All Men Are Mortal

All Men Are Mortal is a 1946 novel by Simone de Beauvoir. It tells the story of Raimon Fosca, a man cursed to live forever. The first American edition of this work was published by The World Publishing Company. Cleveland and New York, 1955. It was adapted into a 1995 film of the same name. Plot The beautiful, successful, but also vain and egotistical actress Regine meets the strange Italian Raymond Fosca in France in the 1930s. At first he is reluctant to make her acquaintance, but then he 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 at first only thinks about how she herself could attain immortality through the Romance with him - in his memory. Fosca then withdraws from her, but when she seeks him out and confronts him, he tells her his story. Born the son of a patrician in the (fictional) 13th-century northern Italian town of Carmona, the world presents itself to Fosca as a mixture of violence and intrigue: While in the city the influential families fight for supremacy, this struggle is repeated in the outside world as a permanent state of war between the city-states and small states of Italy at the time and their ever-changing constellations of alliances. Neither the respective rulers nor their subjects achieve any real progress. Fosca gets the impression that these battles only go on endlessly because neither party has the time to permanently consolidate the power and rule it has won - and so the desire arises in him for a life that will last forever and thus give him the decisive advantage. In return for his pardon, he receives a magic 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 rises up; even his own son (when he has long since become an adult and wants to inherit the regency from his father) finally fights him, and Fosca kills him himself.