Tete-a-Tete

by Hazel Rowley

  Sartre was teaching at the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly, an affluent western district of Paris, close to where his parents lived, in Passy. His mother, Anne-Marie, wanted him to have lunch every day at her house, after he’d finished his day’s teaching, but he could not abide his nagging stepfather. “I convinced my mother that it would be quite enough if I came for lunch on Tuesdays and dinner on Sunday evenings,” he told Beauvoir. “She asks only a brief bit of afternoon for herself, which is reasonable, because these days she’s being extremely kind.”9

  Beauvoir saw her parents less often, and did not enjoy her visits. Georges de Beauvoir had become bitter and disillusioned with his life, and often made jibes about Simone’s writing, which never found a publisher, and her ignominious free union with Sartre. “You’ll never amount to more than a Worm’s whore,” he flung at her.10

  Nausea was published in April 1938. The dedication read: “To the Beaver.” Les Nouvelles Littéraires called it “one of the distinctive works of our time.” Paul Nizan (whose third novel, La Conspiration, was also a contender for the prizes) hailed Sartre as a “French Kafka.” Sartre and Nizan were both considered to have a good chance of winning the prestigious Prix Goncourt. Neither did.

  When Sartre’s story “The Wall” appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française, André Gide told the editors he thought it a masterpiece. “Who is this new Jean-Paul?” he asked. “It seems to me we can expect a lot from him.”11

  Simone de Beauvoir dazzled her students at the Lycée Molière. She came to class in elegant, tight-fitting suits and exuded a “brilliant, piercing, bold intelligence.” She never looked at her notes, and spoke so fast that the students sometimes begged her to slow down. Bianca Bienenfeld, the best student in Beauvoir’s 1938 baccalaureate philosophy class, thought her like “a ship’s prow speeding through the waves.”12

  That spring, Bienenfeld wrote Mademoiselle de Beauvoir a letter. She was tremendously inspired by philosophy classes, she said, and would like to continue her studies at university. Might it be possible for them to meet and talk after school? The reply came by express delivery. Beauvoir suggested a brasserie in Montparnasse.

  Bienenfeld was sixteen, small and pretty, with a mass of curly auburn hair. Her parents, hoping to escape the anti-Semitism they had experienced in Poland, had come to France when Bianca was a baby, and her father, previously a medical doctor, had done well in the pearl business. They were a cultured, well-read family. Bienenfeld was also a talented pianist. Beauvoir responded to the girl’s passion and intelligence. “I respect her wholeheartedly,” Beauvoir told Bost, “and there are a whole lot of occasions when I do not have the impression of talking to a young girl.”13

  The two women were soon spending every Sunday together. “Waking up Sunday morning was a joy for me,” Bienenfeld would write in her memoirs. “I would run to catch the Metro at Passy station, near my family’s house…. I was so terribly impatient for the end of my ride; I don’t think I have ever felt so strongly about any other ride in my entire life.”14 She got out at Edgar-Quinet and ran all the way to the “seedy-looking Mistral.”

  Beauvoir told her about Sartre, explaining that they loved each other but did not want to live together, they did not believe in marriage, and did not want children, and they had affairs with other people, and were never jealous. Bienenfeld was fascinated by the stories about their past trio with Olga, and astonished when she learned that Sartre was now courting Olga’s younger sister. She thought the Kosakiewicz sisters sounded lazy and capricious, and she could not understand Sartre and Beauvoir’s generosity toward them. In every way, Beauvoir struck her as courageous and admirable:

  From the very first months I identified myself ardently with Simone de Beauvoir. I did everything to get closer to her, to such an extent that my classmates later made fun of the speech habits I had picked up from her…. Around June, even before graduating from high school, I knew I wanted to get a degree in philosophy and teach, just like her.15

  At the end of June, after Bienenfeld graduated from school, the two women went on a backpacking trip in the Morvan region, in Burgundy. They hiked about twenty kilometers a day, in mountainous terrain. Bienenfeld found it hard going. Beauvoir urged her on with a hint of impatience. It rained for the whole five days. They stayed in little pensions sharing a bed. “It was during this trip that we began, shyly at first, our physical involvement,” Bienenfeld writes. She was soon telling Beauvoir that she would never love anyone else as much as she loved her.

  In July 1938, Sartre remained in Paris to finish a volume of short stories and to see Wanda Kosakiewicz, who was coming to stay at the Mistral for a week. Beauvoir was going hiking in the mountains of Haute-Savoie with Bost, who had proved to be one of their few friends, male or female, who could keep up with her. Sartre saw her off on the night train.

  The following evening, Sartre ate at the Coupole while reading a detective novel. After dinner, he took out his pipe and wrote to Beauvoir:

  I didn’t much like saying goodbye yesterday, you absurd little globe-trotter; you’d still be with me right now, full of good little smiles, if you didn’t have that strange mania for gobbling up kilometers. Where the devil are you, anyway? This morning I was mourning for you because it was gray out and I imagined you at the summit of your little mountain looking up, with a stubborn expression, at a sea of gray clouds, like a fisherman gazing at his cork bobbing on the water…. I love you very much, absurd little thing.

  Afterward, Sartre went for a long walk, then caught the metro back to the hotel. There was no message from Wanda, he told Beauvoir the next day (“I was a bit annoyed”), and Olga’s room was dark. He wondered if Wanda had changed her mind about coming:

  I began to downplay the fun I’d have the next day with Wanda, through a compensatory phenomenon I know very well by now: ever since the Olga affair I immediately blot out anything with the slightest resemblance to passion, be it no more than jangled nerves, in a sort of abiding fear. It’s not just with Olga but with the whole world that I have “counter-crystallized.” So I went to bed regretting, as part of the act, that I wouldn’t be able to work the following days if Wanda should come.

  It transpired that Olga had gone to meet Wanda, who turned up on the evening train. Sartre woke to find a note from Wanda suggesting they meet at the Dôme at two in the afternoon, and one from Olga asking for money. He found the two sisters sitting on the terrace of the Dôme. He and Wanda walked to the Rue Mouffetard “affectionately entwined.”

  Sartre’s next letters, addressed to Beauvoir and Bost, announced an unexpected turn of events. He had allowed himself to be distracted by a young actress, Colette Gilbert (his interest was piqued by the fact that Maurice Merleau-Ponty was also pursuing her), and Wanda had gone home to Laigle early, in a huff.

  Meanwhile, Sartre told Gilbert he loved her, but that there was no room for her in his life with Beauvoir and Wanda. As Sartre told his two readers, Gilbert nevertheless spent three nights with him, in his room at the Mistral:

  It’s the first time I’ve slept with a brunette, actually black-haired, Provençale as the devil, full of odors and curiously hairy, with a little black fur patch at the small of her back and a very white body, much whiter than mine…. Very lovely legs, a muscularand absolutely flat stomach, not the shadow of a breast, and, all in all, a supple, charming body. A tongue like a kazoo, which unreels endlessly and reaches in to caress your tonsils.16

  Sartre was fairly sure that on their last night together, before she left for vacation, he had taken Gilbert’s virginity. (“How can I tell you in terms delicate enough not to shock Bost?”)

  Around midnight she suddenly became very nervous, pushed me away then drew me back and finally said, “It bothers me that I’m not yours. I would like you to enter me.” “You want me to try?” “You’re going to hurt me, no, no!” But I tried gently. She moaned…. After a moment she said louder, “No more, nomore, let me be, please.” I stopped and said to her, “But you’re no longer a
virgin.”17

  At seven the next morning, he accompanied Gilbert to the station. When they said good-bye, her eyes filled with tears. Back at the hotel, he found blood on his sheets.

  Sartre was infatuated by the theater of seduction, and he knew it. He described it as a “literary labor,” which, much like writing, involved fine words, adroit silences, and skilled use of viewpoint. The difference, he reflected in his journal, was that seducing women did not make him feel noble. “I’d come back from a rendezvous, mouth dry, facial muscles tired from too much smiling, voice still dripping with honey and heart full of…disgust.”18 Writing, on the other hand, made him feel worthwhile. When he first heard that Nausea was going to be published, he told Beauvoir: “I feel more likeable with this than the sort of happiness that comes to me through the bounty of a good woman. I…can think of myself with pleasure.”19

  His desire to seduce was only partly due to his sense of ugliness. As a child he had learned to please the adults around him with his little antics. He writes in Words that early on, he became “a buffoon, a clown, a sham.” Even before his walleye was noticeable, he had gone to considerable lengths to win little girls’ hearts through his talents as an actor and storyteller. In his adolescence, his hated stepfather once made the casual remark that Sartre was like him: “He’ll never be able to talk to women.”

  In a child’s life there are always words of this kind, thrown out absent-mindedly, which are like the absent-minded smoker’s match in some forest…and which set the whole lot ablaze. I’m not so sure that this pronouncement wasn’t one of the main causes, in later life, of all those conversations I stupidly wasted in spouting sweet nothings—just to prove to myself that in fact I did know how to talk to women.20

  Sartre’s dream was to be “a scholarly Don Juan, slaying women through the power of his golden tongue.” Since he himself felt so hideously ugly, it was essential that the women were beautiful. (“An ugly man and an ugly woman—the result is really…rather too conspicuous.”21) The only problem, he admitted, was that once he had conquered a woman, he scarcely knew what to do with her. “To be honest, for a long time—and perhaps to this very day—nothing struck me as more moving than the moment at which the avowal of love is finally wrenched forth.”22

  Sartre’s lifelong practice of harsh self-analysis was disconcerting—slippery, almost. His friends ended up admiring if not his behavior then at least the merciless lucidity with which he scrutinized himself. But what did it add up to? Critics have regularly discussed Sartre’s self-excoriation. Was it exhibitionism? Was he taking responsibility for his actions? Or was it a form of exoneration?

  Sartre had been courting Wanda for over a year, and their relationship was still unconsummated. Like her sister, she was horrified by his unhealthy diet, which she blamed for his bad skin. She made it clear that physically, he disgusted her. This made Sartre all the more determined in his pursuit.

  Feeling contrite about making her jealous with Gilbert, he took the train to Rouen. Wanda consented to meeting him there for the weekend. They shared a room at Le Petit Mouton (where Beauvoir and Olga had once lived). They even shared a bed. Wanda let him contemplate her naked body, but she resisted any incursions. “To tell the truth, I gain territory each time,” Sartre reported to Beauvoir.23

  After Wanda caught the train back to Laigle, Sartre had a few hours to kill before returning to Paris. It was a dreary, gray Sunday. He sat in the Brasserie de l’Opéra and wrote a tender letter to Wanda. He called her his “dear little marvel.” He had been wandering the streets of Rouen, missing her, he said. He could still see the charming little smile she had flashed him when she left. He imagined her in the train, downhearted to be returning to Laigle. “I love you, my dear little Wanda.” He believed, or wanted to believe, that she was at least a bit fond of him. Was she?24

  Wanda was persuaded to return to Paris for a few more days. However, Sartre wrote to Beauvoir (still in the mountains with Bost), progress had been stalled:

  Little Kosakiewicz displays the mental faculties of a dragonfly, and I’m finding it heavy going. I so wish you were here, I want to feel your arm in mine and tell you little anecdotes and hear your comments. Last night was painful…. I was deliberately very affectionate with her, first on La Butte, and then at the College Inn, but all in vain. There at the end, my tenderness made her shudder with displeasure.

  They had spent the evening drinking. Wanda looked very pretty, “in an angelic little jacket.” Afterward, in her room at the Mistral, Sartre tipped her back on the bed and kissed her. She dashed to the bathroom, and Sartre heard her vomit. He supposed the rum and sherry had upset her stomach. The next afternoon, he met her at the Dôme. “I froze her out all day, abruptly dropping my game and declaring that we were through unless she became more loving with me. She promised anything I wanted.”

  Sartre and Beauvoir had arranged to meet at the railway station in Marseille on the morning of July 30. They were going to take a boat across the Mediterranean to Morocco. “I’m feeling a sort of departure anguish right now, the whole year’s behind me,” Sartre wrote to her. “O charm of my heart and my eyes, mainstay of my life, my consciousness and my reason, I love you most passionately, and I need you.”

  Beauvoir had been having an enjoyable time in the Savoy with Bost. He was waiting for her at the station at Annecy, “tanned and looking very nice in his yellow pullover.”25 For the first few days they had risen at six in the morning and hiked grueling distances. They wound their way through gorges, climbed narrow mountain paths, scrambled across screeds of rock, and traversed stretches of snow. In a hailstorm, they hurried down a steep mountain, sliding down slippery ferns, and Beauvoir gashed her left hand on a rock. Bost washed the wound with spirits, bandaged her hand with a handkerchief, and insisted they find a doctor in a nearby hamlet. One afternoon, Bost threw up from sheer exhaustion, and Beauvoir had a violent nosebleed. In the evenings, after a hearty dinner washed down with local wine, Bost smoked his pipe and filled in their travel log, while Beauvoir wrote letters. In fine weather, they slept in a small tent. When it was wet, they took a room in an inn. On the fifth night, it was pouring, and they slept in a barn. Beauvoir would write to Sartre from Albertville:

  Something extremely nice has happened to me, which I didn’t at all expect when I left: three days ago, I slept with little Bost. It was I who suggested it, of course. Both of us had been wanting it: we’d have serious conversations during the day, and the evenings would be unbearably oppressive. One rainy evening at Tignes, in a barn, lying on our bellies ten centimeters from each other, we gazed at each other for an hour, putting off the moment of going to sleep with various pretexts; he was chattering madly and I was vainly searching for the casual propitious phrase that I couldn’t bring myself to articulate—I will tell this to you better when I see you. Finally I looked at him and laughed stupidly, and he said: “Why are you laughing?” and I said: “I was trying to picture your face if I suggested that you sleep with me,” and he said: “I thought you were thinking that I wanted to kiss you and didn’t dare.” After that we floundered around for another quarter of an hour before he decided to kiss me. He was simply astonished when I told him I’d always felt incredible tenderness towards him, and he ended up telling me last night that he had loved me for a long time. I’m very fond of him. We spend idyllic days, and nights of passion. But have no fear of finding me sullen, disoriented or ill at ease on Saturday; it’s something precious to me, something intense, but also light and easy and properly in its place in my life, simply a happy blossoming of relations that I’d always found very nice.26

  The following weekend, Beauvoir and Sartre, on their way to Tangiers, stood in the bow of the boat, underneath the shooting stars, watching the moon disappear into the sea. Sartre showed no signs of jealousy, but told Beauvoir, without any real reproach in his voice, that by sleeping with Bost she was being “ignoble” to Olga. Had Beauvoir considered how complicated her life was going to be in the coming ye
ar?

  It was true, what Sartre said. Beauvoir and Olga had remained close friends, despite their ups and downs over the years. (They had long since ceased being lovers.) And it mattered a great deal to Olga that Bost was faithful to her. But Beauvoir kept thinking of the previous summer, when Bost had been with them in Greece. They had crossed from Marseille to Piraeus in a rickety boat called Cairo City, and she had gazed at the sleeping Bost with longing. Throughout those three weeks with Bost, she had been painfully conscious that Bost was a delightful young man of twenty-one, and she was about to turn the ripe old age of thirty.

  This summer she was thirty, and she would never forget the way Bost had murmured “I love you” at the station at Chambéry. She felt as if her youth had been returned to her. She was not going to spoil it with remorse.

  Tangiers, Casablanca, Marrakech, Fez, Ksar el Souk, Meknès: they marveled at the shuttered palaces, the mosques, the labyrinthine streets and noisy marketplaces, the veiled women, the donkeys struggling under their loads. In the stifling heat of August, there were few European tourists in Morocco. Sartre and Beauvoir tried to spend the hottest part of the day in cafés, reading, writing, and drinking mint tea. In Meknès, Sartre stayed and worked in their hotel while Beauvoir went off for the day by herself, steeling herself against the inevitable harassment by Arab men. She had completed her book of novellas that year, while teaching, and she was giving herself a break from writing. Sartre had finished his volume of short stories, and was now writing a daring article for the Nouvelle Revue Française in which he attacked the establishment Catholic writer François Mauriac. In years to come, the article would be considered among his most brilliant pieces of literary criticism.