by Hazel Rowley
Elkaïm phoned Beauvoir in a panic. She did not trust Pierre Victor, she said. He had an aggressive, overpowering personality, and she was afraid he would become “Sartre’s Schoenmann.” She was referring to Ralph Schoenmann, the authoritarian secretary-general of the Russell Tribunal, who had made himself a laughingstock at the Stockholm and Copenhagen meetings by constantly claiming to speak on behalf of the absent Bertrand Russell, too old and fragile to be there himself.
Beauvoir did not like Pierre Victor much either. But Sartre seemed happy at the idea of working with him. She was pleased for Sartre, and relieved to have some time for herself. It was tiring to read aloud to Sartre every morning. What could be the problem with paying Pierre Victor to be Sartre’s eyes for three hours a day, and to bring back some joy and stimulation to his life? Later, she would terribly regret her attitude.
In November 1974, Sartre signed a contract with French national television to write ten programs on his relationship to twentieth-century French history. For nine months, Beauvoir and Pierre Victor read relevant books and documents to Sartre. And then, in August 1975, the contract was canceled, ostensibly for budget reasons. At a press conference, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Victor spoke of “indirect censorship.”
All that remained for Sartre now, in the way of work, was the book he and Pierre Victor were planning, based on their tape-recorded discussions. The provisional title was Power and Liberty. They knew they did not think the same way. Like most of his contemporaries, Victor was more interested in Deleuze and Foucault these days, and in the new intellectual fashion known as structuralism. The point of their collaboration, as they saw it, was to think in opposition to each other, to think dialectically.
Victor was convinced the book was going to be important. To some extent, Sartre let himself be carried along by his young friend’s enthusiasm. But he was aware of the problems. “You have ideas that are not mine and that will make me go in certain directions that I used not to take,” he told Victor. As he saw it, this would be “a work set apart” from the rest of his work, “not belonging to the whole.”19
Beauvoir and the old-timers at Les Temps modernes were grateful that Pierre Victor was keeping Sartre intellectually stimulated. They admired Sartre’s fighting spirit. But privately, Jean Pouillon recalls, they looked upon this new project as “the delusion of an old man who refused to give up.”20
Pierre Victor was not his real name, and he sometimes disguised himself with a false beard and sunglasses as well. Benny Lévy, alias Pierre Victor, was born in Cairo to a Sephardic Jewish family who left Egypt during the 1957 Suez crisis, when Victor was eleven. The Algerian War was blazing, and Victor found it difficult to work out his relationship with France. At the age of fifteen, he read Sartre and was bowled over. “For me, the French language was Sartre,” Victor said later.21 He was bright, and by the age of twenty, he was studying at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. But he had never managed to obtain residence papers, which meant he could be thrown out of the country at any time. As a Maoist militant who came in frequent contact with the police, he hid behind a false identity.
Beauvoir was convinced, even in hindsight, that Pierre Victor took on the job of Sartre’s secretary out of a genuine and deep affection for Sartre. As usual, Sartre gave more than he received. Victor was rewarded for his three hours a day with a salary that was generous even for a full-time job. What’s more, Sartre wrote to President Giscard d’Estaing on Victor’s behalf, and managed to get him French citizenship.
As Pierre Victor saw it, his task was to keep the little flame in Sartre alive:
I often felt like quitting. I would arrive, ring the bell, and at times, he wouldn’t even hear me. He’d be there, alone, dozing in his armchair, and, through the door, I could hear the music of France Musique coming from the radio that Simone de Beauvoir had left on for him, so that he wouldn’t feel too lonely or too bored. It was a constant struggle against death. At times, I had the impression I was there to fend off sleep, lack of interest, or, more simply, torpor…. What I was really involved in was a sort of resuscitation.22
Sartre and Victor quickly abandoned the fourth volume of Flaubert, and spent their time discussing history and philosophy instead. Victor was charismatic, fiery, and inclined to be hectoring. Elkaïm, hovering in the background, was sometimes alarmed. “He would come up with a very crucial, complex question at the moment Sartre was about to give in to his fatigue,” she remembers. “At other times, he would start reading to him very loudly, with extraordinary zest and passion, as if in a state of exaltation: It was quite scary.”23
When he felt up to it, Sartre enjoyed himself. At other moments, Victor’s haranguing voice simply tired him. “Pierre would quite like to absorb me,” he told Liliane Siegel. “Some days he baits me, we have a row, sometimes that amuses me and I stand up to him, but at other times it bores me so I give in.”24
To commemorate Sartre’s seventieth birthday, in June 1975, Le Nouvel Observateur published an interview with him. Michel Contat asked Sartre about politics, books, his relationship to music, friends, and money. Sartre agreed he had made a lot of money in his life, and still had plenty coming in from royalties, foreign contracts, interviews, and his teacher’s pension, but he always spent it faster than he made it. “There are people who are financially dependent on me,” he explained. (He did not say that he was paying salaries to Puig and Victor, monthly allowances to Wanda, Michelle, and Arlette, supporting a new girlfriend, Hélène, paying his cleaning woman, and helping out the local beggar.) “At the moment there’s nothing left, and for the first time I’m wondering how I’m going to manage.”25
“There are several women in my life,” he said. “Although in a sense Simone de Beauvoir is the only one, really there are several.” Nevertheless, he mentioned only Arlette Elkaïm and Michelle Vian by name, referring to Elkaïm as “my adopted daughter,” and Michelle as “the wife of Boris Vian.”
He made it clear that his intellectual relationship with Simone de Beauvoir had meant everything to him:
I have been able to formulate ideas to Simone de Beauvoir before they were really concrete…. I have presented all my ideas to her when they were in the process of being formed.
Because she was at the same level of philosophical knowledge as you?
Not only that, but also because she was the only one at my level of knowledge of myself, of what I wanted to do. For this reason she was the perfect person to talk to, the kind one rarely has. It is my unique good fortune….
Still, you have had occasion to defend yourself against Simone de Beauvoir’s criticisms, haven’t you?
Oh, often! In fact we have even insulted one another…. But I knew that she would be the one who was right, in the end. That’s not to say that I accepted all her criticisms, but I did accept most of them.
Are you just as hard on her as she is on you?
Absolutely. As hard as possible. There is no point in not criticizing very severely when you have the good fortune to love the person you are criticizing.
The interview was the summation of a life. There were things Sartre wanted to say, and he knew this might be his last chance to say them. He had dedicated books to other women; he had been photographed with them in the press. But at the age of seventy, he was making a public declaration of his love and his gratitude to Simone de Beauvoir.
Sartre’s women were middle-aged now. In 1975, the year Sartre turned seventy, Wanda was fifty-eight, Michelle Vian was fifty-five, and Arlette Elkaïm was almost forty. Behind their backs, Sartre had embarked on a last romantic attachment with a young woman. Hélène Lassithiotakis, a dark-haired Greek woman in her early twenties, had rung his doorbell sometime in 1972. “Do you remember me? We met in Athens at one of your lectures.”
Sartre paid for her to come to Paris for a year and study philosophy. He saw a lot of her. “When I’m with her, I feel as though I were thirty-five,” he told Beauvoir.26 Near the end of that year, Lassithiotakis had a psychotic episode in th
e street. Le Bon drove her to Saint Anne’s psychiatric hospital. “The Beaver and I used to joke with Sartre about all his mad women,” Le Bon says. “We told him: ‘It’s you who drive them nuts!’”27
Sartre was blind by then, but it did not stop him from making several visits to Athens, accompanied by Beauvoir or Pierre Victor. And Lassithiotakis made trips to Paris. “Because of the medicines she took she had gained over twenty pounds,” Beauvoir writes. “Furthermore, she was as silent now as she had been talkative before her illness. But she was still beautiful and Sartre liked being with her.”28
The affair lasted five years. In 1977, Sartre called it off, telling Beauvoir that Lassithiotakis was too self-seeking. But just as he had with his other women, he continued to see her as a friend.
In March 1977, Sartre did the unthinkable. He had bad pains in his left leg. His doctor had told him that if he did not give up smoking he would have to have first his toes amputated, then his feet, then his legs. Sartre said he would think it over. Two days later, he decided to stop. He handed his cigarettes and lighters to Le Bon. (Beauvoir rarely smoked anymore.) He never went back to smoking, and did not seem to find the deprivation burdensome. He even encouraged friends to smoke in front of him.
But he would not give up alcohol, and this became an aspect of the power struggle among the women. He told Beauvoir he was restricting himself to one glass of whiskey a night. Meanwhile, Michelle smuggled in whiskey bottles, which Sartre hid at the back of his bookcase. He would put on a soft voice, Michelle Vian says, like a naughty boy defying his mother: “You know, I don’t tell the Beaver everything.”
When Beauvoir saw him with an obvious hangover, there were scenes. “It infuriated Beauvoir,” says Michelle Vian. “She was his mama. She was the only one allowed to give him his bottle.”29
For a time Michelle spent Saturday nights at Sartre’s place. When his doctor made a home visit and found Sartre’s blood pressure way up again, he took Liliane Siegel aside—it was her turn with Sartre—and asked whether he had been drinking. Siegel told him that Sartre regularly drank half a bottle of whiskey on his Saturday nights with Michelle. The news reached Beauvoir’s ears. “I telephoned Michelle,” she writes, “telling her why she was no longer to come to Sartre’s on Saturdays.”30
There was another incident, which Beauvoir does not mention in Adieux. Liliane Siegel’s cleaning woman used to go around to Sartre’s apartment once a week. It was not a pleasant job. Sartre had never been fussy about cleanliness, and now he could not see. One day the young woman, who was Portuguese and devoutly Catholic, announced that she would not be going back. On questioning it came out that she had heard a woman having an orgasm in Sartre’s bedroom. She was terribly embarrassed, and had left in a hurry.
Siegel knew Sartre’s schedule. She rang Beauvoir, and told her. Beauvoir made another phone call to Michelle Vian. The conversation, Michelle recalls, was awkward:
“Michelle, we’re friends, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“You know Sartre is very tired. He mustn’t drink. He mustn’t smoke. He mustn’t be excited. He mustn’t have relations. It’s not good for him. You see what I mean?”
The next time they saw each other, Sartre explained to Michelle, “It’s not so bad…. My prostate isn’t in good condition. If I want to…” He added: “I don’t tell everything to the Beaver, you know.”31 According to Michelle Vian, they continued to make love (not intercourse) until near the end of Sartre’s life.
Sartre was furious with Siegel. “You make me sick. You’re a filthy sneak,” he shouted. “I never want to see you again.”32
Olivier Todd once asked Sartre how he coped with all his women, some of whom were notoriously jealous.
I lie to them, Sartre said. It is easier, and more decent.
Do you lie to all of them?
He smiles.
To all of them.
Even to the Beaver?
Particularly to the Beaver.33
Sartre might have meant this as a lighthearted retort, but it was another betrayal. When Todd’s book was published, a year after Sartre’s death, Beauvoir was hurt and angry—with Todd, rather than Sartre.34 In Adieux, published a few months later, she retaliated. “Sartre…did not like [Todd] at all and had only a very superficial relationship with him, which is the contrary of what Todd tries to insinuate in his book.”35
Arlette Elkaïm disliked Beauvoir, but most of all she resented Michelle. “The Beaver does not disturb anything—though I’m sure she’d be disturbed if I upset her vacation with Sartre—but Michelle is in the way,” Elkaïm grumbled to John Gerassi in 1973.
Elkaïm admitted she was “rather exclusive,” and that she had been “very very jealous” of Sartre at times. What was strange, she said, was that she had the distinct impression that he liked her jealousy. (“He is a bit sadistic. It amuses him.”) But Sartre hid many things, Elkaïm said, and it was impossible to know what he was feeling. She thought he was probably anxious about dying, but whenever she chided him about drinking too much, he would drink more, to show he didn’t give a damn. Sartre did not like being told what to do.36
Elkaïm spent most mornings at Sartre’s apartment, along with Sartre’s secretary, André Puig, and Pierre Victor. Sartre and Victor would work, and Elkaïm occasionally interrupted with tea or medicine. She had dropped her wariness about Pierre Victor. They had a lot in common: they both came from North Africa, they were both Jewish, and both of them cared a great deal about Sartre. She and Victor were even learning Hebrew together.
Pierre Victor had discovered Jewish theology. He would turn up in the mornings keen to discuss Emmanuel Levinas and messianism. “What next? Maybe he’ll decided to become a rabbi!” Sartre joked to Elkaïm.37
In February 1978, Sartre went with Victor and Elkaïm on a four-day trip to Jerusalem. (It was Victor’s first time there.) Beauvoir was worried about Sartre traveling, but she heard later that they had taken Sartre to the plane in a wheelchair, and stayed in a luxury hotel, and that their friend Eli Ben Gal drove them everywhere. Sartre enjoyed himself.
But when they got back, there was an ugly episode, a foreshadowing of what was to come. Pierre Victor penned a hasty article on the peace movement in Israel, and asked Sartre to co-sign it. Victor sent it to the Nouvel Observateur. Shortly afterward, Beauvoir received an urgent phone call from Bost: “It’s horribly bad. Here at the paper everyone is appalled. Do persuade Sartre to withdraw it.” Beauvoir read the article, found it very weak, and managed to persuade Sartre to drop it. He did not appear to have much invested in it.
Sartre did not mention the incident to Victor, who did not find out about the article’s being withdrawn till the next Temps modernes meeting. Victor had started to attend meetings, usually in place of Sartre. Beauvoir, assuming he knew, said something about it. Victor stormed out, shouting about censorship and calling his older colleagues “putrefied corpses.”38 It was the last they saw of him at the Temps modernes.
Victor had declared open war on those he referred to disdainfully as “the Sartreans.” Elkaïm was on his side. Throughout her life, whatever the difficulties, Beauvoir had always made a great effort to be on good terms with the people Sartre loved. For her, this new turn of events was devastating. She could only wonder about Sartre’s own loyalties. What did he say to his two young friends about her? Did he defend her to them? Or did he indulge their complaints, and even abet them?
In March 1979, Pierre Victor organized an Israeli-Palestinian conference in Paris, under the aegis of Les Temps modernes. Sartre went along with the idea. From the beginning, the “Sartreans” were skeptical.
The most prominent participant was Edward Said, the Palestinian intellectual and activist, who came from New York for the occasion. For Said, Sartre was “one of the great intellectual heroes of the twentieth century.” Said had accepted his invitation eagerly, and looked forward to the meeting of minds.
Years later, Said would write about those extraordinary
few days. He was shocked to see that Sartre hardly seemed to know what was going on, and was completely dependent on the little entourage that fluttered around him:
Sartre’s presence, what there was of it, was strangely passive, unimpressive, affectless. He said absolutely nothing for hours on end. At lunch he sat across from me, looking disconsolate and remaining totally uncommunicative, egg and mayonnaise streaming haplessly down his face.
The discussion was dominated by Pierre Victor, whom Said observed to be a “deeply religious Jew” and “part-thinker, part-hustler.”
Early on, I sensed that he was a law unto himself, thanks no doubt to his privileged relationship with Sartre (with whom he occasionally had whispered exchanges) and to what seemed to be a sublime self-confidence.
After a second day of “turgid and unrewarding discussions,” Said interrupted, saying he had come from New York to hear Sartre. Victor looked irritated. There were whisperings. Finally Victor announced, “Sartre will speak tomorrow.”
The next day, the group was handed two pages of text allegedly written by Sartre, which were full of “banal platitudes,” and were totally uncritical of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. Said knew the pages could only have been written by Victor.
Edward Said returned to the United States bewildered and disillusioned. “I was quite shattered to discover that this intellectual hero had succumbed in his late years to such a reactionary mentor.”39
On Sartre’s seventy-fourth birthday, on June 21, 1979, the romance novelist Françoise Sagan sent Sartre a love letter, which she asked his permission to publish. She admired him both as a writer and a man, she wrote. He had written the best books of his generation; he had defended the weak and the oppressed; he was the soul of generosity. “Making love and offering love, a seducer always ready to be seduced, you have far outstripped all your friends with your vitality, intelligence and brilliance.”40 Sartre was pleased, of course, and after that, he and Sagan saw each other regularly. He took her to gourmet restaurants, and she cut up his meat and held his hand. She became another of his whiskey smugglers, another woman who intensely resented Beauvoir.41 Sartre called Sagan “naughty Lili.”