by Hazel Rowley
On Friday afternoon she was taking her last class for the day when one of the cleaners knocked and came in. She walked up to the teacher’s desk and whispered that a “Monsieur Bost” was waiting in the visitors’ parlor. “My hands started to tremble and my heart to thump, and I had the greatest difficulty in continuing on the subject of sociology—that last quarter of an hour passing in the strangest agony of impatience,” Beauvoir wrote to Sartre afterward. “I rushed down—and there, all solitary amid the green settees and mirrors of a vast visitors’ room, I found Little Bost waiting for me.”
They went for a long walk in the snow—by the Seine, along the Canal St. Martin, and to the Gare de l’Est, where they had a coffee in the dreary basement café that had come to mean so much to Beauvoir. Bost did not seem to notice his surroundings. He talked manically—about life at the front, his comrades, the officers, everything but himself.
By dinner, he had become slightly calmer. He wanted to know all about Sartre, the Kosakiewicz sisters, and everyone else. He and Beauvoir spent a “tender and passionate night” in the Hôtel Oriental on the Place Denfert-Rochereau. “It’s pretty sumptuous—elevator and fine, warm rooms with velvet drapes and a pink counterpane,” Beauvoir reported to Sartre, “but I slept very badly because of the stifling heat—and also, I think, because my nerves were overwrought.”33
The next day, she showed her companion Sartre’s notebooks, and Bost read passages with “wild exhilaration.” She told him the latest stories about Bienenfeld and Wanda. “From the standpoint of principle he finds us infamous,” she wrote to Sartre, “but his heart’s with us.”
We went to the Nox, sat down at a table and talked—gently, so gently. He was truly moving: seeking in you, and me, hopes for later on; talking about his comrades—and about himself and his moods out there, his regrets and his joys—by fits and starts, without the volubility of the previous day, but drawing things from his innermost depths. I was moved to tears (actually shedding a couple) and was feverish—I’d drunk a lot of toddies and other alcohol—but I didn’t lapse into pathos.
She and Bost spent three days and nights together, staying in different hotels each night. Bost left her on Monday evening, in front of his brother Pierre’s apartment in the Place Saint-Germain. He was going to spend the next six days with Olga, who was under the impression that he had just arrived in Paris.
For the next few days, Beauvoir dreamed about Bost. She missed his kisses, longed for his body, and envied Olga. But she knew it was fair this way, and Bost’s tenderness had left her feeling strong. “There’s one thing of which I’m now sure,” she told Sartre. “Bost forms part of my future in an absolutely certain—even essential—way.”34
She was forgetting the rules. Their “contingent” affairs were not meant to become “essential.”
Just as Beauvoir was feeling calmer at last, Sartre plunged into another crisis. He had left Paris smitten with Wanda. No sooner was he back in the war zone than his nightmare came true. He was faced with days in a row of silence from her. No letters. And then came a bombshell—a four-page screed foaming with rage.
It seemed that Sartre’s past had caught up with him. Colette Gilbert, the actress with whom he had had an affair the previous summer, had told the whole story to Marcel Mouloudji, an eighteen-year-old drama student at L’Atelier, who was a close friend of Wanda’s. Gilbert claimed that Sartre had virtually raped her. She even showed Mouloudji the love letters Sartre had written her.
Mouloudji felt more than friendship for Wanda Kosakiewicz. In his memoirs, Le Petit Invité, he writes that he was besotted with her.35 He loved her Russian-doll manner, her laughter, and the short blond hair that made him think of a thatched roof. He was daunted by her intellectual language; it seemed she could talk analytically about the slightest thing. On Friday nights they often went together to the famous Bal Nègre, on the Rue Blomet, and he would watch her shimmying around the dance floor with her African and West Indian partners. To him, she was inaccessible, a sort of goddess. She had introduced him to the Sartre clique, that intimidating group who went around saying “vous” to one another. Wanda talked about Sartre with wonderment. But Mouloudji had no idea that she and Sartre were lovers.
Mouloudji passed on Gilbert’s story, and Wanda seemed to react calmly enough at the time. Only decades later, when Sartre’s letters to Beauvoir were published in 1983, did Mouloudji discover that Wanda was not as indifferent as she had made out, and the reason why.
“I am doing my best not to let this obscenity fill me with childish loathing,” Wanda wrote to Sartre, “but I just can’t help feeling a terrible physical anguish.”36
Feeling alarmed and ashamed, Sartre tried to retain his dignity with a show of anger. He told Wanda that he, too, had a right to be angry. Why had she listened to Mouloudji’s version of things rather than his? Wanda should reread his letters. How could she doubt his love?
He wrote Colette Gilbert a blisteringly nasty letter. “I never loved you,” he fumed. “I found you physically pleasant though vulgar, but I have a certain sadism which was attracted to your vulgarity nonetheless. I never—from the very first day—intended to have anything but a very brief affair with you…. My letters, which were exercises in passionate literature and gave the Beaver and me many a good laugh, did not entirely deceive you.”37 He sent the letter to Wanda, asking her to find out Gilbert’s address and send it on. And he sent a copy to Beauvoir.
He had been “a grubby bastard” with Wanda, he lamented to Beauvoir. He was thoroughly ashamed of his behavior with Gilbert, and with women generally:
What need did I have for that girl? Wasn’t it simply to play the neighborhood Don Juan? And if you excuse me because of sensuality, let’s just say, first of all, that I have none, and that minor skin-deep desire is not an acceptable excuse…. It seems to me that up to now I’ve behaved like a spoiled brat in my physical relationships with people. There are few women I haven’t upset on that score…. As for you, my little Beaver, for whom I’ve never had anything but respect, I’ve often embarrassed you, particularly in the beginning, when you found me rather obscene. Not a satyr, certainly. That I’m quite sure I’m not. But simply obscene.
In a flurry of letters, Sartre begged Wanda to understand how fragile she made him. He loved her. He could not bear to think he disgusted her. “You well know that I’d walk all over everyone (even the Beaver)…to have a good relationship with you.”
He quoted this comment in his next letter to Beauvoir. “The end justifies the means, but I was not proud to have written that,” he confessed.38 When he did not hear from Beauvoir for five days, he started to worry about her.
I’m in an odd state, I’ve never been this uneasy with myself since I went crazy…. My sweet, how I need you…. I love you. I’m afraid I must seem slightly underhanded to you with all the lies I’m entangled in…. I’m afraid you might suddenly ask your self…isn’t he perhaps lying to me, isn’t he telling me half-truths? My little one, my darling Beaver, I swear to you that with you I’m totally pure. If I were not, there would be nothing in the world before which I would not be a liar, I would lose my very self. My love, you are not only my life but also the only honesty of my life.39
He was greatly relieved when a firm but forgiving letter from Beauvoir came the next day. “You mustn’t be too afraid that your letters have a pretty good whiff of reprimand,” he replied, “you’ve got to rub my nose in what I’ve done. Or else, aren’t you my little moral conscience any more?…I feel that this whole period will be set to rights, stamped, buried, only when we two have been able to talk about it together. It’s as though you have a little seal and have to stamp everything I see.”
He assured her he would not be having any new affairs for a good while. The whole episode had made him realize once again how much their relationship meant to him. As for “conjugal” relationships, Wanda was more than enough.40
Intent on tidying up his emotional life, Sartre wrote to Bianca Bienenfeld, ann
ouncing that they were finished.
Beauvoir saw Bienenfeld shortly afterward. “She restrained herself with astounding guts—but she was transfigured by anger. And honestly, I don’t know what got into your head,” she chided Sartre. “That letter, with its moral exhortations and protestations of esteem, was quite unacceptable…. She was humiliated that you didn’t even take the trouble to explain things to her properly. Humiliated and disgusted by the passionate letters you were writing her only a fortnight earlier. I found it desperately unpleasant…. She knows there’s a lie some where and is wondering what the truth is—she’s not without her suspicions even with respect to me.”41
A few days later, Beauvoir admitted she was not innocent either. “I never blamed you for making the break, since after all that’s what I’d advised you to do. But I blamed us—myself as much as you, actually—in the past, in the future, in the absolute: the way we treat people. I felt it was unacceptable that we’d managed to make her suffer so much.”42 Beauvoir would become even more convinced of this in the future, when Bienenfeld suffered a major nervous breakdown.
At the end of March 1940, six weeks after his first leave, Sartre was back in Paris on another home leave. On April 9, in the train taking him back to Alsace, he and his comrades heard that the Germans had invaded Denmark and Norway. The “Phony War” was over. Bost never had a second home leave.43
For one more month their lives continued more or less as before, except for a drama on the home front. Olga was having an affair. She and Wanda tried to hide it from Sartre and Beauvoir, but Beauvoir eventually found out. The man was Niko Papatakis, a heart-stoppingly handsome fellow, half-Greek, half-Ethiopian, who hung around with the theater and film people at the Flore and danced at the Bal Nègre with such grace and lack of self-consciousness that he put all the other men in the shade.44
What did Sartre think? Beauvoir wanted to know. Should she tell Bost? She and Bost had vowed to be open with each other, and she felt very uncomfortable knowing something he didn’t. She did not want to be complicit in Olga’s guilt. And if Bost ever found out, he would be angry that Beauvoir had kept it from him.
Sartre was shocked. Wasn’t Olga a bit disgusted with herself for cheating on Bost at the very moment when Bost was in grave danger of being blown up? Sartre was also angry that Wanda had hidden the affair from him.45 But his advice was not to tell Bost. He did not think Beauvoir had the right to say anything unless she was prepared to replace Olga in Bost’s life, if Bost decided to leave her. But Beauvoir could not do that, because she had him, Sartre, and one could not have two “absolute” relationships at the same time. He thought it better that Olga tell Bost herself, on his next leave. That way Bost would at least have the opportunity to talk it over with her. A man at the front did not need to be emotionally weakened.46
A few days later, still mulling over the question, Sartre, out of the blue, pointed to two other culprits in the whole story. Where Olga was concerned, he told Beauvoir, their guilt was absolute. However much Olga might at times irritate them, they had partly made her the person she had become. They had created the situation in which she lived, and they maintained her in a bubble of lies. In his opinion, they could never feel enough remorse toward the little vixen.47
In his memoirs, Tous les désespoirs sont permis, Niko Papatakis writes that he had an affair during the “Phony War” “with a young actress, of Russian origin,…a member of the Sartre clan.” Because he was not French, he had not been called up, and he was one of the few young men to be found in Paris. The women were throwing themselves at him.48
In his eighties, Papatakis is still a handsome man, occasionally to be seen at the Café de Flore. “Olga was sexy,” he recalls. “Not beautiful, but sexy. She had a Slavic charm. You know, mysterious, without really being so. Her figure was androgynous, almost boyish. She had no breasts to speak of. She had a very attractive, deep voice. I think she liked to seduce.”
Papatakis believes their affair lasted a couple of months. Since Olga tried to hide it from Beauvoir, they did not go out much together, especially not in Montparnasse. But Papatakis remembers going with Wanda and Mouloudji to the Bal Nègre, where they were not likely to bump into Beauvoir.
He found Wanda far less appealing than her sister. “Olga seemed a bit lost in life, and Wanda even more so. She gesticulated a lot, I remember, and tried to keep up with her sister.”49
“My little one, I was completely worn down yesterday,” Sartre wrote to Beauvoir. German planes had dropped a bomb on a town fifteen kilometers away, but that was not what was worrying him. It was Wanda. She had a lesion. They would not know how serious it was until she was X-rayed. She had written to him. “Dear God, how I wish you would come, come at any price.”
It’s odd, she is becoming more and more “my child,” as O. was at one time for you. This time, I’ve had enough of brushing her off with sweet talk each time she needs me. I’ve just written to her that if she wants it, and if the delays aren’t too great, I was ready to marry her to get three days of leave. I don’t imagine that will be very nice for you; though it’s purely symbolic, it does make me look committed up to my ears. I for one don’t like it at all…. But I’ve told you and my mind’s made up: I want to do everything I can for W. from now on.50
Sartre was informed that there would be no marriage leaves while the battle was raging. He begged Wanda not to feel abandoned, either materially or psychologically. “You are my whole life, my love,” he wrote to her.51 He asked Beauvoir to give her money.
On May 10, 1940, the Germans invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. That same day, Bost and his friends were transported by convoy to the woods near Sedan, close to the Belgian border. Nervously, they assured one another that the Maginot Line was the most impenetrable line of defense in history.
But the Maginot Line was incomplete. It did not run along the Belgian border. On May 12, the Germans swept around it, through the Ardennes forest in Belgium, and into France. The French divisions found themselves surrounded and isolated. On land they were shelled; from the air they were bombarded.
Sartre wrote Beauvoir a second letter in the evening of May 12: “My darling Beaver, you sent me a really pathetic little letter, so distressed, my dearest…. Where exactly is Bost at the moment?”
On May 21, 1940, Bost was wounded, hit in the abdomen by flying shrapnel. He was pulled from the front lines, bleeding badly, and carried by relays of stretcher bearers to a Red Cross station. From there, he was taken by ambulance to a military hospital, where he was operated on. The surgeon told him he was lucky to have survived.
“It gave me a hell of a shock to get your letter,” Sartre told Beauvoir a few days later.52 Like her, he wondered whether Bost was understating the severity of his wounds, but he thought it a good sign that Bost had been able to scrawl her a brief note. Provided he survived, this was the best thing that could have happened to him. At least, he would be away from enemy lines for the next few weeks.
During the following days, Bost’s regiment was almost entirely wiped out. Two days after Bost was wounded, Paul Nizan, also on the Belgian front, was killed by a German bullet.
Late in the evening of June 9, 1940, Beauvoir got back to the Hôtel du Danemark to find a note in her mailbox. Bianca Bienenfeld had been looking for her all day. Would Beauvoir come straight away, whatever the time, to the Flore?
There were no taxis on the deserted streets, so Beauvoir took the metro to Saint-Germain-des-Prés. She burst into the Flore and found Bienenfeld with friends, looking very distressed. Her father had inside knowledge that the Germans were about to enter Paris. The schools in Paris were going to close. Bienenfeld and her father were leaving Paris the next day in his car. It was less urgent for Beauvoir—she was not Jewish—but they hoped she would pack her bags and join them.
That was the moment when the bitter truth finally hit home for Beauvoir. France was defeated, humiliated, on its knees, about to surrender to the Germans. And Sartre would inevitably bec
ome a prisoner of war. She wept hysterically. For a while, she was totally out of control.
The next day, she joined the Bienenfelds in their car. It was the famous exodus. Almost three million people took to the roads, heading south or west. The Bienenfelds headed west. They were going to Quimper, in Brittany. Beauvoir asked them to drop her in Laval, the nearest point to her friend Madame Morel’s country house, La Pouèze, fourteen miles from Angers.
On June 14, Paris fell to the Nazis. Within days, France surrendered. On June 22, the eighty-four-year-old French military man Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain signed an armistice with the Germans. The Nazis were to control the northern section of France, including Paris, and a large section in the south would be governed by the French, with Pétain at the head. The capital of the so-called “Free Zone” was Vichy. Whether Pétain realized it at the time or not, he had signed up for almost complete collaboration with the Nazis. Beauvoir sat around in La Pouèze listening to the news bulletins, reading detective novels, and weeping.
By the end of the month, Beauvoir was impatient to return to Paris. She was sure there would be messages from Sartre and Bost waiting for her at the hotel. She even imagined that one or both of them might have made his way back to Paris.
She accepted a lift for part of the way from a German military truck. The back section, under the tarpaulin, was packed with French refugees. They could not move, the air was stuffy, and the smell of gasoline turned her stomach. Beauvoir threw up.53
All that awaited her at the Hôtel du Danemark was a cheery letter from Sartre dated June 9. She fled to her room and sobbed her heart out. The Nazi flag, with its large swastika, was flapping over the Senate in the Luxembourg Gardens. The streets were deserted. Never had Paris felt more grim. Never had Beauvoir felt more utterly alone.