Tete-a-Tete

by Hazel Rowley

  Sartre then made a suggestion to his two friends René Maheu and Paul Nizan. They were planning to prepare for the oral exams together. Simone de Beauvoir knew her Leibniz well and was clearly very bright; suppose they asked her to join them?

  By mid-June, the written exams were over and there was only a month before the orals. Maheu was off to join his wife in Normandy for ten days. Sartre told him he would like to make the acquaintance of Mademoiselle de Beauvoir before they started working together as a group. He suggested a tearoom on the Rue de Médicis, across from the Luxembourg Gardens, five minutes from the Sorbonne. Maheu passed on the message but told Beauvoir he was afraid Sartre would take advantage of his absence to make off with her himself. “I don’t want anyone to get in the way of my most precious feelings,” Maheu said. He had talked about Sartre in glowing terms, but as far as women were concerned, he did not trust him an inch.

  On the designated afternoon, Sartre waited in the tearoom, reading and smoking his pipe. He was taken aback when a fair-haired young woman walked up to him, introduced herself as Hélène de Beauvoir, and explained that her sister was unable to come. “How did you know I was Sartre?” he asked. Poupette, as everyone called her, looked sheepish. “Because…you are wearing glasses.” Sartre pointed out that the man sitting in the other corner was also wearing glasses.

  Sartre thought he knew why Simone de Beauvoir had not turned up, and he could guess how she had described him to her younger sister. He was right. Beauvoir had told Poupette that she would have no trouble recognizing Sartre. He was extremely short, he wore glasses, and he was “very ugly.”1

  Sartre was gallant, and took Poupette to see the new American film A Girl in Every Port. The conversation flagged. When she got home, Poupette told her sister that Jean-Paul Sartre was nothing like the lively dynamo Maheu had cracked him up to be.

  This was not an auspicious beginning. Sartre could not stand being rejected by women. Throughout his life, he would never forgive his mother for betraying him, as he saw it, by marrying again, when he was eleven. Then there was that traumatic episode in La Rochelle, when he was twelve.

  His father, Jean-Baptiste Sartre, had died when Jean-Paul was fifteen months old. Twenty-four-year-old Anne-Marie bundled up her little “Poulou” and went to live with her parents in Paris.2 She belonged to the dynasty of Schweitzers, a Protestant family from Alsace (the famous Albert Schweitzer was her cousin), and like all the Schweitzers, Anne-Marie was tall and slim. Physically, Poulou would take after his diminutive father. And when he was two, he went almost blind in his right eye.

  Poulou was the little prince in his grandparents’ house, doted on and idolized by his mother, grandmother, and grandfather. In that patriarchal household—dominated by the lanky, bearded, and imperious Charles Schweitzer—Anne-Marie felt to Poulou like an older sister. She was financially dependent on her parents, and they condescended to her. There were three bedrooms in the house: the grandfather’s, the grandmother’s, and the one they called “the children’s,” which Anne-Marie shared with her son.

  Anne-Marie gave Poulou her undivided attention. They told each other their troubles. She read to him. She played the piano for him. On rainy Sundays they would earnestly debate whether to go to the circus, a museum, or a movie. Charles Schweitzer would appear at the door of his book-lined study. “Where are you children off to?” he would ask. It was usually the movies.

  “All I wanted to see was Anne-Marie, the young girl of my mornings,” Sartre would write in his autobiography, Words. “All I wanted to hear was her voice.”

  She used to call me her attendant knight and her little man; I told her everything. More than everything…. I described what I saw…I gave myself feelings for the pleasure of sharing them with her…. We had our myths, our habits of speech, and our ritual jokes…. I used to trot along looking tough, my hand in my mother’s, confident that I could protect her.

  When he grew up, Sartre intended to marry Anne-Marie. Then, in 1916, when he was eleven, she married again. For Sartre, this was a catastrophe. It broke his heart. The stranger who stole his mother was Joseph Mancy, a naval engineer. Until the day he died, Sartre would always hate his “Uncle Jo.”

  The following year, when Sartre was twelve, the awkward trio moved to La Rochelle, a small port town on the Atlantic coast. Sartre detested the place. His new classmates were the sons and daughters of local fishermen and oyster farmers. They did not like him—a prissy Parisian with a walleye and a funny way of speaking—and they did not hesitate to beat him up. It did not take Sartre long to become a tough little hoodlum himself.

  In a bid for popularity, he stole money from his mother’s handbag to treat the other kids to cakes from the local pastry shop. The provincial boys all seemed to have girlfriends, and Sartre told tall stories about his girl, back in Paris, with whom he had gone to a hotel and made love. They did not believe him. At school in La Rochelle, he picked out a pretty blond girl, the daughter of a ship chandler, and boasted about her to his classmates. They warned her of Sartre’s interest.

  Sartre never forgot that afternoon. He found the girl, Lisette, standing with a group of her friends. He was on his bicycle. Not sure what to say, he rode in circles around the group. Finally, she said: “Have you finished, you cross-eyed old fool, with your glasses and big hat?”3 Her friends jeered.

  The realization that he was ugly hit Sartre like a stone from a catapult. His adolescence was tormented by it. At the end of his teens, he made a decision. He told a girlfriend, Simone Jollivet, “Until last year I was very melancholy because I was ugly and that made me suffer. I have absolutely rid myself of that, because it’s a weakness. Whoever knows his own strength must be joyful.” He added, “I call that state moral health, because it is exactly like when one is in excellent physical health, one feels strong enough to bend lampposts with a single hand.”4

  Sartre, the future existentialist, had made a fundamental existential choice. If he could not seduce women by means of his physical assets, he would seduce them with words—les mots.

  At sixteen, Sartre was sent back to Paris to his old school, the prestigious Lycée Henri IV, this time as a boarder. Among his classmates was Paul Nizan, equally talented and ambitious, and equally set on becoming a writer. For the next few years, Sartre and Nizan became inseparable friends.

  As schoolboys, the young Sartre and Nizan took themselves for supermen. Convinced they were far superior to the common herd, they would strut around Paris for hours at a time, imitating their literary heroes, acting out roles, inventing a private language. Sartre gorged himself on adventure stories; Nizan introduced him to contemporary literature. They read each other’s writing, and discussed narrative technique.

  From Henri IV, Sartre and Nizan went to the equally prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand, for two years of hard cramming in preparation for the competitive entrance examination to the most elite all-male institution in the nation. Two years later, they moved together to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in the Rue d’Ulm, near the Pantheon, where they shared a study.

  They were so often together that people mixed them up, though their only common physical attribute was a squint. Nizan’s eyes rotated inward; Sartre’s roamed outward. Whereas Sartre’s wandering eyes were intensely disconcerting, Nizan’s cross-eyed look was quite appealing. Sartre was stocky, and at 158 centimeters (five foot one), he was cruelly short. His skin was pale and dull, with pockmarks and blackheads, and he looked as if he needed a bath and a good sleep. Nizan, dark and handsome, dressed with a dandy’s elegance and sometimes appeared at lectures in plus fours, dangling a monocle or twirling a malacca cane. Sartre greatly admired his friend’s costumes, but did not try to compete.

  By their early twenties, their temperaments were pulling the two friends apart. Sartre was in his element during the four years he spent at the Ecole Normale. He reveled in his newfound independence and enjoyed the security of an easygoing, elitist male community, in which he shone. He threw water bombs on frien
ds in evening attire; he wrote a highly obscene sketch for the school’s annual review, in which he acted the part of the school principal. The other normaliens would hear him singing in his fine tenor voice as he dashed between lectures, and playing the piano evenings in the common room. He once stepped into the middle of a fight because he saw an acquaintance, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, being picked on. And yet he was one of the leaders when it came to hazing, the semi-sadistic initiation rituals to which new recruits were subjected.5

  Nizan, on the other hand, was profoundly unhappy in that environment. In his autobiographical narrative Aden Arabie (published in 1931, when he was twenty-six), Nizan, by then a Marxist, was scathing about the Ecole Normale, that “laughable and odious” institution with the esprit de corps of seminaries and regiments, where adolescents, tired after years of cramming for competitions, were taught vapid sophisms by stuffy professors who lived in the affluent western districts of Paris.6

  Nizan had always been prone to melancholy, and at the Ecole Normale his moods grew darker. In one of the most tender and penetrating portraits Sartre would ever write, his foreword to the 1960 reprinting of Aden Arabie (Nizan was killed in battle in 1940), he was harshly critical of his own inability to understand the depths of Nizan’s anguish. As a student, he preferred to see Nizan’s rage and despair as emotional extravagance—an affectation, such as his wearing a monocle.

  My anger was only a bar of soap, his was real…. His words of hate were pure gold, mine were counterfeit…. We had superficial melancholies in common…. For the rest, I tried to impose my optimism upon him. I repeated to him that we were free. He didn’t answer, but the slight smile at the corner of his mouth said a great deal about this idea.

  In their shared study, whole days would pass when Nizan did not speak to his companion. Sartre was hurt. And when Nizan took a year’s leave from the overheated atmosphere of the Normale and caught a boat to Aden, in Yemen, Sartre felt as if he’d been jilted.

  Almost a year later, Sartre was alone in his study one evening, moping over a girlfriend, when Nizan burst in without knocking. Sartre was overjoyed. The two went out drinking. It was like old times. Over brimming beers, they again put the world on trial. Sartre thought they had taken up their friendship where they left off. But Nizan did not return to board at the Ecole Normale. Instead, he moved in with his fiancée’s family, in Montparnasse. A few months later, he got married. Sartre was appalled. “I had made of bachelorhood a moral precept, a rule of life—thus it couldn’t be otherwise for Nizan.”7

  Sartre was known for his brilliance, and was expected to come first in the agrégation. In June 1928, to everyone’s astonishment, he failed the written exams. That was why he was sitting them again a year later, in the summer of 1929, at the same time as Paul Nizan, who had lost a year by going to Aden, and as Simone de Beauvoir, who had gained a year by taking her teacher’s diploma at the same time, giving herself a double load.

  Beauvoir had heard considerable gossip about Sartre and Nizan, those godless young men who mocked bourgeois hypocrisies and Catholic sanctities and only bothered to drop in on certain lectures. Around Sartre, in particular, there swirled rumors of drunken binges and visits to brothels. The third member of their trio, René Maheu, did not share their legendary reputation. Although he, too, held himself aloof from most of his fellow students, Maheu was slightly less intimidating.

  In January 1929, Maheu had given a talk in class that provoked an animated discussion. Beauvoir was charmed by Maheu’s slightly mocking voice, his “broad, liquid smile,” and the “ironical twist he gave to his mouth.”8 Despite his well-cut suits, his ruddy complexion and blond hair lent him the air of a country boy. She wished she could get to know him.

  One morning in spring, Beauvoir looked up from her books at the Bibliothèque Nationale and saw Maheu walk in. She watched him take off his blue overcoat and scarf and sit down to work. At lunchtime she saw him get up, leaving his books behind. Normally, she ate a sandwich in the gardens of the Palais Royal. That day, she went to the library café. Maheu flashed her a smile and cleared a place for her at his table as if they had arranged to meet. They talked about Hume and Kant.

  After that, whenever he came to the library, Maheu would greet her warmly. Before the Easter break, he came and sat next to her in one of Leon Brunschvicg’s lectures. (Sartre and Nizan boycotted these.) After Easter, when lectures resumed, he sat next to her again. He told her he was “an individualist.” So was she, she said. He stared at her. “What? You!” He had been convinced that she was a good Catholic, devoted to good works. Not at all, she assured him.9

  “Meeting with René Maheu, or with myself?” Beauvoir wrote in her journal that evening. “Who else has ever made such a strong impression on me? Why am I overwhelmed by this meeting, as if something had really happened to me at last?”10

  She started to save the seat next to hers in the library. Maheu turned up most days. For weeks, he called her “Mademoiselle,” in that slightly ironic voice of his. One day, he reached across, took her notebook, and wrote on the cover in large capital letters: BEAUVOIR = BEAVER. Her name resembled the English word, and she also worked like a beaver. From that day on, he called her Beaver, le Castor.

  He told her about the “little comrades,” as they called themselves. He had met them at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, when he first came to Paris from the provinces, at the age of eighteen. They were now twenty-four. Maheu was “the Lama,” Nizan “the Grand Duke,” Sartre “the Little Man.”11 Maheu admired his two friends with a passion, especially Sartre, whom he thought a genius. But Sartre was very different from him, he explained. Sartre belonged to the Parisian bourgeoisie; Maheu felt like an upstart in that milieu. Maheu liked to enjoy life; Sartre never for a second stopped analyzing. Maheu liked the countryside and fresh air; Sartre didn’t give a damn about such things.

  There was something princely about Maheu. He reminded Beauvoir of Jacques, the cousin she had been in love with throughout her adolescence. They were both graceful, boyish characters, who often smiled in place of speaking. Both valued beauty—in art, nature, and people. To her, they were artists, poets.

  Beauvoir’s friendships had always been exceptionally formal. Even with her bosom friend, Zaza, whom she had known since the age of ten, she used the formal vous rather than the informal tu. (Zaza used tu with all her other friends.) And when they met or said good-bye, they shook hands. There was only one person who ever hugged or kissed Simone, and that was her exuberant Polish friend Stépha, who was extroverted and unrestrained to a point that left Simone a little dizzy.

  Maheu made Beauvoir conscious of her body in a way she had never been before. He would put his hand on her arm and wag his finger in her face mockingly. He commented on her appearance, her clothes, her husky voice. He found it very appealing, he assured her. Beauvoir had never thought about her voice before.

  She was equally conscious of Maheu as a physical presence. “I would watch him come striding through the gardens with his rather awkward grace; I would look at his ears, transparent in the sun as pink sugar-candy, and I knew that I had beside me not an angel, but a real man,” she would write in her memoirs. His laugh was irresistible. “When he gave vent to his laughter, it was as if he had just unexpectedly dropped in on a strange planet and was making a rapturous discovery of its prodigious comicality.”12

  In the three weeks running up to the written examinations, they saw each other almost every day. On the rare occasions when Maheu did not work in the library, he would turn up at the end of the afternoon and invite her for tea or coffee.

  Beauvoir was enchanted by their conversations. Maheu knew a lot about history and myth—more, she thought privately, than about philosophy—and had a wonderfully entertaining way of bringing the past to life. “My greatest happiness is Maheu,” she wrote in her journal.13

  He was also her greatest source of anguish. When they said goodbye at the end of the day, she felt sad. He was going home to his wife. He rarely talke
d about his personal life, but he had told her that Inès was five years older than he, and represented all the mysteries and paradoxes of femininity. He loved her. She was beautiful. She came from the Catholic nobility.

  There were times when Beauvoir found Maheu disappointingly conventional, particularly when it came to women. He admitted that bright women brought out a certain resistance in him. When Beauvoir told him about her tormented relationship with her cousin Jacques, Maheu said he thought she should marry Jacques. Society did not respect unmarried women. Beauvoir lent Maheu a recent English novel she had enjoyed, The Green Hat, by Michael Arlen. She admired its independent heroine, Iris Storm. Maheu did not. “I have no liking for women of easy virtue,” he told her. “Much as I like a woman to please me, I find it impossible to respect any woman I’ve had.” Beauvoir was indignant. “One does not have an Iris Storm!”14

  The written exams were held in the middle of June. Beauvoir and Maheu walked into the library of the Sorbonne together. “Good luck, Beaver,” he said to her gently. They found their seats. Beauvoir placed a thermos of coffee and a box of biscuits by the side of her desk. The topic was announced: “Liberty and Contingency.” She gazed a while at the ceiling, and soon her pen was flying across the page. When they came out, she looked for Maheu, but he had disappeared.

  The exams continued for several days. After the last one, Maheu called around at the Beauvoir family apartment, on the Rue de Rennes, and invited Simone for lunch. He was about to join his wife in Normandy, he told her, but when he got back, the little comrades were going to prepare for the orals together. Would she like to join them?

  When he failed his agrégation the previous year, Sartre had been obliged to move out of his room at the Ecole Normale. He was now living in one of the student residences at the Cité Universitaire, on the southern edge of the city. On Monday July 8, 1929, Maheu turned up in the morning, as arranged, with Mademoiselle de Beauvoir. Sartre opened the door and greeted her politely, his pipe in his mouth. Paul Nizan looked at her dubiously through his tortoiseshell glasses.