Madeleine Bourdouxhe

[1][3] In 1927, she married a mathematics teacher, Jacques Muller, a marriage which lasted until his death in 1974.

Her daughter, Marie, was born the day the Germans invaded Belgium, 6 May 1940.

[1] She fled with her husband to a small village near Bordeaux, but was forced by the government in exile to return to Brussels, and remained there, active in the Belgian Resistance.

[citation needed] After the war, she lived regularly in Paris and had contact with writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Queneau and Jean-Paul Sartre, and also with painters such as René Magritte and Paul Delvaux.

She avoided publishing after Gallimard turned down her manuscript of Mantoue est trop loin in 1956.