by Hazel Rowley
Beauvoir freely admitted that her novel She Came to Stay was very close to reality. Despite the minor fictional elaborations, the novel, with its rich use of dialogue, gives a far more vivid picture of the lived experience of the trio than Beauvoir’s memoirs.
Pierre and Françoise, intellectuals immersed in the world of Paris theater, have an open relationship, and tell each other everything. At the beginning of the novel, Pierre says he’s tired of all his affairs that go nowhere. “With the exception of my relationship with you, everything about me is frivolous and wasteful,” he tells Françoise.
“I no longer enjoy these affairs,” said Pierre. “It’s not as if I were a great sensualist, I don’t even have that excuse!” He looked at Françoise a little sheepishly. “The truth is that I get a kick out of the early stages.”
Françoise’s young friend Xavière is about to return, unwillingly, to her family in Rouen. Pierre suggests to Françoise that they “take her in hand.” They form a trio. Soon Pierre’s personal neuroses come to the fore:
“It’s too ridiculous,” he said, “she really makes me uncomfortable, that little devil, with her philosophy that makes less of us than dust. It seems to me that if I could get her to love me, I’d be as sure of myself as I was before…. To make her love me would be to dominate her, to enter her world and conquer in accordance with her own values.” He smiled. “You know the need for this kind of victory is a mania with me!”
“I know,” Françoise said.
The novel’s only radical departure from reality is the ending. Françoise goes up to the gas range in Xavière’s room—Xavière is about to go to sleep—and quietly turns on the gas. It’s so psychologically unconvincing, this murder, that it completely lets down the novel. But it shows Beauvoir’s need to get her rival out of her system. Astonishingly, she dedicated the book to Olga Kosakiewicz.
Among their various inventive games, Sartre and Beauvoir used to conjure up a character they called Petit Crâne—Little Noddle—a handsome, upright man, a man of action rather than words, who thought little and spoke little, and in the place of ambition had small, obstinate desires. When Little Bost joined their circle, they joked that Little Noddle had materialized in real life. “Light as that young man’s presence is, you feel something like a vacuum when he goes,” Sartre observed to Beauvoir.44
Little Bost was tall, with jet-black hair that fell in his face, green eyes framed with dark lashes, and a dazzling smile. He never pushed himself forward, and did not like to talk about himself. Sartre and Beauvoir attributed his reticence and integrity to his Protestant Huguenot upbringing. He did not have an original mind, and he was always afraid of saying something stupid. But he thought he would like to be a writer, like Sartre, whom he idolized.
In October 1935, Marc Zuorro landed a teaching post in Rouen and joined their circle. He was a friend of Pierre Guille and Madame Morel’s, and over the years Sartre and Beauvoir had sometimes met him in Paris. Zuorro, too, was a handsome fellow. He had a beautiful singing voice, and firmly believed he would one day be a famous opera singer. From his future lofty heights, he looked down on the world, mocking everyone, including Sartre and Beauvoir, who appeared to acquiesce in its mediocrity. “Despite this he affected to treat his friends with the greatest consideration,” Beauvoir writes. “We were amused by his love of intrigue, his indiscretions, and his scandal-mongering.”45
She warned Olga: “The handsome Zuorro…will surely try to catch you in the nets of his dirty little intrigues.”46 Indeed, Zuorro quickly added to the atmosphere of tension and jealousy that was growing, like thick brambles, around the trio. He moved into the Hôtel du Petit Mouton and struck up a friendship with Olga. Zuorro could see that Sartre was interested in her, far more so than he publicly let on. The competition spurred Zuorro on. He played Olga his classical records. In the street, he sang her arias from operas. The stories he told her were even more extravagant than Sartre’s.
Sartre would watch the two of them going off somewhere, arm in arm, and became wildly jealous. Beauvoir did her best to mollify him.
Sartre and Beauvoir had continued, every year, to apply for teaching posts in Paris. Beauvoir, who knew that her chances were not helped by her living in hotels and consorting with a former student in seedy Rouen dance bars, was astonished when, in the early summer of 1936, she was offered a post at the Lycée Molière, a girls’ school in the affluent sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. Sartre was also promoted, but to a school in Lyon. He decided to turn this down in favor of a less prestigious job in Laon, an hour from Paris by fast train. He calculated that taking the more modest job would give him a better chance of being considered for a Paris post the following year.
Beauvoir moved into the Royal Bretagne Hotel in the Rue de la Gaîté, near the Montparnasse station. Zuorro, who had also landed a post in Paris, installed himself in a more expensive hotel in the nearby Rue Delambre. Little Bost was going to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, and he lived ten minutes away, in his brother Pierre’s apartment in the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Sartre insisted that Beauvoir bring “the daughter of the Cossacks” to Paris.47 Beauvoir half hoped that Olga’s parents would make her go back to Laigle. But Olga was almost twenty-one, and eager to move to the big city. Beauvoir rented a small room for her in the Royal Bretagne, and Olga found herself a part-time job as a waitress. Sartre spent every spare moment in Paris. He and Olga would often spend whole nights together, wandering the streets of Paris till dawn.
They called themselves “the Family.” Like most families, theirs was rife with tensions and rivalries.
Sartre’s obsession with Olga was devastating for his ego. She told him repeatedly that she was not in love with him. She rarely let him touch her. For more than two years he had waited patiently, making tentative efforts to seduce her. Occasionally, when her defenses were down, he managed to kiss her. But Olga never slept with him.
In Rouen, Zuorro had made a great show of his courtship of Olga. In Paris, Zuorro finally realized he was homosexual. He had always been keen on Bost. Now he declared that Bost was his undying passion.
Bost was embarrassed—this was not a passion he reciprocated—and he began to hide from Zuorro. Olga was hiding these days from Sartre. Bost and Olga had always been a little wary of each other. One of the things that distanced them was Bost’s wholesale admiration for Sartre. But things now took a different turn.
One evening, Zuorro peeped through the keyhole of Olga’s room in the Royal Bretagne and saw exactly what he had feared: Bost and Olga locked in an embrace. At Christmas, Zuorro accompanied Sartre and Beauvoir to the ski slopes of Chamonix. The three of them shared a hotel room (“a bare, bleak barn of a place, with three beds in it”), and Zuorro loudly cried himself to sleep.48 On that vacation, Sartre even shed a few tears himself.49
For the next few months, Zuorro went around raging and sobbing, then took to prowling around Montparnasse with a revolver in his pocket.50 Sartre suffered the most ferocious jealousy he had ever known. He had never made public his real feelings for Olga. Now he acted as if he did not mind. He even encouraged Bost. To Beauvoir, he fumed and despaired.
What made things worse, far worse, was that Gallimard rejected Sartre’s novel Melancholia (the future Nausea). He had been working on it for four years, and had staked everything on it. With Beauvoir’s encouragement and advice, he had completely reworked it three times. She was convinced that it was now a first-rate novel. Sartre was heartbroken.
By February 1937, Beauvoir was at her wits’ end. She was working very hard—at school most mornings by eight-thirty, and in her spare time trying to finish a collection of novellas—and she felt strangely exhausted. One evening, she was having a drink with Bost at the Café Sélect, in Montparnasse, when a shiver ran through her. She spent the next few days in bed, sweating and in severe pain. Every day she felt weaker than she had the day before. Her doctor finally became alarmed. She was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Saint-Cloud,
on the edge of Paris.
It turned out to be an extremely serious case of pneumonia. One of her lungs had collapsed, and the other was damaged. If the good lung failed, she could die. For weeks, Beauvoir floated between consciousness and unconsciousness, relieved to lie between fresh sheets, with nurses to look after her, removed from the daily crises of the trio.
Her mother visited every morning. Olga and Madame Morel came in the afternoons. When Sartre was in Paris, he saw her every day. His tenderness and solicitude reassured her. But he remained preoccupied. “It was the last stage of my passion for O,” he wrote later. “I was nervy and restless, each day I used to wait for the moment of seeing her again—and beyond that moment for some kind of impossible reconciliation. The future of all those moments spent waiting for the train in the station at St-Cloud was that impossible love.”51
Her doctor wanted to send Beauvoir to a sanatorium. She wanted to convalesce in Paris. The doctor reluctantly agreed. Sartre moved her to a more comfortable hotel, the one in which Zuorro lived, on the Rue Delambre. During the Easter vacation, when Sartre was in Paris, he carried Beauvoir’s lunch over from the Coupole, taking great care not to spill it on the way.52
That Easter, in 1937, Olga’s sister, Wanda, came for a visit to Paris. She had grown more beautiful since the time Sartre met her in a dance bar in Rouen. Whereas Olga was delicate and graceful, Wanda was plump and comely. But her face was exquisite. Unlike her sister, Wanda was only semiarticulate. “It was pathological,” she told an interviewer, years later. “I could not talk, and not at all with Sartre.”53 She was an adolescent from the provinces, she explained to her interviewer, and this was Paris, the intimidating capital, and there was Sartre, equally intimidating, who never stopped talking. She felt completely out of her depth.
One day, Olga was looking after Beauvoir, and Sartre suggested to Wanda that he show her Montmartre. She was a good walker and could happily trudge for kilometers, but that day Sartre exhausted her.54 He took her to his favorite place, Le Café Rouge. At one point, he suggested they act out roles. She would be his mother; he would be her daughter. “I was horribly shocked,” Wanda recalls.
The memory of that afternoon still made Wanda shudder when she was fifty-six. On the way home, in the back of a taxi, Sartre put his arm around her shoulders, pulled her over to him, and planted a kiss on her lips. Wanda, a twenty-year-old virgin, was appalled.55
For the rest of her vacation, Wanda dreaded bumping into Sartre on the street. She hid in her sister’s hotel room, refusing to go out. Olga, who was quite bitter these days about Sartre’s manipulative behavior, was furious on her sister’s behalf. After Wanda returned to Laigle, Olga tackled Sartre about it.
He penned Wanda an icy letter from the Dôme. “Calm down,” he told her. He would not be seeing her again, nor her older sister. If destiny should cause them to meet on the street, he would cross the road. So he had spoiled her Paris holiday? She had spoiled it herself! Or at least, her sister had, by telling her all those nasty things about him. He had never had any intention of playing the seducer. That role did not suit him, he already knew that. If anything, he had been rather bored by the idea of taking her out. And he had never for one second imagined that she loved him!56
With her collapsed lung, Beauvoir missed an entire term of teaching. For weeks, she was bedridden. Sartre wrote her tender letters. “Do you feel well, are there roses in your cheeks?” he asked. “Don’t forget to take a little walk around your armchair. And when you’ve had a good trip around it, sit down in it.”
It was Zuorro and Bost who took her out for the first time. “They walked me as far as the Luxembourg Gardens, each supporting me by one arm,” Beauvoir writes. “The fresh air and sunlight were quite overwhelming, and I could hardly keep my balance.”57
She was still weak and gaunt in mid-April, when she took the train south to convalesce, on doctor’s orders, in a warmer climate. In the little Provençal town of Bornes-les-Mimosas, she gorged herself with good food and lay in the sun reading Faulkner’s short stories. A few days later, defying her doctor’s strict orders, she slung her knapsack on her back and set off on a walk. Sartre urged her not to tire herself out. “Eat well, my Beaver, turn your back to the sea, walk three little kilometers, then sit down.”
From Laon, Sartre was determinedly courting Wanda, despite his protestations to the contrary. Every day, he worked on his short stories, then spent from one to three hours writing to “the littlest Kosakiewicz.” Near the end of April he told Beauvoir there had been two letters in his mailbox that afternoon:
Yours was very short, my darling Beaver, but so blissful it was a joy to read. Wanda’s was long (about like the previous one) and very appealing. That girl seems to have a lazy but considerable intelligence, because each of her letters shows progress over the previous ones. I’ll send it to you as soon as I’ve answered it.
Years later, Sartre told his biographer John Gerassi (the son of Fernando and Stépha) that when Olga went off with Bost, he was excruciatingly jealous for six months. In order not to succumb to despair, he felt obliged to form a romantic relationship with Olga’s sister, Wanda.
“Why did you feel obliged?” Gerassi asked.
“Because the woman I loved had refused me,” Sartre said. “They look very alike, you see, and so it had to be her. It could not be anyone other than this sister.”58
FOUR
THE PROSPECT OF WAR
May 1937–September 1939
In May 1937, Sartre’s gloomy years came to an abrupt end. “Everything began to smile on me.”1 He announced to Beauvoir, still convalescing in the south, that Gallimard had decided to publish his novel Nausea after all.2 “Today, I walk the streets like an author.” One of his short stories was going to appear in the summer issue of Gallimard’s prestigious journal, the Nouvelle Revue Française. And he had landed a new teaching post. After eight years of exile in different towns—eight years of hanging about on railway platforms—he and Beauvoir would finally both be in Paris.
In the summer, they spent six weeks in Greece, three of those weeks with Bost. They slept in the open. Sartre and Bost raced each other down the marble steps of the Acropolis. They traveled to the Cyclades islands on decrepit old boats. (In the choppy seas, Beauvoir invariably heaved her guts up, and Sartre would accuse her of self-indulgence.) Beauvoir planned exhausting excursions, to which Sartre mostly good-naturedly concurred. (When he did not, she admits she was capable of shedding “tears of pure rage.”3) On the island of Santorini, they set off on their longest walk, one they would never forget. The sun was blazing mercilessly, and by the time they reached the ancient ruins of Thera they were parched and exhausted. Then they had to walk halfway across the island to catch a bus back. The last straw was when they strayed from the path and lost their way, whereupon Sartre threw one of his short, sharp temper tantrums. “This is a fine sort of lark,” he said. “I came out here to make the Grand Tour, and now you’ve got me playing at Boy Scouts.”4 By the time they got to the village of Emborio, and stumbled around the baking, shuttered streets looking for a place to eat, they felt half dead.
Sometimes Bost and Beauvoir went off by themselves, exploring or swimming, while Sartre stayed in a café and worked. That summer, he wrote to Wanda every day—hundreds of pages in all—colorful, humorous letters full of tenderness.5
While Beauvoir traveled around Alsace for ten days with Olga, Sartre went back to Paris to look for a room. Beauvoir’s hotel, the Royal Bretagne, was full, as were most of the long-term rental hotels in Montparnasse, and Sartre was pleased to discover the Hôtel Mistral, on the Rue Cels, a tiny street between the Avenue du Maine and the Montparnasse Cemetery. “It doesn’t look very promising, has a shabby stairway and motheaten halls,” he told Beauvoir, “but the rooms are large, clean, and much better furnished than those at the Royal Bretagne, with a sofa, rug, bookshelves on the walls.”
When Beauvoir came back to Paris, they moved in, taking rooms on different floors.
“Thus we had all the advantages of a shared life,” Beauvoir writes in her memoirs, “without any of its inconveniences.”6
Their favorite cafés—the Dôme, Coupole, and Sélect—were close by, on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. Just around the corner from the Mistral, on the Avenue du Maine, was a large, noisy brasserie, the Café des Trois Mousquetaires. For the next few years, these cafés were as familiar to them as their hotel rooms. “What never wearies me,” Sartre would write, “is to sit on chairs which belong to nobody (or, if you like, to everybody), in front of tables which belong to nobody: that’s why I go and work in cafés—I achieve a kind of solitude and abstraction.”7
Now that they lived in the same city, they had to be careful not to encroach on each other’s private space. Their days were strictly scheduled. On the whole, they did not see each other before they left for school. Sartre tended to be irascible when he first got up, and preferred his own company at breakfast. “I can hardly endure even the Beaver,” he confessed in his journal. “I have been known, when she’d be waiting for me at the Rallye, to pop in to the Café des Trois Mousquetaires and quickly gulp down a coffee and croissants, in order to remain for a moment still wrapped up in myself and last night’s dreams.”8 Their afternoon writing hours were equally sacred. Lunch times and evenings, after eight P.M., were their sociable hours.
They had long ago decided that the most satisfying form of communication was tête-à-tête. If Sartre was eating with Wanda at the Coupole, or if Beauvoir was seeing Olga at the Dôme, there was no question of the other’s spontaneously joining them. And time limits were sacrosanct. Their friends constantly complained that when their time was up, they were expected to melt away, making way for the next person.