How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance

by Marilyn Yalom

  For Sartre’s seventieth birthday, in June 1975, he granted a long interview to Le Nouvel Observateur. He admitted that there were several women in his life, but added, “Simone de Beauvoir is the only one.” His tribute to her was unequivocal:

  I have been able to formulate ideas to Simone de Beauvoir before they were really concrete . . . she was the perfect person to talk to . . . we have even insulted one another. . . . That’s not to say that I accepted all her criticisms, but I did accept most of them. . . . There is no point in not criticizing very severely when you have the good fortune to love the person you are criticizing.11

  Like many of Sartre and Beauvoir’s readers, I have had to revise my idealized picture of them and come to terms with their failings. Initially, they gave me a philosophic vocabulary with terms such as being and nothingness, existence and essence, authenticity and bad faith, and, yes, essential and contingent love. Their model of an intellectual partnership was one I formed and lived with my psychiatrist husband. Their books—Sartre’s plays and his autobiography The Words, and Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, A Very Easy Death, and The Second Sex—were on the syllabus of college courses I taught for over thirty years. When I became involved in women’s studies, I realized over and over again the extent to which The Second Sex had raised and sometimes answered the most important feminist questions. Beauvoir’s conviction that women would remain the second sex unless they could support themselves rings as true today as when she expressed that idea in 1949. For a woman born in 1908 within a class that considered work for women demeaning, Beauvoir proved that she could earn her own keep and become the full-fledged equal of a man and more. In that respect, Beauvoir and Sartre did not disappoint, for they treated each other as economic and intellectual equals till the end.

  I am not the only one to quarrel with Beauvoir’s negative view of motherhood. She had her reasons, and very good reasons, for seeing motherhood as an impediment to self-realization. Even today, if a woman wants to succeed in the world of business, politics, or academia, she has more chance of success if she is childless. In this respect, as in all others, Beauvoir assumed that the male model of success is what counts. She simply had no appreciation for the emotional depth and psychological growth that can be derived from parenting. It makes no sense to judge Beauvoir and Sartre according to a nuclear family model, because this is something they consistently rejected as a stifling bourgeois construct, and God knows they hated anything that smacked of the bourgeoisie from which they had come. Oddly enough, they referred to their famous threesomes as “the family,” perhaps craving—despite themselves—the biological kinship they consciously eschewed.

  For a long time I have been a Beauvoir groupie. I was and still am on the editorial board of the Simone de Beauvoir Society, founded some thirty years ago by my former colleague Professor Yolanda Patterson. In addition to teaching works by Sartre and Beauvoir, I wrote about her in academic books and articles. Most recently I wrote a letter to the New York Times in defense of the 2010 retranslation of The Second Sex—Beauvoir’s feminist masterpiece—by my friends Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, after the entire work had been trashed in the Times by Francine du Plessix Gray.12

  But my most moving association with Simone de Beauvoir concerns a 1987 conference on autobiography that I organized at Stanford University under the auspices of the Center for Research on Women (now the Clayman Institute for Gender Research). With a small stipend at my disposal, I invited Beauvoir to speak at the conference; she sent her sister Hélène instead, along with Hélène’s paintings. It was at this conference in April 1987 that Hélène received word of Simone’s death, and she immediately flew back to Paris accompanied by a number of professors.

  Simone de Beauvoir was buried next to Jean-Paul Sartre in the Montparnasse Cemetery. A single ledger tombstone covers their adjoining plots. For anyone unfamiliar with their story, it might seem strange to come upon a double tombstone, similar to those used for married couples, and find two different surnames on it. In death, their physical remains were united, but unlike Abélard and Héloïse, they had no belief in an afterlife. As Beauvoir poignantly wrote: “His death separates us. My death will not reunite us. . . . It is splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long.”13

  What, then, is the legacy that Sartre and Beauvoir bequeathed to the history of love? I see them, first and foremost, as proponents of freedom in love, as in all other aspects of life. Without the traditional legal or religious bonds of marriage, they declared themselves free to love each other in every sense of the word. They also considered themselves free to have sexual partners outside their primary couple, with an honesty about their secondary relations that still astonishes. Though a certain French tradition going back to the Middle Ages had countenanced outside lovers for married couples, none expressed that right so unconditionally, and none incorporated it into a love pact that applied equally to the man and the woman. In this respect, Sartre and Beauvoir were pioneers in the women’s movement, though they might not have recognized themselves as such. Beauvoir would not make common cause with women as a group until the movement claimed her in the 1970s.

  What differentiates this love from what we in the United States call “open marriage” or even “polyamorous marriage”? More than anything, it was the commitment that Beauvoir and Sartre vowed to each other and honored to the end of their lives. In spite of everything—lovers, hangers-on, adopted daughters, and male associates who took control of Sartre when he became blind and gâteux (decrepit)—Beauvoir remained his primary partner. They were truly wedded to each other in ways that made others envious.

  Colette Audry, one of Beauvoir’s colleagues when they were both teaching at the same lycée in the early 1930s, remembered a half century later: “Theirs was a new kind of relationship, and I had never seen anything like it. I cannot describe what it was like to be present when those two were together. It was so intense that sometimes it made others who saw it sad not to have it.”14

  For all their flaws, Beauvoir and Sartre offered an egalitarian model of couplehood that would have to wait two generations to become fully fashionable. Their love for each other did not die with the end of shared sex. They confirmed each other as two halves of an entity sharing a single vision. An oft-quoted definition of love written by another existentialist, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose life overlapped with that of Beauvoir and Sartre, would have provided a fitting epitaph for their tombstone: “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Dominion of Desire

  Marguerite Duras

  HIS HANDS ARE EXPERT, MARVELOUS PERFECT. I’M VERY LUCKY, OBVIOUSLY, IT’S AS IF IT WERE HIS PROFESSION. . . . HE CALLS ME A WHORE, A SLUT, HE SAYS I’M HIS ONLY LOVE, AND THAT’S WHAT HE OUGHT TO SAY . . . ALL IS SWEPT AWAY IN THE TORRENT, IN THE FORCE OF DESIRE.

  Marguerite Duras, The Lover, 1984

  Girl on bicycle crossing a bridge in Vietnam built by Gustave Eiffel in 1904. Photograph by Reid S. Yalom, 2010.

  The world of Marguerite Duras is dominated by love—fierce, relentless passion that bursts into creaturely happiness mingled with heartache. Duras’s men and women experience ecstasy, tenderness, longing, jealousy, suffering, revenge. Their lives are ravaged by love’s course. In her fiction and films, you can sense the pulse of love beating under every word.

  Maria, the protagonist of Duras’s novella 10:30 on a Summer Night, is haunted by memories of lovemaking with her husband Pierre, now painful memories because she sees him consumed with desire for her friend Claire. With Claire and their daughter in tow, Maria and Pierre are traveling in Spain on their way to Madrid, but due to a violent summer storm, they stop for the night in an overflowing small-town inn, where the only place to sleep is on a hallway floor.

  Maria, sensing the frustrated desire between Pierre and Claire, imagines:

  This must have been the first
time they kissed. . . . She could see them fully outlined against the moving sky. While Pierre kissed her, his hands touched Claire’s breasts. They were probably talking. But very softly. They must have been speaking the first words of love. Irrepressible, bursting words which came to their lips between two kisses.1

  Maria drinks too much. She easily falls into wine-induced stupors. It becomes increasingly clear that she is a serious alcoholic. (Duras had her own problems with drink.) Pierre tries unsuccessfully to stop her. Despite Maria’s stubborn alcoholism and Pierre’s irresistible attraction to Claire, he still loves his wife and treats her with tender desire.

  “You remember? Verona?”

  “Yes.”

  If he reached out, Pierre would touch Maria’s hair. He had spoken of Verona. Of love all night, the two of them, in a bathroom in Verona. A storm too, and it was summer, and the hotel was full. “Come, Maria.” He was wondering. “When, when will I have enough of you?”

  There is a visceral understanding between the two of them. He knows that she knows about Claire, and yet he believes that the marital bond will somehow survive.

  Interwoven within the story of Maria, Pierre, and Claire is a shocking event that has just occurred in the nameless town. That very day, a man had shot and killed his youthful, naked wife and the lover lying beside her.

  “His name is Paestra. Rodrigo Paestra.”

  “Rodrigo Paestra.”

  “Yes. And the man he killed is Perez. Toni Perez.”

  As the police patrol the town and wait for dawn to catch the murderer, Maria obsesses over his fate. She has heard that he is hiding on the rooftops, and suddenly decides to help him escape. Without directly expressing the parallel between Paestra’s situation and her own, Maria understands all too well how a spouse could be driven to murder out of jealousy. How she manages to deliver Paestra from the rooftops but not from his own despair; how she accepts the inevitable sexual union between Pierre and Claire; how Pierre and Maria unsuccessfully cling to their long-term love for one another—these are all themes that play out against each other in a haunting drama.

  Much of the power of Duras’s writing lies in what she does not say. We the readers, or viewers in the case of her films, are asked to fill in the spaces. We enter into her characters’ thought processes, partake of their emotions, and add our own. However idiosyncratic her stories, they delve into a common pool of primitive emotions hidden in each of us.

  The unsaid lurks behind her famously stylized language: sonorous word patterns and repetitious leitmotifs create a distinctly musical texture. It is no accident that one of her best-known novellas is titled Moderato Cantabile—a musical term meaning “moderately and melodiously.” Here, too, a man had killed the woman he loved, but instead of fleeing he throws himself upon her inert body and strokes her hair.

  The crowd could see that the woman was still young, and that blood was coming from her mouth in thin trickles, and that there was blood on the man’s face where he had kissed her.2

  This crime of passion, this ultimate expression of transgressive love, works its way into the imagination of others surrounding the fatal couple. Once again the murder is interwoven into a more developed story, this time that of a man named Chauvin and his former employer’s wife, Anne Desbaresdes. They meet by chance in the café where the murder had taken place and continue to meet there, though this is inappropriate territory for a bourgeois wife like Madame Desbaresdes. Their only topic of conversation is the murder, even though neither really knows anything about the parties involved. Nonetheless, they are drawn to the mystery of a love so wild it defies all rational understanding.

  The murder beomes a catalyst for the mounting attraction between Anne and Chauvin, which reaches a level of erotic intensity far beyond the events themselves. A thousand other French stories are filled with similar events concerning love, adultery, and jealousy, yet Duras manages to endow these events with a unique incantatory power. Just as Racine in the seventeenth century elevated love to a level of tragic gravitas, so too Duras in the twentieth century draws her readers and spectators into the roiling underworld of all-consuming love.

  Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) was seventy when she wrote The Lover. At that time, she was already a much-honored author with over fifty novels, novellas, films, and plays to her credit. These included the world-famous film Hiroshima, Mon Amour and works of fiction such as Moderato Cantabile, which was often included in French and American courses on literature. The Lover won the 1984 Prix Goncourt and sold 750,000 copies by the end of the year. Later it was made into a much-acclaimed film.

  The Lover is set in Vietnam where Duras was born and grew up. Named Marguerite Donnadieu (meaning “give to God”), she was the third child of parents who had come from France to educate indigenous Vietnamese children. As members of the French ruling class, her family lived comfortably in what was then called Indochina, but after the death of her father, their circumstances were considerably reduced. Like Duras, the unnamed girl in The Lover has a bitter schoolteacher mother, a brutal older brother, and a sweet second brother who dies young. She is fifteen and a half when she meets a rich Chinese man, older by a dozen years, on a ferry crossing the Mekong River. She is returning by bus and boat from her village of Sadec (now called Sa Dec) to school in Saigon. The man has come aboard the ferry with his black limousine and white-liveried chauffeur.

  He looks at the girl in the man’s fedora and the gold shoes. He slowly comes over to her. He’s obviously nervous. He doesn’t smile to begin with. To begin with he offers her a cigarette. His hand is trembling. There’s the difference of race, he’s not white, he has to get the better of it, that’s why he’s trembling. She says she doesn’t smoke, no thanks.3

  The man is surprised to see a white girl using the native transportation system. He asks about her family in Sadec and tells her that he lives in the big house with the large terrace and blue tiles bordering the river. He has just returned from Paris where he was a student. Would she allow him to drive her to her destination in Saigon?

  Here begins the surprising history of a poor adolescent French girl with an older rich Chinese man. He has the traditional attributes of power—money and maturity—which she counters and subjugates with her youth, beauty, and skin color. Race is the subtext of this story. Being white gives her an incomparable advantage in that colonial French society, which looked down upon Asians, be they native Vietnamese or Chinese transplants. Her mother and brothers treat the man with contempt, and his father refuses the idea that his heir should marry “the little white whore from Sadec.” But before arriving at that point in the narrative, we follow the romance of the French girl and the Chinese man, and it is unlike anything we have read before.

  Every day the man comes in his chauffeur-driven car to the French high school she attends and drives her back to the state boarding school in which she sleeps. But one day after school he drives her to the Chinese section where he keeps a bachelor apartment. There he tells her that he loves her.

  She says, I’d rather you didn’t love me. But if you do, I’d like you to do as you usually do with women. He looks at her in horror, asks, Is that what you want. She says it is.

  And so they make love at her request, and he is the one who weeps and moans, rather than she. Their lovemaking has nothing of the stereotypical.

  He’s torn off the dress, he throws it down. He’s torn off her little white cotton panties and carries her over like that, naked, to the bed. And there he turns away and weeps. And she, slow, patient, draws him to her and starts to undress him.

  . . .

  She touches him. Touches the softness of his skin, caresses his goldenness, the strange novelty. He moans, weeps. In dreadful love.

  After he has penetrated her, he wipes the blood away and washes her as if she were a baby. Their lovemaking alternates between scenes of tenderness and passion, during which she, too, comes to experience exquisite pleasure.

  For a year and a half they make love reg
ularly in his bachelor apartment, surrounded by the noises and smells of the Chinese quarter of Cholon. In time, her family finds out, and she is beaten by her mother and older brother. Her mother screams: she is no better than a prostitute, she will never be able to marry and find her place in society. This doesn’t stop the family from taking the money that comes their way from the Chinese man. They even accept his invitation to a meal in an expensive Chinese restaurant, where they behave very badly, don’t even speak to their host as they gobble up everything in sight.

  The girls in her French school stop speaking to her. She doesn’t care. “We go back to the apartment. We are lovers. We can’t stop loving each other.”

  He gives her a valuable diamond ring. This curtails some of the criticism at home and at the boarding school, which looks the other way when she is absent at night from the dormitory. By now the lovers are joined in a ritualistic dance of love. He washes her body with special water set aside in large jars for that purpose. She abandons herself to his caresses, strokes his body as he strokes hers. Their silent caresses are occasionally broken by tempestuous outbursts.

  Then suddenly it’s she who’s imploring, she doesn’t say what for, and he, he shouts to her to be quiet, that he doesn’t want to have anything more to do with her . . . and now they succumb to it again amid tears, despair, and happiness.

  Eventually the time comes when the girl must return to France for university education. The man is so pained at the thought of separation that he can no longer make love to her. “His body wanted nothing more to do with the body that was about to go away, to betray.” On the day of her departure, she stands on the deck of the boat that will carry her to Europe and sees his big car on the dock, “long and black with the white-liveried driver in front. . . . That was him in the back, that scarcely visible shape, motionless, overcome.” She starts to weep, hiding her tears from the mother and brother who will accompany her to France. Had she loved him as he had loved her? No. But she had loved him in her own way, and she will never forget him.