On Thursday, October 24, 1963, at four in the afternoon, I was in my room at the Minerva Hotel in Rome. I was flying back the next day and was organizing my papers when the phone rang. It was Bost from Paris: "An accident happened to your mother," he told me. I thought she had been hit by a car. She was having difficulty climbing onto the sidewalk, and only with the help of her cane, so she must have been hit by a car. "She fell in the bathroom and broke her hip," Bost, who lived in the same apartment building, told me. The previous day, around ten in the evening, as she was climbing the stairs with Olga, he had seen three people on the stairs ahead of him, a woman and two policemen. "She is on the second floor, on the mezzanine," the woman was telling them. Had something happened to Mrs. Beauvoir? Indeed. She had fallen. She had been crawling on the floor for two whole hours before managing to reach the phone; she asked a friend of hers, Mrs. Tardier, to break down the door. Bost and Olga accompanied the other three to the apartment door. They found mom lying on the floor, dressed in her red corduroy velvet robe. Mrs. Lacroix, the doctor who lived in the same apartment building, diagnosed a hip fracture.