A suicide pact has ended the life of the French writer-philosopher André Gorz and founder of the Nouvel Observateur magazine, aged 84, and his 83-year-old wife Dorine with such predictability and finesse that even the French Catholic Church has refrained from criticism, preferring instead to focus on their wonderful testimony in favour of marriage – their love match lasted nearly 60 years.  
 
The woman who gave André Gorz unparalleled happiness was English, born Doreen Keir in London in 1924. She came from a broken home, as her mother, who almost certainly never married her father, left him for another man. Doreen was brought up by her father, or ‘godfather’ as he preferred to be called to avoid awkward questions, in Margate in a house overlooking the sea. When Doreen reached adulthood she found this a stultifying existence and after the Second World War ended, took a ferry to the Continent in search of adventure.  


She did not get far. As Doreen later admitted, after Margate, Lausanne in Switzerland seemed like Las Vegas and she settled there earning money from bit parts in plays and very respectable photographic modeling. Doreen had a flair for languages and by 1947 she could speak passable German and fluent French. That winter she went to a party and found herself in a card game partnering a 24-year-old chemistry graduate named André Horz, who discouragingly announced himself as a ‘penniless Austrian Jew’. Snow began to fall heavily and like it or not, Doreen was trapped. André hesitatingly asked the vivacious red-haired woman to dance and by the time it stopped snowing, the couple had connected in a magical way. They married in Paris in September 1947 and when André took French nationality, Doreen followed suit, changing her name to Dorine.

André was born in Vienna in September 1923 as Gérard Hirsch, the product of a rather precipitous union between a Jewish timber merchant and former soldier and his Roman Catholic secretary. His father also became a Roman Catholic and changed the family name to Horst. In 1939 Gérard was packed off to a Catholic school in neutral Switzerland, a few days ahead of the arrival of his call-up papers for the German army. He loyally blamed his unhappy childhood for the lack of children in his marriage to Dorine, but the couple had an intense physical relationship, and close friends believed that Dorine was unable to conceive.

Instead, she threw herself into supporting Gérard’s career as a writer. An acolyte of Jean-Paul Sartre, he would become a leading social philosopher in his own right. Life for high profile writers on the left was not without risk, and Gérard became André Gorz, the name of the industrial town where his father had acquired his army field glasses which was stamped along the rim. One pseudonym soon led to another. André did his best work for Sartre’s successful magazine, Les Temps Modernes, as Michel ‘Bosquet’, the French equivalent of Horst, meaning ‘thicket’. Dorine said later in life that she had more names than she could remember, but never any money.

Treatment for a back problem involving x-rays went badly wrong in the late 1960s, leaving Dorine in constant and growing pain. A year ago André Gorz surprised his publisher by writing a moving epitaph on marriage to his wife, Lettre à D, published to great acclaim. As her health began to fail altogether, the couple planned a quiet death in their home in the village of Vosnon, near Troyes, taking a huge overdose of drugs.

Here is an extract from the moving Lettre à D, translated by Julie Rose:

“You’ve just turned 82. You are still beautiful, graceful and desirable. We’ve lived together now for 58 years and I love you more than ever. Lately I’ve fallen in love with you all over again and I once more carry inside me a gnawing emptiness that can only be filled by your body snuggled up against mine.

At night I sometimes see the figure of a man, on an empty road in a deserted landscape, walking behind a hearse. I am that man. It’s you the hearse is carrying away. I don’t want to be there for your cremation; I don’t want to be given an urn with your ashes in it. I hear the voice of Kathleen Ferrier singing, ‘Die Welt ist leer, Ich will nicht leben mehr’ and I wake up. I check your breathing, my hand brushes over you.

Each of us would like not to survive the other’s death. We’ve often said to ourselves that if, by some miracle, we were to have a second life, we’d like to spend it together.”

From our December 2007 e-newsletter