers, André’s sister, Simone, is both a genius and a saint.

André and Simone Weil are hardly household names in Britain today, but in the world of mathematics the former is acknowledged as a genius for his work on number theory; and to many philosophers, André’s sister, Simone, is both a genius and a saint. A precocious student who beat Simone de Beauvoir for the top place on entering the École Normale, Simone Weil was a socialist activist while working as a teacher in Le Puy and enrolled with the anarchists during the Spanish Civil War. She underwent a religious conversion while visiting Assisi in 1937 but never joined the Catholic Church. She died of malnutrition while working for the Free French in London in 1944, refusing to eat more than the basic ration for a worker in France. The coroner’s verdict was suicide.

At Home with André and Simone Weil is an elegant and witty memoir-cum-reflection by the daughter of André and niece of Simone. Looking exactly like her aunt, Sylvie Weil became a ‘living relic’ whom Simone’s disciples touched and talked to with reverence without showing the slightest interest in Sylvie herself. General de Gaulle, giving Sylvie a prize for a national composition award, did not congratulate her but whispered: ‘I greatly admired your aunt.’ In fact it was well known that De Gaulle, when leader of the Free French in London, thought Simone was mad.

After Simone’s death, her parents, Sylvie’s grandparents, made Simone’s bedroom into a shrine and laboriously copied out her notebooks.