Camus found ways to escape his family that were deemed socially acceptable. On August 5, he deserted Paris with his family, and settled into the Château des Brefs, the property of his publisher Gallimard in the Vendée region. The place was so big that Camus was given a room where he could work far away from crying children and a wife who was doing her utmost, but often failing, not to sulk. Camus started almost every day by writing to his darling Patricia. On August 12, he commented: “This is a beautiful and vast old house, furnished with antiquities and old tapestries with ancestors looking at you from their frames. I have found peace here, that is to say that I write for ten hours a day without being disturbed, and I’m finally finishing La peste.”8 On August 21, in another letter to Patricia, Camus announced that he had finished his manuscript at long last, but did not know whether to call it La peste or La terreur. He could have called it Totalitarianism, the subject of his novel. As a token of his undying love, Camus sent Patricia Sartre’s one-kilo philosophy treatise L’être et le néant.
ALBERT, SIMONE, AND ARTHUR
Albert Camus, and indeed Jean-Paul Sartre, often fell for pretty students and groupies. It was easy. Those young lovers were enthusiastic, malleable, a little naive perhaps, and would recover in no time once the affair with the great man had ended. If Maria Casarès stood apart, herself a seductress and as ambitious for her art as Albert Camus was for his writing, Camus nonetheless feared intelligent women. Brought up in a male chauvinist French North African culture, he had difficulty reconciling desire and intellect in his relations with women. He needed to dominate one way or another.
In December 1945, Beauvoir and Camus often had dinner at Lipp, opposite the Café de Flore on the boulevard Saint-Germain. They would then end up in the basement bar of the Hôtel du Pont Royal, right next to Gallimard’s offices. Simone was now too well known a public figure to spend time in the Café de Flore without being interrupted. She liked the discretion of the Pont Royal bar, whether during the day or at night, except that writing on the wine barrels that were used as tables was not an easy task. She did not know how to place her legs; opening them wide in order to hug the barrel was not her idea of elegance.9 In the evening, she and Camus chatted at the Pont Royal until closing time and then strolled happily, if not slightly tipsily, to her hotel room at La Louisiane, where they talked and drank some more. Coal was still severely rationed in the winter of 1945 and it was very cold in Simone’s room;10 drinking helped keep them warm.
Beauvoir was attracted to Camus and Camus to Beauvoir. He admired her as a free-spirited and independent woman, and he desired her: she was five years older and beautiful, she was elegant, chic, and fiery, and under her carapace he knew she was also warm and passionate. However, he was frightened of her intelligence; he feared that it might even turn him off. What kind of pillow talk did one have with Beauvoir? he wondered.11 She had no reservations about him. Nothing in him could turn her off, except perhaps his moralizing, but he usually kept that for his readers. He had confided to her his marital problems and his many frustrations. “He wanted to speak and write the Truth!” she wrote in her diary. “The chasm between his oeuvre and his life ran deep. When we were together, he was funny, cynical, a little coarse, bawdy even. He opened up and gave in to his impulses.”12 Beauvoir had seen clearly the paradox lying at the heart of Camus’ existence. He was one of France’s public moral thinkers, and yet the private man could not reconcile his longing for truth with his thirst for freedom. After two in the morning, fueled by alcohol, Albert liked meditating on love: “One must choose in love: lasting or burning!” Simone loved his “kindness and his hunger for passion.” If Beauvoir and Camus ever had an affair, it was during those nights of December 1945.13
If Camus might, in the end, have felt too intimidated by Simone de Beauvoir’s piercing intelligence and beauty,14 Arthur Koestler was immediately inflamed by it. Unknowingly, Camus had been their go-between. Thanks to Camus, Beauvoir had read Darkness at Noon before anyone else in France and had warmed to Koestler’s mind and personal history. From Bwlch Ocyn in Wales, where he had settled a year earlier with Mamaine Paget, Arthur Koestler had not missed a beat of French political and intellectual life and, at forty, he was impatient to dive back into the Parisian whirlpool, especially following the phenomenal success of the French edition of Darkness at Noon. An invitation he could not refuse arrived in the post in September 1946. The theater director Jean Vilar was inviting him to watch the rehearsals of his play Le Bar du crépuscule, une bouffonnerie mélancolique (Twilight Bar)15 and to attend the first night on October 23, 1946. It had been six years since his desperate flight from Paris in a legionnaire’s uniform and under a fake identity;16 how satisfying to come back as a conquering hero and literary champion.
Koestler, alone for two weeks before Mamaine’s arrival, had not waited to be introduced by common acquaintances. He had gone straight to Combat’s office, entered the editor in chief’s little cubicle, and extended his hand to Camus with a warm smile. Then he had gone to the bar of the Hôtel du Pont Royal, where he knew he would find Sartre and Beauvoir, and waited for them to turn up. On seeing them, he had walked up to them and had said, “Bonjour, je suis Koestler.”17 On both occasions, the rapport between the Hungarian Jew turned English literary lion, the Algerian-born writer, and the Existentialist philosophers was instant.
A week later, Koestler had introduced Mamaine to Sartre and Beauvoir, and they all often met at Sartre’s flat or at the Flore for lunch. On October 23, Mamaine wrote to Celia: “Sartre is simply charming and while he’s talking one feels that existentialism must be the thing, though always without having much idea what it is. He and K. get on very well and we both get on like a house on fire with Simone de Beauvoir.”18 A few hours later that very night, Koestler would also get on like a house on fire with Simone.
Late that evening, the two couples bumped into each other at the bar of the Hôtel du Pont Royal. Mamaine was tired and went to bed, leaving Koestler with Beauvoir, Sartre, and Jean Genet. Back at the hotel, she could not sleep. She wrote to her sister to pass the time. “K shows no sign of coming in, which worries me rather as he must be terribly drunk by now (3 a.m.), hence this rambling letter, as I cannot think of what else to do.” Koestler would be another few hours. He was with Simone, in her round room in the Hôtel La Louisiane, making love furiously to the French philosopher whose passion he had felt from the moment he had met her. She had in turn been attracted to his intensity, his all-devouring energy and blazing intelligence, but she had also sensed in him a certain violence. They had been curious about each other, and had perhaps wanted to test themselves against each other, like boxing champions in the same weight class. As the door shut behind them, he almost ripped off her clothes. She was not entirely surprised to find him rough, very rough. And when he left her at dawn to join Mamaine, who had finally fallen asleep, Simone knew there would not be another night with Koestler. She had realized, by the way he ravished her, that Koestler was a violent and impulsive man, a world-weary seducer. He seemed to be using women in his life like props. Had she not heard him say just that to Mamaine the other night? “You’re my only prop,” he had said. Simone de Beauvoir was nobody’s prop.
MAMAINE, JEAN-PAUL, AND ALBERT
A week later, on October 31, Camus and his wife, Francine, Koestler and his girlfriend Mamaine, and Sartre and Beauvoir met for dinner “in an Arab bistro to eat some Arab food.” From there they went to a bal musette “with blue and pink neon lights and men dancing on stage with girls in very short skirts.” The evening and night were to prove so memorable that Mamaine wrote to her sister the day after to tell her everything in detail. “For the first time in my life I danced with K, and also saw the engaging spectacle of him lugging the Castor (who has I think hardly ever danced in her life) round the floor, with Sartre (who ditto) lugged Madame Camus.” The new friends were having a good time, and the night was young, so Koestler invited them all to a Russian nightclub. The Sheherazade was really not
Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir’s kind of place, but Koestler’s energy was irresistible. On entering the nightclub, they were plunged into almost total darkness with violinists playing soulful music in their ears. The Parisian friends all looked at each other in embarrassment.
Koestler ordered enough champagne, vodka, and Russian hors d’oeuvres (known as zakuski) for a regiment, and everybody started relaxing. “Sartre got very drunk almost at once, Beauvoir also got drunk and K got drunk too (we drank vodka and champagne in large quantities). Francine Camus (who is extremely beautiful and nice) also got tight. Camus and I did not get drunk, though we nearly did.” Not surprisingly, when a pickpocket snitched his wallet with 13,000 francs in it, Koestler did not feel a thing. Time flew by. Sartre knew he was giving a talk, which he had not written yet, to thousands of people at UNESCO the following day, but he was having too good a time to leave. Suddenly the violinists surrounded their table and began playing “Ochi Chornya” (“Dark Eyes”), one of the most famous Russian sentimental songs. On hearing the first notes, Koestler took his head in his hands and started weeping uncontrollably.
The friends patted Koestler on the shoulder and someone said, “Is it time for an onion soup?” In the street, walking toward Les Halles, the “belly of Paris” as Zola had called it, the men started soliloquizing. Camus kept repeating, “If only one could write the Truth!” Sartre was giggling, thinking aloud, “And in a few hours, I’ll be addressing a crowd about the writer’s responsibility!” And Koestler, behind them, exclaimed: “We must absolutely agree on politics or I do not see how we could be friends!” Seated in front of an onion soup, the imperious Koestler insisted on ordering oysters and white wine to wash it all down. “By that time, Sartre was simply roaring drunk, and awfully sweet and funny. He kept pouring pepper and salt into paper napkins, folding them up small and stuffing them into his pocket.”19
Camus, laughing and referring to the UNESCO talk, told Sartre: “Tu parleras sans moi!” (You’ll have to speak without me). Sartre burst out: “Je voudrais bien parler sans moi!” (I wish I could speak without me, too!). When they finally looked out the window it was broad daylight. The three couples said good-bye and very unsteadily went on their way. Crossing the Seine at the Pont Neuf, Simone leaned on the bridge and began sobbing over the tragedy of the human condition. “I do not understand why we do not throw ourselves into the water!” she told Sartre. Now also weeping, he replied, “Well, let’s do it!” At a different bridge, the Pont Royal, Koestler and Mamaine had also wept profusely, but not over the human condition. Simply because of the river’s “incredible beauty” with “those lovely lemon-green and yellow poplars with their black trunks, and the houses reflected in the water by the early morning light.”
Beauvoir could not remember later how they got back to their respective beds. Eight hours later, the worse for wear, looking rather pale, she was seated in the front row at UNESCO’s big amphitheater for Sartre’s lecture. Sartre appeared on stage: “his face was ravaged.” Sartre had slept only two hours. When his alarm went off, he got up and walked with great difficulty to his pharmacy where he grabbed a tube of Orthédrine. It was full; he swallowed all the pills. Orthédrine was a stimulant drug, widely available in pharmacies, on which the résistants who had used it during the war had bestowed a kind of magic aura.
* * *
No amount of pills could distract Sartre from his feelings for Mamaine, whom he had been taken by. She found him charming and very amusing. “Of all the people I have met with K, I like Sperber20 best, and Sartre,” she wrote to her sister Celia that week. However, Sartre was not the only one to have a crush on Koestler’s girlfriend. There was Koestler, of course, but there was Camus, too. He had found Mamaine exquisite. And Camus particularly liked beating Sartre in the seduction game. Whom had Mamaine fallen for, Sartre or Camus? The things that happened that night wouldn’t be revealed until a few months later.
“I LOVE YOU AS A MAN LOVES A WOMAN”
Although both had resigned from the Communist Femmes françaises at the end of 1945 and did not share an office anymore, Édith Thomas and Dominique Aury had remained close. The two women were very different. They had come from diametrically opposed political milieus. Dominique came from the extreme Right and Édith from the extreme Left. Yet both had ended up as résistantes during the war, Dominique through patriotism, Édith through idealism. Dominique was a seductress, a smooth operator, flexible, extremely polite and discreet. Édith loved truth and authenticity while Dominique reveled in secrets and sometimes lies. But they shared three overriding qualities: intelligence, generosity, and humor. From their very first encounter, they became friends. The two were in awe of each other, for different reasons. Dominique admired Édith, and Édith was fascinated by Dominique. Édith knew Dominique had a lover with whom she shared a great physical passion, but she did not know who the man was. Albert Camus?21 Dominique was so discreet that it was impossible to know for certain. As for Édith, she was as desperately lonely as ever.
Édith had grown very harsh, both with herself and with others. At thirty-seven she was too ashamed of her body to risk seduction; she had almost turned the page on men, on sex, and on love; in fact she had only lost her virginity at the age of thirty-two, in “more pain than pleasure,” as she had confided to her diary.22 She had had very few and very brief encounters since, and all had been unsatisfactory. “I’m like a whore in so far as all men are the same to me: I cannot love any of them. I’m as lucid as one can be.”23 She far preferred friendship to love. Dominique, the only person she had let come close, seemed to be the only one to see the sensitive and luminous beauty in Édith.
After months of close friendship, Dominique had decided to reveal her true feelings for Édith. A seductress, a conqueror of both men and women, Dominique knew how to snare her prey. On October 27, she invited Édith to have a coffee. “As soon as I arrived, Dominique told me: ‘Édith, this is an ambush.’ She looked pale and troubled, almost ill. ‘I love you as a man loves a woman.’” Édith recounted the exchange and her feelings about it in her diary immediately after returning home.
What to do? Oh God (who does not exist), what to do? I have for her a profound affection and esteem. We share the same feelings about people and books. I love her delicacy and her intelligence. If she were a man, I would be elated by her love. If I were a man, I would love her. But I’m a woman and she’s a woman. What to do? Why am I always putting myself in awkward situations?24
Édith could not conceive of sex between two women, not out of prudishness but simply because it had never occurred to her that she could one day be concerned by it personally. In fact, she did not have anything against homosexuality. “For me, there is no evil nor any good, no vice nor any virtue in homosexuality. So why refuse it? I have in fact a Greek amoral point of view.”
A few hours later, on the same day, Dominique walked up the stairs to Édith’s flat on tiptoe and as quietly as possible slipped a letter under Édith’s door. It was another declaration of love, using the respectful vous and not the familiar tu.
Édith, my love. Forgive me, as I could not keep silent any longer. I would like to be standing next to you still, and to tell you that I love you, and to kiss you. I do not know how to control myself anymore. Your softness confuses me. You do not know what it feels like to be burnt, and to have under my lips your hands so soft, or your soft black hair, or your cheeks’ downy hairs, there, just above the ears. Édith, I have never loved a woman the way I love you. I have never loved a girl for whom I also had admiration, respect and this combatant camaraderie based on tenderness and which is so powerful in time of war. To have held you in my arms even for a second this morning made me wobble, and reach for the wall for support. I kiss both your hands, Édith.25
Not used to such a display of emotions, both surprised and tormented by it, Édith quickly fell into the trap Dominique had laid for her. The day Sartre dragged himself on the stage of UNESCO for his talk on the responsibility of writers, the
same day Koestler, Mamaine, Camus, and Francine spent entirely in bed, two women on the other side of the Luxembourg Gardens also chose not to leave the bedroom. One was initiating the other in carnal pleasures she had never thought possible. Dominique played the bad boy and Édith the vulnerable jeune fille. Dominique had promised that their liaison would not affect their friendship. She knew she could not remain faithful to one lover, she could not make any promises of the sort, but she was and would always remain a very loyal friend. Their first afternoon and night together transfigured Édith. She threw herself headfirst into their affair. “I’m burning. I’m like a small bundle of dry wood, a handful of straw. I’m thirsty. Am a lone walker in the middle of the desert. I’m hungry. Will you be my orchard, my water spring? Or will you be like fire, consuming everything and leaving me mortally unsatiated?”26
Walking together past the statues of queens of France in the Luxembourg Gardens one frosty November morning, after another torrid night during which Dominique played the “passionate teenage boy” and Édith “his first ever mistress,” Édith tried her best to appear distant and cool: “Dominique, I could never stand the presence of a man in my life and I fear this is what is going to happen again.” Dominique’s eyes welled up with tears: “Oh, Édith, are you telling me that I’m going to lose you? Tell me what I should do, I’ll do everything you want me to do.” By the end of November, Édith had totally fallen under Dominique’s spell. She was now the one writing desperately passionate letters.
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