Tete-a-Tete

by Hazel Rowley

  Sartre had heard a great deal about Claude Lanzmann’s sexy younger sister. He asked to meet her. Claude Lanzmann arranged a dinner. He remembers saying to Beauvoir, “Here we go. This will surely lead to an affair.”51

  It was the spring of 1953, and No Exit was playing at the Théâtre de l’Athénée, with Evelyne in the role of the seductive young narcissist Estelle. The critic from Le Monde raved: “We can no longer imagine another Estelle than Evelyne Rey…the quintessence of the eternal feminine.”52 After the play, the four of them went out to eat. Evelyne was radiant, and Sartre was enchanted.

  Beauvoir recalls: “Sartre said to me: ‘Do you think that I could perhaps, I don’t know, send her some flowers?’…He wanted to have another affair. I said to him, yes, go for it, you can only try…. The desire for an affair, that’s something he never lost.”53

  In his memoir, Le Testament amoureux, Serge Rezvani claims that Claude Lanzmann acted as a “procurer” for his sister. Jacques Lanzmann says, “Yes, Claude regularly served as a ‘Madame’ for Evelyne.”54 Several people, notably Bianca Bienenfeld and Nelson Algren, have said the same about Beauvoir, meaning that she set Sartre up with her young women friends, knowing exactly what would happen.

  Evelyne was yet another of Sartre’s fragile young women. She was six when her mother abandoned the family. During her adolescence her brothers were away—at school in Clermont-Ferrand, and then in Paris—and she lived alone with her Jewish father and Catholic stepmother in the countryside near Brioude. Her father thought she might be safer if she converted to Catholicism. But he had not expected her to embrace God with such passion. For a time she became quite messianic, with dreams of becoming a nun and converting the blacks in Africa. She would always remain something of a mystic. Love, for her, meant adoration.

  The love affair with Gilles Deleuze had been disastrous. She had become so thin and weepy after he jilted her that the family genuinely feared she would die. The marriage with Serge Rezvani had not made her happy either.55 Like her siblings, Evelyne was driven by ambition, while at the same time plagued by feelings of inadequacy. One day Rezvani had suggested she take up acting. Excited by the idea, she enrolled for classes with the famous drama teacher René Simon. He told her that with that Semitic nose of hers she would go precisely nowhere. “Fix it!” he ordered her imperiously. Rezvani remembers evening after evening in which Evelyne would stand in front of the mirror, curse her appearance, and weep.

  To his dismay, Evelyne began to turn herself into a New Look model. She acquired vampish gestures, wore elbow-length black gloves, and smoked with a long cigarette holder. Rezvani could not help thinking that rather than actually being one, she was acting the part of a femme fatale.

  The marriage ended in 1950. For several months the two of them did not see each other. When they met again, at the Deux Magots, Rezvani hardly recognized the smiling woman who came toward him, with her small, upturned nose. He was horrified. He thought she had “banalized” her beauty.

  In June 1953, Sartre and Beauvoir, accompanied by their lovers, met up for a few days in Venice. The couples stayed in different hotels. On Saturday, June 20, Beauvoir and Lanzmann spent the morning walking on the Lido beach, then took a vaporetto back to the Piazza Roma, where they had arranged to meet Sartre and Michelle for a late lunch. As they disembarked, they caught sight of a newspaper with the large headline: I Rosenberg sono stati assassinati. The worldwide demonstrations and nine appeals to the U.S. Supreme court had not saved Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The previous evening, just before sundown (the start of the Sabbath), the two, accused without evidence of transmitting the secret of the A-bomb to the Soviets, had been strapped into the electric chair and put to death.

  Sartre’s face, when they saw him, was rigid. Lunch was canceled. Sartre went straight back to his hotel and phoned the Parisian paper Libération, promising them an article by midnight.56 The four met up that evening at ten P.M., in the Café Florian, in Piazza San Marco. Sartre handed his article to Beauvoir and Lanzmann. They read it and both had the same reaction. It was no good. In his fury, Sartre was ranting, and had lost his punch.

  Sartre sat up all night rewriting the article, and phoned it through to Paris the next morning. The family had rarely seen him so angry and upset. “So much for ‘American leadership of the free world,’” he wrote. “Your free world is not ours.”57

  Beauvoir wrote to Nelson Algren the next day, from the room she shared with Lanzmann at the Hotel Luna. Algren had been active on the “Save the Rosenbergs” committee, and she was sure he would feel as she did. “Even right wing people agree on one point: this is the biggest mistake made by USA in the Cold War,” she wrote.58 She had been profoundly moved by the letters Ethel and Julius Rosenberg had written each other from their prison cells. Gallimard had published them in translation, she told Algren, and the proceeds were going to the Rosenbergs’ two young sons.

  Algren wrote back in July. He was in one of his bitter moods. The Rosenbergs died for a lie, he said. The Soviet Union was no workers’ democracy, and only second-rate people believed it was. He had not been moved by the Rosenbergs’ letters from prison. Nor by the television coverage. He still kept seeing that “little fat fool of a woman in a shapeless green dressing gown walking up to that electric chair.” He had read Sartre’s comments in a newspaper, and he thought Sartre was wrong. The United States was not yet a fascist country, even though executing the Rosenbergs was a fascist act. He still believed there was more hope in the United States than in the USSR. Sartre should not disown the United States too soon.59

  She was interested in what he had to say about the Rosenbergs, Beauvoir replied. It was true that in the Soviet Union the former Stalinist leader Beria had just been arrested for spying. A strange business. She supposed Algren was right: it was difficult to have much confidence in the Soviet Union.

  Beauvoir was conciliatory with the men she loved.

  From Venice, Beauvoir and Lanzmann drove to Trieste, where they discovered, to their surprise, that it was not difficult to obtain visas for Tito’s Yugoslavia. “We’re fantastically excited,” Beauvoir wrote to Sartre.60 They stacked the car with provisions and spare oil, and ventured into communist territory. Lanzmann had already been to East Germany, but this was Beauvoir’s first experience of life behind the iron curtain. They found Yugoslavia poverty-stricken, but they were impressed by the atmosphere of solidarity among the people.

  Beauvoir then spent several weeks in Amsterdam with Sartre and was looking forward to meeting Lanzmann in Basel when she heard the news that he had had a car accident and was in a hospital in Cahors, in the southwest of France. She set off in the car immediately. Sartre took the train to Paris. He was going to join them in a week.

  A few days later, Beauvoir wrote to Sartre from Cahors. Lanzmann had been in severe pain, but he was getting better and was back on his feet:

  It’s bright sunshine and I’m in a dentist’s waiting room with no paper, which explains why I’m writing on these scraps. In an hour’s time it will be midday, my tooth will be fixed and the car too, and we’ll leave Cahors. We’ll drive gently round the region until Wednesday.

  Here I am again. I have my tooth and am just leaving. Listen,

  I’d like to show you the Lascaux caves. So, instead of coming to Cahors, get out at Brive. The train leaves at 8.50 and arrives at 14.39. I’ll be at the station to meet the first and second trains—or at the Poste Restante, if so instructed. We could also arrange to meet at the Truffe Noire hotel, 21 Bld Anatole-France, and you can also wire me there on Wednesday.

  She closed with careful instructions. While Sartre was in Paris, would he please transfer his Italian royalties to his French bank account, ring the secretary at Les Temps modernes, and call at the Rue de la Bûcherie apartment to pick up mail, a work folder, shirts, socks, and underpants for Lanzmann? “Till Wednesday, o little yourself. A big hug and lots of kisses. Your charming Beaver.”

  Later that week, the three of them spent a mo
rning looking around the Gothic cathedral in Albi, northeast of Toulouse. After lunch, Lanzmann and Beauvoir explored the town while Sartre spent the afternoon sitting in the hotel garden, under an arbor, writing an immensely long letter to Evelyne Lanzmann. He read it to them that evening. “It was a magnificent letter,” Claude Lanzmann recalls, “a very literary letter. An account of his day and Albi’s red cathedral. He spoke about himself, about her. He said he wished she were there.”61

  Sartre had begun a tempestuous affair with Evelyne. A replay of the quasi-incestuous tangles between Beauvoir, Bost, and the Kosakiewicz sisters? Sartre’s secretary, Jean Cau, joked that if Sartre and Beauvoir had a daughter, Jacques Lanzmann would be sleeping with her.

  In his autobiographical narrative Words, which he drafted the following year, Sartre comments on his incest fantasy:

  As a brother, I would have been incestuous. I used to dream about it. Origin? A cover-up for forbidden emotions? It may well be. I had an older sister, my mother, and I wanted a younger one…. I made the serious mistake of often looking among women for this sister who had never turned up…. Echoes of this fantasy can be found in my writings…. What attracted me in this family link was not so much the temptation to love as the prohibition against making love; I liked incest, with its mixture of fire and ice, enjoyment and frustration, so long as it remained platonic.62

  There was nothing platonic about this relationship. “Evelyne was one of the women Sartre was most attached to,” Beauvoir would tell John Gerassi in 1973. “He was extremely jealous…. When he did not get letters, he was very moody,…he became very dark.”

  “With Evelyne, I saw him anguished like an adolescent,” Claude Lanzmann says of Sartre. “When he hadn’t heard from her one day, he got up at least ten times from the table to phone.”63

  Evelyne was a tall woman, like Sartre’s mother. Sartre admitted to Beauvoir that this made him self-conscious in public. “I thought other people looked upon me as a figure of fun, being the lover of such a tall girl…. But sensually I liked it very much.”64

  Evelyne was aware that she was not the only woman in Sartre’s life, but he assured her that he was no longer sleeping with any of them. He insisted, nevertheless, that Michelle Vian must not hear of their affair. She was very jealous, he said, and he did not want to hurt her.

  Evelyne would have liked to proclaim to the world Sartre’s love for her. It was hurtful that she could not go out with him publicly, travel on vacation with him, or talk about their affair except to close friends. Over time, she would come to resent this.

  For her part, Michelle had no idea about Evelyne. To be sure, Sartre was intensely preoccupied with his work, but he still made love to her, and his letters were as passionate as ever. “I kiss you everywhere,” he wrote to Michelle. “I adore you, my sweetheart, I miss you.”65

  Thirty years later, a Sartre scholar interviewed Michelle Vian at length. When he unwittingly mentioned Sartre’s affair with Evelyne, presuming she knew about it, Michelle could not believe her ears.66

  Evelyne—along with Wanda and Michelle—became another of Sartre’s “mistresses.” He kept her handsomely. When they first met, Evelyne was living in a hotel in Montmartre. Sartre installed her in a two-bedroom apartment at 26 Rue Jacob, five minutes from where he lived with his mother, on the Rue Bonaparte.

  Jacques Lanzmann, who was broke after his travels in South America, moved in with his sister. “I have always lived above my means,” he writes in his memoirs. “Luckily, Sartre was there to mop up Evelyne’s financial messes. And luckily, Evelyne was there to mop up mine.”67 Evelyne and Claude both handed Jacques money, indirectly from Sartre and Beauvoir. Sometimes the gift was more direct. When Jacques’s girlfriend went to Switzerland for an abortion, it was Sartre who paid.

  Jacques Lanzmann was writing a book about his experiences in South America. Beauvoir recognized that he had considerable talent, and helped in every way she could. She handed him money regularly, and published an extract from his book in Les Temps modernes. When he finished the book, it was she who edited the manuscript, with her usual care and skill. Le Rat d’Amérique, published in 1955, was nominated for the Prix Goncourt.

  Meanwhile, Sartre had written a fourth play for Wanda: Kean, adapted from a melodrama by Alexandre Dumas. It was a resounding success.68 Sartre promised Evelyne he would write a play for her, too.

  Beauvoir was seriously worried about Sartre. He had been working far too hard all year and was suffering from high blood pressure. His doctor prescribed a long rest in the country, but Sartre ignored him and went on working at his usual frenetic pace. He took no exercise. He occasionally went on diets. (“Most of my life I’ve tried to lose weight so as to give the impression of a thin little man instead of a fat little man,” he said. “Besides, fatness was something I thought of as surrender and contingency.”69) But Sartre enjoyed eating. His favorite food was the rich Alsatian cuisine his mother had cooked in his childhood—cabbage, pork, and all kinds of sausages filled with fat. He hated vegetables and fruit. He loved cakes, chocolate, and sugar-drenched desserts. And he never touched lobsters, oysters, or any kind of shellfish.

  The worst was the corydrane. He had started crunching as many as twenty tablets a day. Beauvoir and Lanzmann kept telling him, “You’re mad. You’re killing yourself.” Sartre would say he did not care; he wanted to switch on the sun in his head.70

  At the end of May 1954, he left for three weeks in the USSR. It was his first trip there; he’d been invited by the Soviet Writers Union. Before he left, he stayed up for several nights, writing a preface to a book of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of China. On the way, he stopped in Berlin to participate in a Peace Movement meeting. He wrote his speech on the plane.

  In the USSR he gave talks, attended meetings, met official groups, and spoke on the radio. He was whirled around on sightseeing tours across the country. There were endless official receptions and banquets, with a staggeringly heavy consumption of vodka. Always the little tough guy, Sartre was determined to keep up with his large Slavic hosts. At the end of yet another meal in which he had already drunk too much, the writer Simonov presented him with a drinking horn full of wine. “Empty or full, you shall take it with you,” he challenged Sartre.

  “No letter from you,” Beauvoir wrote to Sartre at the beginning of June. The French newspapers sported photos of him in Red Square and on the banks of the Moskowa. Beauvoir had been reading books about the USSR, but she would have preferred a letter. (“L’s waiting avidly for one, because of the stamp—I promised to make him a present of it.”) Evelyne, who had been in the hospital, had received Sartre’s flowers but was “suffering acutely from the lack of letters,” and Beauvoir had done her best to console her. She had also given Wanda her money and made arrangements for Michelle to get hers. “I had your mother on the phone this morning…she seemed in good form. Your whole little world is doing fine in fact…. I kiss you with all my soul, my dear, sweet little beloved.”71

  After a short visit to London, Beauvoir and Lanzmann returned to the Rue de la Bûcherie to find an urgent note from Bost under their door: “Come and see me at once.” They rushed downstairs, to Bost and Olga’s apartment. Sartre’s secretary, Jean Cau, had phoned Bost to say that Sartre was in a hospital in Moscow, with high blood pressure. Beauvoir panicked. The whole group went to see Jean Cau, who assured them that it was nothing serious. But Beauvoir remained uneasy. They decided to go to the Soviet embassy and ask the cultural attaché to phone Moscow.

  At the embassy, they were told they could phone the USSR themselves. All they had to do was to pick up the receiver and ask for Moscow. Beauvoir writes:

  The image of the Iron Curtain was still so firmly fixed in our minds at the time that we had some difficulty believing them. We went back to the Rue de la Bûcherie, I asked for Moscow, for the hospital, for Sartre. At the end of three minutes, I was stupefied to hear his voice. “How are you?” I asked anxiously. “I’m very well, thank you,” he answered
in polite tones. “How can you be well if you’re in the hospital?” “How do you know I’m in the hospital?” He seemed mystified. I explained. He admitted that he’d had a sudden attack of high blood pressure, but it was over and he was returning to Paris.72

  Sartre spent ten days in the hospital in all, and returned to Paris exhausted. For months afterward he was depressed, with no energy, and close to a nervous breakdown.

  Years later, he would claim that he was too sick to think clearly when he insisted in an article in Libération that there was complete freedom of expression in the USSR. The statement was so palpably false that even Ilya Ehrenburg, the Soviet writer who had been responsible for Sartre’s invitation to Moscow, rebuked him for his rosy reporting.

  In The Mandarins, Anne Dubreuilh, musing about her husband, the Sartre-like Robert Dubreuilh, finds herself thinking the unthinkable:

  “There was a time when he would have spoken out,” I said to myself. There was a time when he was completely forthright, would let neither Russia nor the Communist Party get away with anything.

  In 1975, Sartre would admit that he had lied after his first visit to the USSR:

  Actually, “lied” might be too strong a word: I wrote an article—which Cau finished because I was ill—where I said a number of friendly things about the USSR which I did not believe. I did it partly because I considered that it is not polite to pour shit on your hosts as soon as you are back home, and partly because I didn’t really know where I stood in relation to both the USSR and my own ideas.73

  Until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Sartre never criticized the USSR in public statements.

  Sartre went to Rome, with Michelle, to convalesce. He slept a great deal. To Beauvoir he wrote that he did not seem capable of rubbing two ideas together. At the end of August, when they made a trip to Germany and Austria, Beauvoir was shocked by his apathy: