by Hazel Rowley
Beauvoir was taken aback by the filth of Sartre’s tiny student room. There were cigarette butts on the floor, and the air was thick with stale body odor and tobacco fumes. Books and papers were piled everywhere, and satirical sketches were stuck on the walls. They brought in a second chair for Beauvoir. The others took turns on Sartre’s chair, desk, and narrow bed. Beauvoir, who had prepared for this all weekend, gave a close reading of Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics, feeling as nervous as if she were taking the actual oral exam.
At the end of the day, the men decided that Beauvoir needed a nickname. They teased her with various possibilities. Sartre wanted to call her Valkyrie. To him, she was like a Viking virgin warrior goddess. No, said Maheu. She was Beaver, le Castor. They clenched their fists about her head. It was official.
They devoted two days to Leibniz, and decided that was enough; then Sartre set about explaining Rousseau’s Social Contract. Beauvoir proved by far the best at finding the flaws in Sartre’s arguments. Nizan frowned and chewed his nails. Maheu looked at Beauvoir with frank admiration. Sartre accused her of making him trot out everything he knew. But Sartre clearly loved imparting his knowledge, and did so with passion. He knew how to untangle complicated ideas and make them comprehensible and exciting. And while he did so, he had the other three in fits of delighted laughter. “More and more, his mind seems to me quite extraordinarily powerful,” Beauvoir wrote in her journal. “I admire him and also feel huge gratitude for the way he gives himself so generously.”
The men did not hold themselves back in Beauvoir’s presence, and Beauvoir was often shocked by the things they said. But she had been rebelling for years against the stiflingly conventional world in which she had been brought up. Their defiance was a tonic.
Their language was aggressive, their thought categorical, their judgments merciless. They made fun of bourgeois law and order; they had refused to sit the examination in religious knowledge…. On every possible occasion—in their speech, their attitudes, their gestures, their jokes—they set out to prove that men were not rarefied spirits but bodies of flesh and bone, racked by physical needs and crudely engaged in a brutal adventure that was life…. I soon understood that if the world these new friends opened up to me seemed crude, it was because they didn’t try to disguise its realities; in the end, all they asked of me was that I should dare to do what I had always longed to do: look reality in the face.15
Beauvoir had never imagined that fierce intelligence could go along with such a sense of fun. When they stopped work, the men started singing, joking, and acting out different characters. Sartre put a jazz record on his gramophone, then they strolled over to the fun fair at the Porte d’Orléans and tried out the shooting gallery. Whenever Sartre scored a prize—an ugly bit of crockery or a dime novel—he gallantly handed it to Beauvoir.
On Wednesday afternoon the group gave themselves what they called “a very big recreation,” at the Café Dupont, in the sleazy Pigalle district of Montmartre. The men drank beer; Beauvoir drank lemonade. She got into a fierce discussion with Sartre, and realized she was arguing with him for the sheer fun of it.
Sartre and Nizan started to plan the group’s evening. Maheu cut the discussion short. He was taking the Beaver to the cinema, he said. “Fine, fine,” said Nizan. “So be it,” said Sartre.
On the bus ride back home that evening, Maheu told Beauvoir: “I’m happy you get on with the little comrades, but…”
“But you’re the Lama, I know.”
“You won’t ever be one of the little comrades.”
“Of course. I’m your Beaver.”16
On Thursday morning, Nizan turned up with his wife, Henriette. To Beauvoir’s dismay, this meant they did not work. Instead, they squeezed themselves into Nizan’s car and went for a drive around Paris, stopping in a bar for a coffee and a game of Japanese billiards. The women did not warm to each other. Henriette Nizan thought that Beauvoir dressed atrociously, and seemed pathetically eager to copy the men—smoking, drinking, even adopting their private language.17 For her part, Beauvoir had little interest in Henriette’s worries about her new baby. She scrawled in her journal: “I spoke to her about her daughter with an air of sympathy, which apparently made her like me, and which amused Sartre and Maheu, who saw it as proof that I am feminine after all.”
At lunch Beauvoir joined the men in a glass of beer. The Nizans dropped them back at Sartre’s student residence and went home to Montparnasse. Beauvoir, Sartre, and Maheu settled down to work. It was hot. Sartre drew the curtains to keep out the sun. Maheu sprawled on the bed, handsome in his shirtsleeves. Sartre puffed at his pipe. For Beauvoir, in that semi-obscure retreat from the world, time seemed to melt away. She was at her brilliant best that afternoon, and she knew it. “I felt unleashed,” she wrote in her journal.
At 8 P.M., she hurried off to the Bois de Boulogne where she was meeting other friends—a more conservative group of philosophers who were still practicing Catholics. Among those rowing on the lake that evening was Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It was Beauvoir who had introduced Maurice to Zaza, and that magical summer, while so much was going on in Beauvoir’s own life, Maurice and Zaza were falling in love. But Zaza had been forbidden to join them that evening. Her family did not approve.
Zaza Lacoin, the third of ten children, came from a well-to-do, devoutly Catholic family. She and Simone had been best friends since the age of ten, when they rivaled each other as star pupils at the Cours Adeline Désir, a private Catholic girls’ school in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which placed far less emphasis on education than on prayer, the catechism, piety, and deportment. The girls were taught the piano, knitting, crochet, and etiquette at tea parties.
Monsieur de Beauvoir, an atheist, had wanted to move his two daughters to a secular school, which would have given them a better education without his having to pay fees, but Simone would not contemplate leaving her friend behind. She idolized Zaza. Whereas she herself was timid, childish, and in every way the model obedient pupil, the dark-haired Zaza was precocious and rebellious. Beauvoir would never forget the school musical recital at which Zaza, a talented pianist, played a piece her mother had insisted would be too difficult for her. When she finished a perfect performance, the triumphant Zaza, in front of all the teachers and parents, stuck her tongue out at her mother. Madame Lacoin merely smiled.
But when her daughters reached a marriageable age, Madame Lacoin turned into a tyrant. She had significant social aspirations for her daughters; nothing was more important than a good marriage. Before Zaza was allowed so much as to play a game of tennis with a group of young people, her mother needed to know that they came from good Catholic families.
The Beauvoir girls could not aspire to a bourgeois marriage, because they did not have a dowry. Their marriage prospects had plummeted in 1918, when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar in a dramatic revolution that rendered Georges de Beauvoir’s Russian railway and mining stocks worthless. Most of his inheritance had been invested in these, and after the war he no longer had the capital to open his law practice again. For the rest of his life he drifted from one salesman position to another. The family struggled to keep up appearances, but Georges would tell his daughters bitterly, “You girls will never marry. You’ll have to work for a living.”
Looking back later in life, Beauvoir thought it the best thing that could have happened to her. When she left school, she decided to take the agrégation, which would mean a secure job as a secondary-school teacher in a state school. She wanted to study philosophy. The nuns at the Cours Désir were appalled. “To them a state school was nothing better than a licensed brothel,” Beauvoir writes. “They told my mother that the study of philosophy mortally corrupts the soul.”18 She agreed to study classics and mathematics instead, at an all-female Catholic institution on the outskirts of Paris. Not for another year did her parents consent to let her study philosophy at the Sorbonne.
Zaza’s parents would not let Zaza near the Sorbonne. They belonged to the trad
itional French Catholic bourgeoisie, who distrusted intellectuals, especially philosophers. They considered the classics, Greek and Latin, to be full of crudities. As for modern literature, they dreaded to think what effect it might have upon a young girl’s imagination. While Beauvoir was studying Greek, Latin, philosophy, and pedagogy, Zaza’s life became an endless round of churchgoing, tea parties, bridge games, picnics, and social visits. She had no illusions about the emptiness of her existence. She complained to Beauvoir that she could not sleep, and she suffered from frequent headaches.
Despite the differences between their families, the girls’ friendship endured. A turning point came when Simone, at the age of nineteen, finally admitted to Zaza that she no longer believed in God. Zaza prayed for her soul, but remained loyal to her friend in the face of intense opposition from her mother. By the summer of 1929—Zaza and Simone were twenty-one—the situation had reached a crisis point. Madame Lacoin would no longer allow the godless Simone in their house. Nor would she allow Zaza to go boating in the Bois de Boulogne with Simone and her freethinking philosopher friends from the Sorbonne.
Sartre and Beauvoir were among seventy-six students across the nation who sat the highly competitive written agrégation examinations in philosophy in 1929. Passing the agrégation guaranteed lifelong tenure as a secondary-school teacher in France’s state school system, and the number of successful candidates was determined by the posts available in the nation’s high schools. Philosophy had a long and venerable tradition in France, and attracted the best and the brightest.
The results were displayed on the afternoon of July 17, an oppressively hot day in Paris. Twenty-six candidates had been successful, six of them women. This group was now eligible to proceed to the orals. Sartre, Beauvoir, and Nizan were among them. Maheu was not.
Maheu left Paris that same afternoon, telling Sartre to give Beauvoir his best wishes for her happiness. That evening Jean-Paul Sartre took Beauvoir out to celebrate their success. “From now on, I’m going to take you in hand,” he said.
It was scarcely an atmosphere conducive to romance. The orals were famous for being extremely grueling. They involved four separate tests in front of a six-man jury. The hardest was la grande leçon, in which candidates pulled a topic out of a hat and were given five hours in the Sorbonne library to prepare a class lesson at the tertiary level. In addition, there were three close readings of texts, in Greek, Latin, and French, for which the students were given only an hour to prepare. The orals were public events. The best students, like Sartre and Beauvoir, had a large audience.
For those two weeks, while they prepared for their orals, Sartre and Beauvoir barely left each other’s company other than to sleep. They went along to hear their friends perform. Between sessions, they continued their own preparations—sometimes with Nizan, in his study in the Rue Vavin, under his large poster of Lenin. But mostly they preferred to be alone together.
They talked in bars and cafés that had always been out of bounds for Beauvoir. She had only ever gone to the cinema to see serious art films; Sartre now took her along to cowboy movies. They walked in the Luxembourg Gardens, and strolled past the secondhand-book stalls along the banks of the Seine, where Sartre bought her some of the swashbuckling cloak-and-dagger historical novels he had loved as an adolescent. “He was interested in everything and never took anything for granted,” Beauvoir wrote later. “How cramped my little world seemed beside this exuberantly abundant universe!”19
People tend to assume that it was Jean-Paul Sartre who transformed Simone de Beauvoir from a dutiful daughter of the French bourgeoisie into the independent freethinker who did more than any woman in twentieth-century France to shock that bourgeoisie. It was not so. Sartre merely encouraged Beauvoir to continue down the path on which she had already embarked. Even Zaza, who thoroughly disliked the “frightful, learned Sartre,” had to admit that Simone had chosen this route of her own accord. “The influence of Sartre might have hurried things along a bit; that’s all,” she mused in her journal in July 1929.20
Beauvoir also kept a journal, and those square-ruled notebooks, written in her scarcely legible, forward-thrusting hand, reveal a young woman who was prepared to go out on a limb long before she met Sartre. Already at fifteen—the same age she set her heart on becoming a writer—she had realized she no longer believed in God. For a long time she told no one. When she admitted her dark secret, at the age of nineteen, it caused a major rupture between her and her mother.
At nineteen, inspired by the French writers André Gide, Maurice Barrès, Paul Valéry, and Paul Claudel—men who were now middle-aged, but who, like her, came from the bourgeoisie and were also in revolt against its hypocrisy—Simone de Beauvoir embraced “sincerity toward oneself” and the commitment to “calling a spade a spade.”21 She was already questioning marriage on ethical grounds. “For me a choice is never made, it is always being made…. The horror of the definitive choice, is that it engages not only the self of today, but that of tomorrow which is why basically marriage is immoral.”22
By the age of twenty, Simone de Beauvoir had chosen a path that she increasingly realized would condemn her to loneliness. “I can’t get rid of this idea that I am alone, in a world apart, being present at the other as at a spectacle,” she wrote in her journal. “This morning…I passionately wished to be the girl who takes communion at morning mass and walks in a serene certainty…. The Catholicism of Mauriac, of Claudel,…how it’s marked me, and what place there is in me for it! And yet…I do not wish to believe: an act of faith is the most despairing act there is and I want my despair to at least keep its lucidity. I do not want to lie to myself.”
Beauvoir came from a world in which women were extraordinarily sheltered and constricted. As she would show in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, men and women inhabited sharply divided worlds. Women could not vote. France’s best educational institutions were for men only.23 Women were expected to go to church; men could be atheists. Not only did women never go in bars, they did not even venture into cafés. (When Beauvoir set foot in a café for the first time in her life, at the age of twenty, she considered herself wildly rebellious.) Men drank and smoked in public; women did not. Women remained virgins until marriage; men did not. Unmarried women were pitied. And even if a young woman was beautiful and cultivated, the only way she could aspire to a socially desirable marriage was by means of a substantial dowry.
There were times when Beauvoir called her solitary rebellion “an intoxication.” And yet she was aware that she was going to need extraordinary strength. “I would so like to have the right, me as well, of being simple and very weak, of being a woman,” she confided to her journal. “In what a ‘desert world’ I walk, so arid, with the only oases my intermittent esteem for myself.”
She sensed that for women love came at a cost, and that there was part of her that no man was ever likely to accept. “I speak mystically of love, I know the price,” she wrote. “I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.”
The stakes were different for Sartre, as a male. He could indulge his romantic concept of love without risking his subjecthood. He dreamed of moonlit walks and tender talks on a park bench by the seaside. His fantasy was that he would take charge of a beautiful young woman, protect her, save her. He liked sentimentality, adoration, whispered sweet nothings. It reminded him of his doting childhood relationship with his mother. Even now, Anne-Marie still called him Poulou.
As a man, his sex life could be neatly separated off from his dreams of love. Sartre lost his virginity at eighteen, with a married woman who was thirty. She took the initiative. (“I did it with no great enthusiasm,” Sartre said later, “because she wasn’t very pretty.”) After that there were prostitutes picked up in the Luxembourg Gardens. In his Ecole Normale years, Sartre and his friends regularly visited brothels. They felt contempt for these women. “We felt that a
girl shouldn’t give herself like that.”24
When Sartre was twenty-one, he courted a young woman who lived in Lyon. Their romance was nourished by long narcissistic letters. “I love you to the point of madness,” Germaine Marron wrote to him. “You find me simple, without affectations, which is true, but in fine Lyonnaise society I give the impression of a wild animal.”25 They became engaged. At twenty-three, Sartre, as a good bourgeois son, asked his mother and stepfather to formally request the girl’s hand in marriage.
When Sartre failed his agrégation in the summer of 1928, the Marron family called off the engagement. “Instead of joining my friends at tennis I went by myself to a meadow with a bottle, and I drank,” Sartre recalls. “I even cried. Cried because I had drunk, but it felt good…. I was relieved. I’m not sure of having acted quite correctly in this whole affair.”26
Behind his fiancée’s back, Sartre had enjoyed a tempestuous liaison with Simone Jollivet, a theatrical blonde who since the age of eighteen had worked as a courtesan in a fashionable brothel in Toulouse. Her clients would find her standing in front of the fireplace reading—entirely naked except for her Rapunzel-like hair. “Her cultured mind, her proud bearing, and the subtle technique she brought to her task knocked town clerks and lawyers flat,” Beauvoir wryly reports in her memoirs.27
Jollivet was three years older than Sartre and had grand ambitions to be a writer. Sartre drew her up a reading list, encouraged her, lectured her. He saw his role as preventing her from botching her life. She risked being nothing other than a dreaming Madame Bovary; he would make her into an artist. She complained that his letters were “little lectures.”28 He wrote back: “Who has made you what you are? Who is trying to keep you from turning into a bourgeoise, an aesthete, a whore? Who has taken charge of your intelligence? I alone.”29