by Hazel Rowley
During those first difficult days, Beauvoir would sit on the terrace of the Dôme, gazing across the street at the Rodin statue of Balzac, and fantasize that Sartre would materialize behind the statue, dressed in his blue uniform and beret, his knapsack slung across his shoulder, and walk toward her smiling.
She was given another teaching job, and was relieved to spend her mornings at the Lycée Duruy. She telephoned the Bost household, in Taverny. One of Bost’s sisters said that Bost had been moved to a military hospital in Carpentras, near Avignon. Beauvoir rang Olga in Laigle. The town had been bombarded and their windows had been shattered, but the Kosakiewicz family was safe.
Nathalie Sorokine returned to Paris, and Beauvoir had never been more pleased to see her. Sorokine was an inveterate thief, and she proceeded to steal two bicycles, one of which she gave to Beauvoir. Beauvoir learned how to ride it, and soon the two women were swooping around the empty streets of Paris on their new wheels.
On July 11, Beauvoir received a penciled note from Sartre. The envelope had been opened, and at first she did not recognize the handwriting. He had been taken prisoner on June 21, his thirty-fifth birthday, the day before the Armistice. He seemed in good spirits. “If I’m writing in pencil, it’s not that a shell shattered my pen, but that I lost it yesterday…. I have high hopes of seeing you again soon, and everything is fine with me…. I love you with all my might.”54 Only later did he tell her that the prisoners were sleeping on the bare floor, with almost nothing to eat, and that they were in a “strange emotional state.”55
People were beginning to come back to the city. On July 18, Olga arrived from Laigle. There had been standing room only on the train. Beauvoir wrote in her journal:
I go to school by bicycle and return in the pouring rain. At the hotel, there’s a note from Kos, telling me she’s here. She quickly comes down from her room, we go to the Dôme, she has a beautiful new raincoat, a red scarf around her hair, she looks very nice and I am happy to see her.
They spent the rest of the day in cafés, anxiously talking. In the evening, they returned to Beauvoir’s hotel room. Olga brewed some tea. They shared Beauvoir’s bed, and slept badly. Beauvoir’s war journal ended there.
Over the next few weeks, Beauvoir and Olga were involved in something Vichy France regarded as a crime of the highest order. Olga was pregnant. The man in question was Niko Papatakis. The affair was over.56 Even if the father had been Bost, Olga did not want a child. She was going to have to have one of those illegal, dangerous back-alley abortions that every woman in France dreaded. Under the Vichy government, it was even more difficult than usual to find a willing abortionist.
Beauvoir managed to obtain an address. The abortionist was a skinny old woman, and Beauvoir and Olga were terrified that she might not be sufficiently conscious of hygiene. They moved temporarily into Beauvoir’s grandmother’s vacant apartment at Denfert-Rochereau, where they spent “two sinister weeks.”57 In her next novel, The Blood of Others, Beauvoir would include an abortion scene, and Sartre would work a gnarly old woman abortionist into the novel he was writing, The Age of Reason.
“Getting your letters gave me back my joy,” Sartre wrote to Beauvoir. “You are my life, my little sweet, my whole life.”58 Communication was sporadic. Prisoners were authorized to write only two postcards a week. Sartre sent longer letters from the local civilian post office, but this required “cunning and the right opportunity.”59
In mid-August, he was transferred to Stalag XIID, a prisoner-of-war camp near Trier, in Germany. The prisoners’ conditions were much improved. Sartre was cheerful, he assured Beauvoir, and neither bored nor hungry. In fact, he had never felt so free. He liked his fellow prisoners, he had found a good chess partner, and had become a good bridge player. He boxed or wrestled for three-quarters an hour every day. He was reading Heidegger (the Nazi officers had been only too pleased to give him a fine hardback edition of Being and Time) and was writing his own philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness. He was having fun mounting a Christmas mystery play. His closest friends were two priests—a Jesuit and a Dominican. On Tuesday evenings he gave philosophy lectures to an audience made up almost entirely of priests.
“I’m not at all miserable, I even have loads of pleasant moments, but I’m hard as a pebble. To melt into water, it’s you, tender little Beaver, you alone I’d need to find again. If I find you again, I find my happiness again and I find myself.”60
In Paris, Beauvoir got on with her life as well as she could. Most of her friends had left. René Maheu was teaching philosophy at a high school in Fez, Morocco. Stépha and Fernando, known to be communists, had fled to New York. Colette Audry was in Grenoble with her husband. Poupette was trapped in Portugal. (She had gone to visit her boyfriend, Lionel de Roulet, and the borders had closed a week later.)
Beauvoir taught in the mornings. Some afternoons, she went to the Bibliothèque Nationale and grappled with Hegel, so she could keep up with Sartre’s latest thinking. Otherwise she sat in one of the booths at the back of the Dôme, revising She Came to Stay.
She spent two evenings a week with Olga, who had a small role in Charles Dullin’s production of Plutus, at the Atelier. Wanda was painting Beauvoir’s portrait. “We have very polite relations at present,” Beauvoir told Sartre, “though she has given me a face shaped like a gourd.”61
Two other evenings were spent with Nathalie Sorokine. The girl was wildly jealous. She could not stand being just one more person slotted into Beauvoir’s inflexible schedule. “I’ve been working it out,” she told Beauvoir. “You give up slightly less than a hundred and fortieth part of your life to me!”62 Beauvoir explained in vain that she was writing a novel and had courses to prepare. Sorokine riposted: “You’re nothing but a clock in a refrigerator!”63 She was often waiting outside Beauvoir’s hotel room when Beauvoir left in the morning, at eight A.M., and would loiter outside the gates when Beauvoir came out of school. There were frequent arguments, and the residents of the Hôtel du Danemark would hear the sounds of scuffles and fighting coming from Beauvoir’s room. No one had any doubts as to the nature of hers and Sorokine’s relationship. The women were causing something of a scandal at the hotel.64
Bost returned to Paris in September 1940. “After so many months exclusively in female company, it was wonderful to pick up a friendship with a man again,” Beauvoir writes. Bost and Olga took a room together at the Hôtel Chaplain, on the Rue Jules-Chaplain. Wanda moved there, too. They were five minutes from Beauvoir at the Hôtel du Danemark.
Bost was given a temporary teaching job. He and Beauvoir had lunch together every day except Thursdays, when she went to her parents. On Saturday nights they had a secret tryst at the Poirier, an old hotel in the Emile Goudeau Square in Montmartre. They loved this square, with its chestnut trees, cast-iron fountain, and rundown artist studios where Picasso, Braque, and Modigliani had painted at the beginning of the century.65 For Beauvoir, this was the high point of her week.
Soldiers in gray-green uniforms strutted around the city. There were large green street signs in German. Shopping for food involved ration cards and long queues. The hotels were freezing, and Beauvoir slept in her woolen ski pants. Petrol was almost nonexistent, and the only cars on the street were taxis and emergency vehicles. In the cafés everyone was talking about the prisoners, the conditions of the prison camps, and whether any of them was likely to be released before the end of the war. There were rumors that they were starving to death.
Signs went up in shop windows: OUT OF BOUNDS TO JEWS. Jewish workers were fired from factories, and Jews were debarred from public office and the liberal professions. Public servants, which included teachers, were asked to sign an affidavit swearing that they were neither Jews nor Freemasons.
Beauvoir had finished another draft of her novel She Came to Stay and was polishing the finer details. “But what a need I have of your judgment!” she told Sartre. “Alone in front of my text, I get to feel pretty sick of it in the long run.”66 Sh
e was helping Bost write film scripts. He was hoping to break into journalism and screenwriting.
She was not unhappy, she wrote, but she was not leading her true life, which was so full and rich and gay. Her true life was Sartre. She was waiting for him all the time. “I have constant nightmares about you. You come back…but you don’t love me anymore and I’m filled with despair. At times, not knowing when I’ll see you again has me literally fighting for breath…. I scan every street corner for you. Ilive only for the moment when I set eyes on you again.”67
Beauvoir had not seen Sartre for eleven months. One evening, at the end of March 1941, she returned to the Hôtel du Danemark and found a note in her mailbox in his handwriting. “I’m at the Café des Trois Mousquetaires.” Her heart stopped. She ran all the way to the café (“a reddish glow behind its thick blue curtains”) and almost fell through the door.68 Sartre was not there. A waiter handed her a note. Sartre had waited two hours, then gone out. He would be back shortly.
There were civilians as well as military men in the Nazi prison camps, and the Nazis were releasing civilians if they proved themselves unfit for military action. Sartre and a priest friend of his had organized forged papers and passed themselves off as civilians. At the medical examination, Sartre made the most of his near-blind right eye, pulling at his eyelid, exposing the expanse of white, and complaining of dizzy spells. The doctor had signed his release papers.
Sartre had come back to Paris a changed man. It frightened Beauvoir. Never had the two of them seemed so far apart. He was impatient, intransigent, full of moral strictures. He was shocked that she had signed an affidavit declaring she was not a Jew, and disgusted to hear that she occasionally bought food on the black market. He had not come back to Paris to enjoy his freedom, he told her, but to act. He wanted to organize a resistance group. They had to expel the Germans from France. Beauvoir thought him deluded. Had he still no idea how powerless they were as individuals?
“That evening, and the next day, and for several days thereafter, Sartre completely baffled me,” she would write in her memoirs. “We both felt that the other one was speaking in a completely different language.”69
SIX
OCCUPIED PARIS
March 1941–September 1944
Sartre wasted no time in making contact with other intellectuals interested in forming a resistance group. Maurice Merleau-Ponty was back in Paris—freed from his prison camp when he contracted pneumonia—and he knew some young philosophers who had already formed a group called “Under the Boot.” Bost also had friends who were eager to take action against the Germans. In the end, a dozen or so people turned up to the first meeting in Beauvoir’s room at the Hôtel Mistral, where she and Sartre were living again. Most of them, like Bost, were in their mid-twenties, ten years younger than Sartre and Beauvoir.
A couple of the members, including the hotheaded Corsican philosopher Jean-Toussaint Desanti, wanted to manufacture bombs and hurl grenades, but the group quickly decided that this was beyond their capacity. Their weapons would be words. They would collect information and distribute news bulletins, inciting Parisians to resist German power.
They called their group Socialism and Liberty. Sartre had been deeply marked by collective life in the prison camp, which he considered a kind of socialism, and for the first time he thought of himself as a socialist. He did not mind that some members of the group were Marxists. Their aim was not to form a political party, he pointed out, but to expel the Germans from France. Discussion at the weekly meetings was sometimes fierce, but Sartre never tried to impose his own views.
It was usually Dominique Desanti, Jean-Toussaint’s wife, who typed the leaflets; Bost and his friend Jean Pouillon printed them on a duplicating machine, and members of the group distributed them across Paris, preferably at the doors of factories, at dawn. They soon had fifty members. For better secrecy, they modeled themselves on the communist network, splitting up into groups of five.
They made overtures to the communist resistance movement, but word came back that the communists did not trust Sartre, who by his own admission had sat around in his prison camp reading Heidegger (a Nazi supporter), and who probably bought his release by agreeing to spy on French resistants. Sartre was horrified by this rumor.
He arranged meetings with other resistance leaders, and Beauvoir sometimes went with him. “All these groups had two things in common,” she writes, “a very limited effective strength, and extraordinary lack of common caution. We held our meetings in hotel rooms or someone’s study at the Ecole Normale, where walls might well have ears. Bost walked through the streets carrying a duplicating machine, and Pouillon went around with his briefcase stuffed full of pamphlets.”1
That summer, Sartre and Beauvoir crossed into the so-called Free Zone, run by the collaborationist government of Marshal Pétain. Sartre hoped to establish contact with some resistance members in the south, in order to make Socialism and Liberty part of a larger organization. The border was formally closed, but they sent ahead bicycles (illicitly supplied by Sorokine) and camping equipment (lent by Bost), and were led across the border at night by a guide to whom they paid a small fee. For the next few weeks they cycled long distances up hills and along bumpy roads, eating even less well than in Paris. Among the people on Sartre’s list of contacts were the prominent left-wing writers André Gide and André Malraux. Neither showed much interest in Sartre’s plans. Malraux (who was not yet a member of the Resistance) told Sartre that Russian tanks and American planes were needed to combat Hitler, not well-meaning groups of intellectuals.
Resistance was dangerous work, and it became clear that the risks they were taking were far greater than any influence they might have. “We had the feeling we were shouting in the desert,” Dominique Desanti recalls.2 As a group, they felt isolated. In May 1942, nineteen-year-old Yvonne Picard, a former student of Beauvoir’s, resigned from the group to join the much larger and more effective communist resistance. One week later, she was arrested by the Germans. Her friends never saw her again.
Soon after that, reluctantly, the group decided to disband.3 The Marxist members, including the Desantis and their friend François Cuzin, went to work for the communist Resistance. Cuzin, a brilliant young philosopher, joined a major resistance group in the south. In July 1944, the Germans laid an ambush. Cuzin and his comrades were first tortured, then executed.
Although Sartre would not sign the declaration that he was neither a Jew nor a Freemason, he did not lose his job, and was sent back to the Lycée Pasteur. It turned out that the inspector general of education was a resistant. In October he transferred Sartre to the more prestigious Lycée Condorcet, where Sartre prepared students for the Ecole Normale.
After a morning’s teaching, Sartre and Beauvoir installed themselves in a café to write. Their favorite was the Flore, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, with its red chairs and mirrors. The café was not well known in those days, and German soldiers almost never set foot in it. But the best thing was its warmth. The four winters of the Occupation would prove unusually severe, with snow and ice on the streets of Paris. Coal was rationed, and power cuts were common. In the middle of the Flore sat a large potbellied stove, which the owner kept well stoked with his supply of black-market coal.
Sartre and Beauvoir worked mostly upstairs, on the second floor, where it was quieter. They sat at opposite ends of the room so they would not be tempted to talk, and—in the fug of tobacco fumes, amid the jangle of coffee cups, the hubbub of conversation, and the distraction of people making their way to the toilet or phone—they wrote. Both used fountain pens. Sartre’s handwriting was small, neat, and professional. Beauvoir’s jagged calligraphy was almost impossible to decipher. Even Sartre complained about it.
On the table beside their sheaf of papers were a small porcelain teapot, a cup and saucer, and an ashtray. Like everyone else, they smoked. Tobacco was scarce during the war, and Sartre would scour the café floor for cigarette butts to stuff in his pipe. Beauv
oir liked the feel of a cigarette in her hand, but she did not inhale, and did not mind if she had to go without cigarettes altogether.
Dominique Desanti, a former member of Socialism and Liberty, was thoroughly inspired by Sartre and Beauvoir. One day she plucked up the courage to ask Sartre if he would read the first fifty pages of a novel she was writing. Sartre took her manuscript, and made an appointment to meet with her the following week:
The table he used to sit at—it was virtually reserved for him—was opposite the clock…. He’d been there a while, absorbed by his writing, and I sat some way off. At another table Simone de Beauvoir was also writing; she made a little sign to me. He had not lifted his head…. At 11.30 on the dot, exactly the time he’d told me to meet him, he screwed the cap on his fountain pen and gave me a welcoming smile, showing that he had registered my presence. I went over to his table, he ordered me a tea, and took my manuscript out of his briefcase.
Sartre said encouraging things, then asked Desanti if she planned to make writing her vocation. Yes? In that case, he would make some more substantial criticisms. He was gentle and encouraging, she recalls, and he soon had her laughing at some of the weak passages in her writing. His criticism was kind, and utterly to the point. He tapped his pipe on the table, filled it (his nails were filthy, she noticed), and made several attempts at lighting it. “Writing is an occupation without respite,” he told her as he handed the manuscript back. “I like to teach. But at some level I am always thinking about what I am writing…. At every moment you must be ready to dive back into it. Look at the Beaver.”4
It was an affectionate joke in their circle, writes Desanti, that the Beaver was always beavering away. It was clear that Sartre admired her for it.