The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Deleuze still lived with his mother on the rue Daubigny, but he set Évelyne up in an apartment in a nearby, equally bleak street in the 17th arrondissement, which, for her, was far from everything, first and foremost those places that an aspiring actress was professionally obliged to frequent. I visited her one day in the furnished one-bedroom apartment he had rented and found her miserable, almost exiled. I felt as though he were hiding her away, forcing her to live a clandestine existence, sneaking around furtively to visit her when it suited him as a man might visit a brothel. How long this second affair – incarceration would be more accurate – continued, I don’t know, nor can I relate what my sister later confided to me about her lover’s behaviour, the means and the ruses he felt the need to employ when he decided to end it with her, since his philosophical ‘desirante’ subversiveness demanded, if it were both to thrive and have free rein, a bourgeois respectability that Évelyne could never offer him. Their break-up also ended our friendship; except in passing, I never saw Deleuze again. My admiration for him remained intact and indeed grew with time, but my affection for him was gone. The violence of his own suicide rekindled it.

  In her heart of hearts, Évelyne was deeply, permanently wounded, but the theatre, rather than the cinema, saved her; here she truly learned to act, learned the profession the hard way, working with the repertory company Centre Dramatique de l’Ouest, touring towns in Brittany and Normandy. I came across a letter she wrote to Paulette and Monny in which she lists the places and dates, day by day, almost without break or rest, the Cinéma Familial in Lannion, the Théâtre Comœdia in Brest, village halls in Loudéac and Vitré, the NEF hall in Vannes, the concert hall in Le Mans, the Beaux-Arts in Cherbourg, theatres in Quimper, Pontivy, Mayenne, Saint-Lô, Coutances. It was Molière’s Illustre Théâtre, going from town to town come rain, snow or heatwave, but, as she wrote, no matter what the weather, theatres are invariably freezing cold, dressing rooms filthy and often stinking. It doesn’t matter, she went on, ‘I adore this life, it would break my heart to leave it.’ When she came back to Paris, she continued to act, both in the theatre and on television. I saw her perform – perfect, poignant, understated – in The Three Sisters, in Colette Audry’s Soledad, Audiberti’s Le Ouallou [The Slammer], Arthur Adamov’s Ping-Pong. In 1953, she gave a magisterial performance as the child-killer Estelle in Sartre’s Huis clos [No Exit] at the Comédie Caumartin with Christiane Lénier and François Chaumette, a role she performed on many more occasions with different actors in different theatres in the years that followed, even in a television production with Judith playing Inès and Michel Auclair as Garcin, directed by Michel Mitrani.

  I mention all this not because I want to dwell on my sister’s career – the usual career path of a young, gifted actress – but simply to tell the truth. Where, if not in this book, will it be told? Since her suicide, on 18 November 1966, the official version would have it that she only ever acted in plays that Sartre had written expressly for her. Ambiguous phrases – for example, in the Pléiade edition of Sartre’s works for theatre – imply that Sartre insisted she be cast as Estelle at the Comédie Caumartin. I can attest that this is not true, that Sartre did not then know my sister. He had never seen her act, until one morning I – who by then had been living with Simone de Beauvoir for a year – got a call from him, and I quote him here verbatim: ‘Apparently, your sister is very good in Huis clos, I’d like to go and see it. Set it up with Castor [Simone de Beauvoir], and we’ll take her to dinner afterwards.’ In relaying Sartre’s imperious command to Castor, my only comment was to quote Comte Mosca in La Chartreuse de Parme [The Charterhouse of Parma] when he learns Sanseverina is about to meet Fabrice: ‘If once the word “love” is spoken between them, I am lost.’ It was inevitable that Sartre and Évelyne would have an affair, everything pointed to it: Sartre’s taste for seduction, my sister’s fondness for philosophy – it would take a thinker of Sartre’s stature to heal the wounds opened by Deleuze; and also the symmetry of a brother in a relationship with de Beauvoir and a sister with Sartre. The consequences for Évelyne frightened Castor and me, I would go so far as to say that I was terrified, knowing Évelyne to be entranced with the absolute, incapable of not giving herself utterly. I considered the risks that such an affair would entail, to say nothing of the complications she would bring to Sartre’s tortuous love life, given that he never broke up with anyone, holding on to his mistresses long after passion and sex had ceased to be part of the relationship. Castor and I did everything in our power to postpone the encounter between them, but he was determined to see this Estelle; he would not give up, he became impatient, we had to do it.

  If I feel it necessary to highlight my fears and reservations here, it is because the contrary has been alleged in a number of books and so-called biographies, eager to pounce on the great paradox of the Lanzmann family, incestuous careerists, prepared to do anything to climb the greasy pole. According to them I delivered my sister up to Sartre just as I had to Deleuze before him. At the root of this notion are two books by Serge Rezvani, Les Années-lumières [Light-Years], published in 1967, a few months after Évelyne’s death, and Le Testament amoureux [The Lovers’ Testament], published in 1981. His reasons for the resentment that caused him to malign our whole family and plunge my mother into a long depression are only too obvious and I don’t intend to dwell on them. I sued both the publisher and the author of Le Testament amoureux and won, resulting in the removal of most of the passages I had asked to be suppressed. It was republished with ‘blank pages’. In September 2003, twenty-two years later, I received a letter from Serge, from which I here reproduce certain passages:

  Claude, suddenly and without truly understanding my reasons, I feel the need to write to you. Many years have passed. More than twenty years since Le Testament amoureux was published and many decades since our first meeting, our friendship, our family ties: Évelyne with all the pain she represents for me, for you, for Jacques, for Paulette… Since then, I have suffered other losses in my personal life… So many losses that it ‘woke me up’, so to speak… This is probably why I felt the sudden need this morning to make my peace with you because I have realized – after all these years – how much I hurt you. I truly beg you to forgive me. Perhaps you will find it impossible to overcome your bitterness. If so, peace! At least I will have made this gesture… I want to embrace you, in spite of everything, a repentant brother…

  I was grateful to Serge for sending me this completely unexpected letter, and I wrote back, but so far we have not seen each other again. The copies of his book that were sold before the lawsuit could obviously not be recalled and the poison continues to work in weak minds. Tête-à-Tête, the umpteenth American biography of the Sartre–de Beauvoir partnership, was made up entirely of petty spite and sordid rumours intended for an ignorant public, relying heavily on that first version of Le Testament amoureux; sadly, it succeeded in finding a French publisher willing to translate and publish it. I didn’t even need to go to court, the publisher quickly realized his mistake, stopped distributing the book and reprinted it, having removed the most unbearably vile and stupid passages. I had written to the publisher, quoting Hegel: ‘No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.’ Three months after my brother Jacques’ death in 2006, I received another letter from Serge.

  My dear Claude, I only belatedly heard about Jacquot’s death! It saddened me deeply. We were bound, and will always be bound by so many youthful memories. This has been compounded today by another great sadness – Hazel Rowley’s book… I refused to speak to her about Évelyne, about you, about our shared memories. You know how sorry I am about Le Testament amoureux!… I did not wish to let this sorrowful event pass without conveying my deep, unchanging affection for you. Je t’embrasse en frère.

  Évelyne Rey, with the author of the famous play in the audience, was dazzling that night at the Comédie Caumartin. Castor sat in the middle, Sartre on her left, me
on her right. I was divided, at war with myself, intensely proud of my sister’s performance but terrorized, because in every one of her lines, her gestures, her movements, the properly Sartrian ‘bad faith’ of the mother who has killed her child, trying to come to some compromise with the truth, only served to make the unavoidable inevitable. With every line she made it more and more obvious, and each time I squeezed de Beauvoir’s knee, my way of saying, ‘Oh no, this is a disaster!’ She clearly understood perfectly because at other moments she squeezed mine, to say, ‘We are lost’, as though we both formed a single Comte Mosca. Supper in a restaurant near the theatre was candlelit and perfect in every way. My sister was radiant, so beautiful she took your breath away, and Sartre played the didactic lady-killer, explaining in his metallic, authoritative voice that she was the finest Estelle he had ever seen, towering over Gaby Sylvia, who had created the role. Sartre had everything it took to seduce Évelyne, complimenting her, his reasons articulate, cogent and neatly strung together. Watching this formidable thinking machine at work, the well-oiled gears and pistons revving until it was at full throttle, left you stunned with admiration, all the more so if the goal of his implacable, passionate logic was to flatter you. Sartre’s enemies mocked him for his ugliness, his squint, caricatured him as a toad, a gnome, some sordid, baleful creature. I found him handsome in a way, powerfully charming, I liked the extraordinary energy of his approach, his physical courage and, above all, that voice of tempered steel, the quintessence of irrefutable intelligence. Consequently, I was not surprised to see my predictions come true, to see my sister begin to fall in love with him. He loved her madly. I saw it when we travelled together, he, Castor and I, stamping impatiently, like a child, waiting for her to phone, throwing a tantrum when she was late, cursing and insulting her when she didn’t call. At such times, I was the one he gave dirty looks to, a justified primitivism since Évelyne and I were of the same blood. He was utterly incapable of sublimating his jealousy: it was so natural to him that he did not even try to disguise it. When jealousy pricked him, he lapsed into a vile mood and his sad passion transformed his steely sovereign voice into that of a sadistic grand inquisitor. If the answers were satisfactory, he returned composed, showering praise on the very person who had him harbouring such serious suspicions. He spent hours on the phone with her, talking to her about the plays she was in, judging the playwrights, questioning her about the actors, meticulously dissecting the production. Yet still he wrote her long letters the following day in which he picked up and further developed his arguments. These missives were, first and foremost, letters of love and literature, inextricably intertwined. I can see him still, sitting beneath the arbour in the garden of the hotel in Albi, writing without let-up for two whole afternoons, including an unforgettable description of the red-brick town of Albi and its cathedral, which he read to Castor and me in the evening. We were first to hear both his declarations of love to my sister and his thoughts about Albi. For us, this went without saying, as it did for her. Whatever happened to that letter from Albi? Who took it, kept it or sold it after Évelyne’s death? I’ll never know.

  Like Deleuze, Sartre set my sister up in an apartment at 26 rue Jacob, a stone’s throw from his place, in an elegant hôtel particulier; a large first-floor apartment with windows overlooking the main courtyard, unlike the apartments at the rear, which faced a gloomy garden with staggered rows of tall, slender trees. Afterwards there was a scandal concerning this apartment: one of the later tenants, Alain Juppé, then Prime Minister, was accused of paying rent well below the market value. It turned out that the hôtel particulier belonged to the City of Paris, and tenancies were granted by the Hôtel de Ville. I wonder what connection Sartre had with the Hôtel de Ville and I tell myself, happily, that the rent he paid was not exorbitant. However, this 180-square-metre love-nest was warm and welcoming: my sister had a wonderful sense of hospitality, and it was a pleasure to spend time there, to dine with her and with Sartre in the vast main room, which was also the bedroom, or in the kitchen, which was a cosy and inviting room with state-of-the-art fittings. The difference between this and her arrangement with Deleuze was not only that Saint-Germain-des-Prés, especially back then, was much more appealing than the dreary plains and arteries of the 17th arrondissement, but that Sartre, though he continued to work 300 metres away in his tiny apartment at 42 rue Bonaparte, to all intents and purposes lived with Évelyne, at least in the beginning, in the first flush of passion. And although she admired him unreservedly, she was never in thrall to him as she had been with Deleuze. Sartre’s infantile fits of jealousy did not change the fact that, as a philosophical advocate of freedom, he had insisted from the first that this be the basis for their relationship, allowing my sister to develop and to maintain a certain intimate and sarcastic distance from him, making it possible for her to deal with and to protect herself from what was imposed on her. Michelle Vian being Sartre’s maîtresse en titre meant that absolute secrecy about the newcomer was enforced, notwithstanding the flames of passion burning in the heart of the sultan of the rue Bonaparte. Évelyne would never be centre stage, or be granted the status of favourite; she would have to content herself with being his darling yet in the shadows, with the understanding that their relationship was a jealously guarded secret, shared only with the inner circle – such as Castor and me. And so their liaison was crowned with an exquisite, a precious quality that would have been impossible under the harsh spotlight of a public affair.

  What remains most vivid to me when I think of those early years in the rue Jacob is how joyous their relationship was. With Sartre, as with Castor, the only inexhaustible subject of conversation was the world. The world was what we had read in the newspapers, in books, it included politics, people we knew, people we had met, friends, enemies, endless gossip, catty, witty, partisan, and not remotely ‘enculturé’ to use one of Sartre’s words, an endless backbiting that we resumed after work. It was something at which Évelyne excelled, given her caustic wit, her keen eye and her hilarious turns of phrase. People were struck by her combination of beauty and intelligence; she had many friends, both men and women. Sartre paid for the apartment and gave her money – as he did to his other mistresses – when she wasn’t working. ‘Voilà le sou’ was the invariable note that accompanied a cheque. My sister was happy for several years; she had her acting, she had Sartre, to whom she was faithful until she finally decided to leave him because she could no longer bear the enforced secrecy. In the beginning it had been easy, but as time went on it had become intolerable. Sartre’s holidays were exclusively reserved for Castor and Michelle Vian, and when she realized that this would never change, Évelyne resolved to give him up, after two years or perhaps three, I’m not sure. But both valued the special relationship they had; Évelyne stayed on in the apartment on the rue Jacob and Sartre visited several times a week, advising her in everything, he was her closest confidant and the one to whom she most often turned. The term ‘break-up’ in the ordinary sense is inadequate: it was both a change and something permanent. My sister, who was the epitome of loyalty and discretion, never broke the promise she had made to Sartre; Michelle Vian never learned about their relationship from her. Obviously, quite a lot of people were aware of the relationship and yet it remained a secret until her suicide, one she did nothing to betray. In her Memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir kept the code of omertà, passing over the relationship between Sartre and Évelyne in silence, something that I know caused her considerable pain since, in so doing, an important period in her life was obliterated. Quite recently, I was told that Michelle Vian did not learn of the relationship until after Sartre’s death: there are none so blind as those who will not see!

  Évelyne’s tact was also evident in the fact that, although she was surrounded by handsome men – actors, directors and intellectuals – Sartre’s successor was neither taller nor more handsome, and he was certainly not rich. It was Robert Dupuy, whom she referred to by the nickname ‘Roro’, a big-hearted lawyer of ke
en intelligence; Sartre, who was invited to dinner with them on several occasions, was very fond of him. To tell the truth, I think that my sister felt more at ease, reassured by ugly men. Love, for her, was something other than the dual mirage of alluring images; love was first and foremost of the soul, since Évelyne found it difficult to accept her beauty, so evident to others but so problematic to her: she never felt that she was beautiful, never considered herself inherently beautiful, so it was a constant source of uncertainty, of anxious self-doubt that could never be assuaged. A beautiful woman is merely an ugly woman in disguise, Sartre wrote somewhere, and it was not for nothing that Évelyne delighted in the fierce materialism of Albert Cohen’s Belle du seigneur [Her Lover]. Before the handsome Solal seduces the exquisite Ariane by explaining to her in stunning detail the theorems, lemmas and scholia on which his loathing of seduction is based, he begins by making himself loathsome to her – horribile visu – by covering up his front teeth with black tape, leaving only the two gleaming canines to make himself look like a toothless old man. ‘A pair of canine teeth, he later mocked her after she had surrendered to him body and soul, that is what your love is worth.’