Tete-a-Tete

by Hazel Rowley

  Despite her professed disdain for marriage in her 1927 journal, Beauvoir had spent her teenage years hoping to marry her cousin Jacques. Up until her meeting with Sartre, she envisaged herself as a wife and mother, as well as a writer. And she had never aspired to sexual libertinage. On the contrary. Throughout their adolescence she and her sister, Poupette, had been mortified on those nights when their father did not come home. They knew that while their mother chafed and wept, he was escorting some mistress or other to the theater. At the age of twenty, Simone was aghast when she discovered that her cousin Jacques had been having an affair with one of those heavily painted young women who hung around bars. She was horrified to think that her Polish friend, Stépha, might actually be sleeping with her Spanish painter boyfriend, Fernando. When Stépha gently tried to enlighten her, Simone shut her eyes and put her hands over her ears. Even at the age of twenty-one, when she met Sartre, she was shocked to hear that the Nizans had an “open marriage.” These people all maintained a public façade of married respectability; Sartre was proposing none at all.

  Sartre, it seems, was surprised that Simone de Beauvoir accepted his terms. Ten years later, he analyzed his need for freedom with vaguely disconcerting self-mockery. Since his bookworm youth, he had taken for granted that he would one day be a great writer. Early on, he had understood that a male adventurer had to preserve his freedom. In everything he read—from Greek myths, classical tragedies, nineteenth-century novels, to the swaggering detective novels he devoured one after the other—the lone male hero steered his way through treacherous obstacles, the most dire of which were women. Sartre was determined, he writes, to avoid this trap himself.

  It was all the more comical in that women certainly weren’t running after me, indeed it was I who was running after them. Thus, in the few adventures that came my way at that time, after I’d gone to immense trouble to get round some young lady, I used to feel obliged to explain to her, like some dragon of virtue, that she must take care not to infringe my freedom. But within a short space of time, as I was good-natured, I’d make her a gift of that precious freedom. I’d say: ‘It’s the finest present I can give you.’…Happily for me,…circumstances independent of my will would intervene in time to restore me (after a bit of a drubbing) to that dear freedom, which I’d forthwith make haste to bestow upon some other young lady.

  On one occasion I was hoist with my own petard. The Beaver accepted that freedom and kept it. It was in 1929. I was foolish enough to be upset by it: instead of understanding the extraordinary luck I’d had, I fell into a certain melancholy.4

  It seems Beauvoir had no difficulty accepting the idea that they would not have children. Their relationship was on an entirely different basis. They were writers. They needed their freedom, and they needed a great deal of time, without distractions. Moreover, she saw that Sartre was disgusted by pregnant women’s bellies, and by babies, which he said smelled of piss. Whether he influenced her on this is a moot point, but over the years, several of their friends would comment that Sartre and Beauvoir were visibly repelled by pregnant women. It is obvious in their writing.

  Beauvoir felt desolate at the beginning of November, when she saw Sartre off on the train to Saint-Cyr. For the first two weeks, the conscripts were allowed no visitors. By the time Beauvoir was permitted to visit him, Sartre had been transformed into a soldier, in dark blue puttees and a beret. They were obliged to meet in a room packed with other soldiers and their families. Sartre was fuming at his loss of freedom and the waste of eighteen months. Beauvoir felt as if she were visiting a man behind bars.

  In mid-November, Zaza Lacoin was seriously ill, with a high fever and delirium, in a small hospital in Saint-Cloud, southwest of Paris. The doctors called it meningitis or encephalitis; they were not sure. Beauvoir was convinced Zaza was suffering from a broken heart.

  For the last five months, Madame Lacoin had put Zaza under an intolerable strain. Zaza and Merleau-Ponty were deeply in love. They had decided to get married in two years, after Merleau-Ponty had finished his agrégation and military service. But Madame Lacoin was not happy. Merleau-Ponty was an outstanding student and a practicing Catholic, but he was not wealthy, and though he aspired to a university position, his financial prospects were modest compared with those of Monsieur Lacoin, a businessman.

  Madame Lacoin was also concerned about the social status of Merleau-Ponty’s family. Zaza admitted she did not know much about them, except that Maurice’s mother was a widow and that his father had been a naval officer, and Maurice was one of three children. She assured her parents there was no need to worry. “Knowing our family as he does, he would never have breathed a word about his feelings if for whatever reason it would not be admissible for him to enter it.”5

  Her mother was not satisfied. She arranged for Zaza to spend a year in Berlin, in the hope that she would forget this man. “It’s so hard, Simone,” Zaza wrote to her friend at the end of the summer of 1929. “One really has to believe in the virtue of suffering and to want to carry the cross with Christ to accept this without a murmur.”6

  Zaza was torn between her mother and the man she loved. Her extreme piety taught her obedience. In the face of all the difficulties, Merleau-Ponty, instead of battling with Zaza’s mother, retreated slightly. Just when the tormented young woman most needed his reassurances, they were not forthcoming.

  In October, Simone received a mysterious letter from Zaza: “Mama has told me something astonishing which I cannot explain to you now.” In her next letter, Zaza asked: “Can children bear the sins of their parents?”7

  At the beginning of November, Zaza fell ill. In the hospital she was allowed no visitors other than her family. When Beauvoir saw her again, at the end of that dreadful month, Zaza was laid out on a bier in the hospital morgue, her hands folded over a crucifix on her chest.

  Beauvoir held it against Merleau-Ponty that he had not had the moral courage to support Zaza against her mother, and she made this quite clear in her memoirs. By 1958, when Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter was published, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a well-known left-wing philosopher (he no longer believed in God), with a teaching position at the prestigious Collège de France. In her memoirs, Beauvoir calls him “Jean Pradelle.” In a further attempt to put readers off the scent, she calls him once by his real name: “My fellow pupils were Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss; I knew them both a little. The former I had always admired from a distance.”8 But she leaves the reader in no doubt that she did not admire the man she calls “Jean Pradelle.”

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty had remained close friends with Beauvoir over the years. When he read Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, in 1958, he wrote to her. He had reread the letters he and Zaza wrote each other during those painful months in 1929. (He called her by her real name, Elisabeth.) “Reading these, as well as your book, made me realize—intensely, to the point of despair—the extent to which I was passive, unconscious, and nonexistent in those years. Everything you say about me is true.” At twenty-one, he had been too immature, he said, to deal with the pressures “Elisabeth” and her family were putting him under:

  I have never doubted that she was the woman I could have loved…but I was not ready to love somebody, not even her…. It would have taken some months for it to become love, for me to have been changed by her and by her presence. The attitude of her family, her own anxieties (which she hid from me more than she did from you), instead of touching me, they chilled me…. But there is something you don’t know, which I myself did not know about at the time when Elisabeth fell ill, and which she had to bear all alone, without it being any fault of mine.9

  Soon afterward, he and Beauvoir met over a drink, and—thirty years after those tragic events—Merleau-Ponty recounted the full story. In the autumn of 1929, the Lacoin parents did what many bourgeois families did before a marriage: they hired a private detective to investigate Merleau-Ponty’s family.10 The skeleton that emerged from the closet was deeply shocking to devout Catholics, who cons
idered adultery a mortal sin. Madame Lacoin told Zaza, whereupon Zaza wrote Beauvoir those mysterious letters. Merleau-Ponty was told nothing until it was too late, and Zaza was dead.

  Monsieur Merleau-Ponty was indeed a navy officer, and he and his wife lived in La Rochelle. They had one son. During her husband’s long absences, Madame Merleau-Ponty fell in love with a university professor. He, too, was married, but it was a serious liaison, and conducted fairly openly. Madame Merleau-Ponty bore two children by him—first Maurice, then his sister Monique. The professor assumed financial responsibility for his children, but he could not give them his name.11

  Back in November 1929, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty were both devastated by Zaza’s death. At the time, Merleau-Ponty had no idea that Beauvoir held the loss partly against him. And Beauvoir had no idea what Merleau-Ponty was going through.

  Beauvoir always felt that Zaza’s fate could easily have been her own. Zaza was her shadow self, the self she might have been if Georges de Beauvoir had not lost his fortune. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter ends with the haunting words: “For a long time I believed that I had paid for my own freedom with her death.”

  It was Raymond Aron who suggested that Sartre and another friend of Sartre’s, Pierre Guille, apply to do their military service in the meteorological division. Aron had completed a year of his military service as a meteorologist. It was not too bad, he told them.

  For the first three months, Sartre and Guille were sent to train at the meteorological station at Fort Saint-Cyr. Aron was one of their instructors, and they annoyed him by throwing darts at him during lectures. Sartre chafed at being sequestered in his barracks, but he had to admit that wind velocity readings were easy, if tedious, and he had far more spare time than he had anticipated.

  Saint-Cyr was so close to Paris that Sartre and Beauvoir managed to see each other most days. Three or four evenings a week, Beauvoir caught a train to Versailles, then a bus to Saint-Cyr, and she and Sartre had dinner together, sometimes with Guille and Aron, mostly at the Soleil d’Or, the large brasserie near the bus terminal. On Sundays, Sartre went to Paris.

  After their training period, Guille was sent to Paris and Sartre to the meteorological station at Saint-Symphorien, near Tours. He shared a small house with two other conscripts, neither of whom he liked. But their supervisor, a civilian, gave them an entire week off every month, in addition to Sundays. Sartre spent all his spare time in Paris. And once a week, Beauvoir would catch the train to Tours.

  When they were apart, they wrote to each other most days. Sartre called her “my little wife” and “darling little Beaver.” She called him “my sweet little husband” and “most dear little being.”

  “My dearest, it is thundering, and I look constantly to the past, all those beautiful days with you,” Sartre wrote after one of his weeks in Paris. He was feeling bored and restless, he told her, “like a swimmer who realizes he is caught in seaweed.”

  “If one has to be ill, it’s nice to do so just after you’ve left, my dearest love,” Beauvoir wrote from her bed at Denfert-Rochereau, where she was recovering from a sore throat and fever. She was thinking about the “miraculous week” they had just spent together. “We’ll be seeing each other soon, won’t we, my love? You promised, so I’m taking good care of myself. I love you. I love you.”12

  They wrote as though speaking to each other, and joked and cavorted with prose. Sartre, about to turn up in Paris, sent a frivolous note:

  My little morganatic wife

  I’ll be arriving at 12.15, Gare d’Austerlitz (up to you to check the time…. No, I take that back. The schedule’s here in the drawer of the table where I’m writing; I can check it myself: it’s 12:13). I’d be delighted if you could find time to meet me at the station. By the way, I hope to be in Paris for six days.

  If you have free time, we might go out together sometimes.

  With warm regards.

  PS: My dearest, I’ve read the description of your 1st chapter. If its style is as simple as the style in your letter—no more, no less—it will be excellent.13

  By the summer of 1930, Beauvoir was making troubled remarks in her journal. “I cannot reconcile myself to living if there is no purpose in my life…. Sartre talks to me as though to a very little girl…. I have lost my pride—and that means I have lost everything.”14

  At first she had been overjoyed to fall in love with a man she regarded as her superior. Now she was beginning to realize the dangers. The man who was considered the brightest of his year’s crop of bright young men at the Ecole Normale had a firm sense of his genius. It was a word he used without embarrassment. “I looked upon myself—though in all modesty, if I may say so—as a genius,” he said later. “I talked to my friends as a genius talks to his friends.”15 Sartre had a strong personality, and his friends all too easily became what he called his “acolytes.”

  Sartre’s sociability and generosity were legendary. Funny, playful, inventive, and a brilliant imitator, he would make people laugh till they cried. He loved to help and encourage people, and to give them things. But despite his warmth and gregariousness, he was disconcertingly self-sufficient. He didn’t seem to need anyone. At least, not one particular person. He liked people around him, the hubbub of voices in the background. He needed to have a woman in love with him, and he also liked for her—even if he complained about it—to need him. But provided he was able to feel that he was loved, he was happiest when alone with his fountain pen, paper, and books.

  His friends regularly accused him of indifference. His girlfriends at first basked in his attentions, then complained that he did not give them enough of his precious time. They would become possessive and jealous, and Sartre would grumble that they were too demanding. It was the pattern of his life.

  Beauvoir did not like to complain. From the beginning of their relationship she made a supreme effort to see things from Sartre’s perspective. It was partly because she felt she owed him everything. It was also because she was convinced that she loved him more than he loved her. She rationalized that she would not make a grievance out of an objective fact. After all, if she loved Sartre, it was partly because he taught her to look things squarely in the face.

  It did not help that the first eighteen months of their relationship were a blur of arrivals and farewells on railway platforms. They had a short time to enjoy each other’s company, then Sartre would have to return to his barracks. For Beauvoir, the only moments that counted were those she spent with Sartre. The rest felt as if she were killing time.

  There was also a physical problem, one that filled Beauvoir with shame at the time, but which she would discuss with astounding openness thirty years later, in her memoirs. Sartre had awakened her physical appetites, and unless he was in Paris, they lacked opportunities to make love. On those days when she visited him in Tours, they were too shy to get themselves a hotel room in broad daylight. She suffered “tyrannical desires” and “burning obsessions,” and was dismayed not to feel in control of her body. The fact that Sartre did not seem to suffer from the same problem made her more ashamed. “I was forced to admit a truth that I had been doing my best to conceal ever since adolescence: my physical appetites were greater than I wanted them to be.”16 Beauvoir, despite their pact, did not talk to Sartre about this.

  Everything conspired to make her fall into a trap she would describe twenty years later in The Second Sex. There is a chapter on “the woman in love,” a woman for whom love is a faith, who spends her life waiting, who abandons her life, even her judgment, to her man.

  The woman in love tries to see with his eyes; she reads the books he reads, prefers the pictures and the music he prefers; she is interested only in the landscapes she sees with him, in the ideas that come from him; she adopts his friendships, his enmities, his opinions; when she questions herself, it is his reply she tries to hear…. The supreme happiness of the woman in love is to be recognized by the loved man as a part of himself; when he says “we,” she is associated and i
dentified with him, she shares his prestige and reigns with him over the rest of the world; she never tires of repeating—even to excess—this delectable “we.”17

  In her memoirs—written at a time when she was seen by the whole world as a famously independent, intellectual woman—she describes her earlier self, in scathing terms, as an “ancillary being,” and “intellectual parasite.”18

  The underlying existentialist philosophy of Beauvoir’s memoirs—it was also the underlying philosophy of her relationship with Sartre—is that it is “bad faith” to look to another, whether a human being or a god, for a sense of salvation. As individuals we are free, and we act in “bad faith” when we try to avoid our freedom. It is not easy, freedom. It brings with it the anguish of choice. It comes with the burden of responsibility.

  Looking back on the first eighteen months of their relationship, Beauvoir writes that Sartre had become her whole world. So fascinated was she by him that she forgot herself. She had ceased to exist on her own account.

  The moment they met on the railway platform, in Tours or Paris, Sartre would grasp Beauvoir’s hand and say: “I’ve got a new theory.” Beauvoir would listen carefully, then point out the flaws she saw in his argument. This would be her lifelong role, and Sartre would come to rely on it heavily. Back then, he pointed out her lack of originality. “When you think in terms of problems, you aren’t thinking at all,” he told her.19

  He had volunteered to “take her in hand,” but now her dependence alarmed him. “You used to be full of ideas, Beaver,” he said. He compared her to the heroines in George Meredith’s novels, who, after struggling hard for their independence, finished up surrendering themselves to love. Beauvoir was mortified.