Tete-a-Tete (11 page)

What made things worse, far worse, was that Gallimard rejected Sartre's novel
Melancholia
(the future
Nausea
). He had been working on it for four years, and had staked everything on it. With Beauvoir's encouragement and advice, he had completely reworked it three times. She was convinced that it was now a first-rate novel. Sartre was heartbroken.

 

By February 1937, Beauvoir was at her wits' end. She was working very hard—at school most mornings by eight-thirty, and in her spare time trying to finish a collection of novellas—and she felt strangely exhausted. One evening, she was having a drink with Bost at the Café Sélect, in Montparnasse, when a shiver ran through her. She spent the next few days in bed, sweating and in severe pain. Every day she felt weaker than she had the day before. Her doctor finally became alarmed. She was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Saint-Cloud, on the edge of Paris.

It turned out to be an extremely serious case of pneumonia. One of her lungs had collapsed, and the other was damaged. If the good lung failed, she could die. For weeks, Beauvoir floated between consciousness and unconsciousness, relieved to lie between fresh sheets, with nurses to look after her, removed from the daily crises of the trio.

Her mother visited every morning. Olga and Madame Morel came in the afternoons. When Sartre was in Paris, he saw her every day. His
tenderness and solicitude reassured her. But he remained preoccupied. “It was the last stage of my passion for O,” he wrote later. “I was nervy and restless, each day I used to wait for the moment of seeing her again—and beyond that moment for some kind of impossible reconciliation. The future of all those moments spent waiting for the train in the station at St-Cloud was that impossible love.”
⁵¹

Her doctor wanted to send Beauvoir to a sanatorium. She wanted to convalesce in Paris. The doctor reluctantly agreed. Sartre moved her to a more comfortable hotel, the one in which Zuorro lived, on the Rue Delambre. During the Easter vacation, when Sartre was in Paris, he carried Beauvoir's lunch over from the Coupole, taking great care not to spill it on the way.
⁵²

 

That Easter, in 1937, Olga's sister, Wanda, came for a visit to Paris. She had grown more beautiful since the time Sartre met her in a dance bar in Rouen. Whereas Olga was delicate and graceful, Wanda was plump and comely. But her face was exquisite. Unlike her sister, Wanda was only semiarticulate. “It was pathological,” she told an interviewer, years later. “I could not talk, and not at all with Sartre.”
⁵³
She was an adolescent from the provinces, she explained to her interviewer, and this was Paris, the intimidating capital, and there was Sartre, equally intimidating, who never stopped talking. She felt completely out of her depth.

One day, Olga was looking after Beauvoir, and Sartre suggested to Wanda that he show her Montmartre. She was a good walker and could happily trudge for kilometers, but that day Sartre exhausted her.
⁵⁴
He took her to his favorite place, Le Café Rouge. At one point, he suggested they act out roles. She would be his mother; he would be her daughter. “I was horribly shocked,” Wanda recalls.

The memory of that afternoon still made Wanda shudder when she was fifty-six. On the way home, in the back of a taxi, Sartre put his arm around her shoulders, pulled her over to him, and planted a kiss on her lips. Wanda, a twenty-year-old virgin, was appalled.
⁵⁵

For the rest of her vacation, Wanda dreaded bumping into Sartre on the street. She hid in her sister's hotel room, refusing to go out.
Olga, who was quite bitter these days about Sartre's manipulative behavior, was furious on her sister's behalf. After Wanda returned to Laigle, Olga tackled Sartre about it.

He penned Wanda an icy letter from the Dôme. “Calm down,” he told her. He would not be seeing her again, nor her older sister. If destiny should cause them to meet on the street, he would cross the road. So he had spoiled her Paris holiday? She had spoiled it herself! Or at least, her sister had, by telling her all those nasty things about him. He had never had any intention of playing the seducer. That role did not suit him, he already knew that. If anything, he had been rather bored by the idea of taking her out. And he had never for one second imagined that she loved him!
⁵⁶

 

With her collapsed lung, Beauvoir missed an entire term of teaching. For weeks, she was bedridden. Sartre wrote her tender letters. “Do you feel well, are there roses in your cheeks?” he asked. “Don't forget to take a little walk around your armchair. And when you've had a good trip around it, sit down in it.”

It was Zuorro and Bost who took her out for the first time. “They walked me as far as the Luxembourg Gardens, each supporting me by one arm,” Beauvoir writes. “The fresh air and sunlight were quite overwhelming, and I could hardly keep my balance.”
⁵⁷

She was still weak and gaunt in mid-April, when she took the train south to convalesce, on doctor's orders, in a warmer climate. In the little Provençal town of Bornes-les-Mimosas, she gorged herself with good food and lay in the sun reading Faulkner's short stories. A few days later, defying her doctor's strict orders, she slung her knapsack on her back and set off on a walk. Sartre urged her not to tire herself out. “Eat well, my Beaver, turn your back to the sea, walk three little kilometers, then sit down.”

From Laon, Sartre was determinedly courting Wanda, despite his protestations to the contrary. Every day, he worked on his short stories, then spent from one to three hours writing to “the littlest Kosakiewicz.” Near the end of April he told Beauvoir there had been two letters in his mailbox that afternoon:

Years later, Sartre told his biographer John Gerassi (the son of Fernando and Stépha) that when Olga went off with Bost, he was excruciatingly jealous for six months. In order not to succumb to despair, he felt obliged to form a romantic relationship with Olga's sister, Wanda.

“Why did you feel obliged?” Gerassi asked.

“Because the woman I loved had refused me,” Sartre said. “They look very alike, you see, and so it had to be her. It could not be anyone other than this sister.”
⁵⁸

May 1937–September 1939

In May 1937, Sartre's gloomy years came to an abrupt end. “Everything began to smile on me.”
¹
He announced to Beauvoir, still convalescing in the south, that Gallimard had decided to publish his novel
Nausea
after all.
²
“Today, I walk the streets like an author.” One of his short stories was going to appear in the summer issue of Gallimard's prestigious journal, the
Nouvelle Revue Française.
And he had landed a new teaching post. After eight years of exile in different towns—eight years of hanging about on railway platforms—he and Beauvoir would finally both be in Paris.

In the summer, they spent six weeks in Greece, three of those weeks with Bost. They slept in the open. Sartre and Bost raced each other down the marble steps of the Acropolis. They traveled to the Cyclades islands on decrepit old boats. (In the choppy seas, Beauvoir invariably heaved her guts up, and Sartre would accuse her of self-indulgence.) Beauvoir planned exhausting excursions, to which Sartre mostly good-naturedly concurred. (When he did not, she admits she was capable of shedding “tears of pure rage.”
³
) On the island of Santorini, they set off on their longest walk, one they would never forget. The sun was blazing mercilessly, and by the time they reached the ancient ruins of Thera they were parched and exhausted. Then they had to walk halfway across the island to catch a bus back. The last straw was when they strayed from the path and lost their way, whereupon Sartre
threw one of his short, sharp temper tantrums. “This is a fine sort of lark,” he said. “I came out here to make the Grand Tour, and now you've got me playing at Boy Scouts.”
⁴
By the time they got to the village of Emborio, and stumbled around the baking, shuttered streets looking for a place to eat, they felt half dead.

Sometimes Bost and Beauvoir went off by themselves, exploring or swimming, while Sartre stayed in a café and worked. That summer, he wrote to Wanda every day—hundreds of pages in all—colorful, humorous letters full of tenderness.
⁵

While Beauvoir traveled around Alsace for ten days with Olga, Sartre went back to Paris to look for a room. Beauvoir's hotel, the Royal Bretagne, was full, as were most of the long-term rental hotels in Montparnasse, and Sartre was pleased to discover the Hôtel Mistral, on the Rue Cels, a tiny street between the Avenue du Maine and the Montparnasse Cemetery. “It doesn't look very promising, has a shabby stairway and motheaten halls,” he told Beauvoir, “but the rooms are large, clean, and much better furnished than those at the Royal Bretagne, with a sofa, rug, bookshelves on the walls.”

When Beauvoir came back to Paris, they moved in, taking rooms on different floors. “Thus we had all the advantages of a shared life,” Beauvoir writes in her memoirs, “without any of its inconveniences.”
⁶

Their favorite cafés—the Dôme, Coupole, and Sélect—were close by, on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. Just around the corner from the Mistral, on the Avenue du Maine, was a large, noisy brasserie, the Café des Trois Mousquetaires. For the next few years, these cafés were as familiar to them as their hotel rooms. “What never wearies me,” Sartre would write, “is to sit on chairs which belong to nobody (or, if you like, to everybody), in front of tables which belong to nobody: that's why I go and work in cafés—I achieve a kind of solitude and abstraction.”
⁷

Now that they lived in the same city, they had to be careful not to encroach on each other's private space. Their days were strictly scheduled. On the whole, they did not see each other before they left for school. Sartre tended to be irascible when he first got up, and preferred his own company at breakfast. “I can hardly endure even the Beaver,” he confessed in his journal. “I have been known, when she'd be waiting for me at the Rallye, to pop in to the Café des Trois
Mousquetaires and quickly gulp down a coffee and croissants, in order to remain for a moment still wrapped up in myself and last night's dreams.”
⁸
Their afternoon writing hours were equally sacred. Lunch times and evenings, after eight
P.M.
, were their sociable hours.

They had long ago decided that the most satisfying form of communication was tête-à-tête. If Sartre was eating with Wanda at the Coupole, or if Beauvoir was seeing Olga at the Dôme, there was no question of the other's spontaneously joining them. And time limits were sacrosanct. Their friends constantly complained that when their time was up, they were expected to melt away, making way for the next person.

Sartre was teaching at the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly, an affluent western district of Paris, close to where his parents lived, in Passy. His mother, Anne-Marie, wanted him to have lunch every day at her house, after he'd finished his day's teaching, but he could not abide his nagging stepfather. “I convinced my mother that it would be quite enough if I came for lunch on Tuesdays and dinner on Sunday evenings,” he told Beauvoir. “She asks only a brief bit of afternoon for herself, which is reasonable, because these days she's being extremely kind.”
⁹

Beauvoir saw her parents less often, and did not enjoy her visits. Georges de Beauvoir had become bitter and disillusioned with his life, and often made jibes about Simone's writing, which never found a publisher, and her ignominious free union with Sartre. “You'll never amount to more than a Worm's whore,” he flung at her.
¹⁰

 

Nausea
was published in April 1938. The dedication read: “To the Beaver.”
Les Nouvelles Littéraires
called it “one of the distinctive works of our time.” Paul Nizan (whose third novel,
La Conspiration,
was also a contender for the prizes) hailed Sartre as a “French Kafka.” Sartre and Nizan were both considered to have a good chance of winning the prestigious Prix Goncourt. Neither did.

When Sartre's story “The Wall” appeared in the
Nouvelle Revue Française,
André Gide told the editors he thought it a masterpiece. “Who is this new Jean-Paul?” he asked. “It seems to me we can expect a lot from him.”
¹¹

 

Simone de Beauvoir dazzled her students at the Lycée Molière. She came to class in elegant, tight-fitting suits and exuded a “brilliant, piercing, bold intelligence.” She never looked at her notes, and spoke so fast that the students sometimes begged her to slow down. Bianca Bienenfeld, the best student in Beauvoir's 1938 baccalaureate philosophy class, thought her like “a ship's prow speeding through the waves.”
¹²

That spring, Bienenfeld wrote Mademoiselle de Beauvoir a letter. She was tremendously inspired by philosophy classes, she said, and would like to continue her studies at university. Might it be possible for them to meet and talk after school? The reply came by express delivery. Beauvoir suggested a brasserie in Montparnasse.

Bienenfeld was sixteen, small and pretty, with a mass of curly auburn hair. Her parents, hoping to escape the anti-Semitism they had experienced in Poland, had come to France when Bianca was a baby, and her father, previously a medical doctor, had done well in the pearl business. They were a cultured, well-read family. Bienenfeld was also a talented pianist. Beauvoir responded to the girl's passion and intelligence. “I respect her wholeheartedly,” Beauvoir told Bost, “and there are a whole lot of occasions when I do not have the impression of talking to a young girl.”
¹³

The two women were soon spending every Sunday together. “Waking up Sunday morning was a joy for me,” Bienenfeld would write in her memoirs. “I would run to catch the Metro at Passy station, near my family's house…. I was so terribly impatient for the end of my ride; I don't think I have ever felt so strongly about any other ride in my entire life.”
¹⁴
She got out at Edgar-Quinet and ran all the way to the “seedy-looking Mistral.”

Beauvoir told her about Sartre, explaining that they loved each other but did not want to live together, they did not believe in marriage, and did not want children, and they had affairs with other people, and were never jealous. Bienenfeld was fascinated by the stories about their past trio with Olga, and astonished when she learned that Sartre was now courting Olga's younger sister. She thought the Kosakiewicz sisters sounded lazy and capricious, and she could not
understand Sartre and Beauvoir's generosity toward them. In every way, Beauvoir struck her as courageous and admirable:

At the end of June, after Bienenfeld graduated from school, the two women went on a backpacking trip in the Morvan region, in Burgundy. They hiked about twenty kilometers a day, in mountainous terrain. Bienenfeld found it hard going. Beauvoir urged her on with a hint of impatience. It rained for the whole five days. They stayed in little pensions sharing a bed. “It was during this trip that we began, shyly at first, our physical involvement,” Bienenfeld writes. She was soon telling Beauvoir that she would never love anyone else as much as she loved her.

 

In July 1938, Sartre remained in Paris to finish a volume of short stories and to see Wanda Kosakiewicz, who was coming to stay at the Mistral for a week. Beauvoir was going hiking in the mountains of Haute-Savoie with Bost, who had proved to be one of their few friends, male or female, who could keep up with her. Sartre saw her off on the night train.

The following evening, Sartre ate at the Coupole while reading a detective novel. After dinner, he took out his pipe and wrote to Beauvoir:

Afterward, Sartre went for a long walk, then caught the metro back to the hotel. There was no message from Wanda, he told Beauvoir the next day (“I was a bit annoyed”), and Olga's room was dark. He wondered if Wanda had changed her mind about coming:

It transpired that Olga had gone to meet Wanda, who turned up on the evening train. Sartre woke to find a note from Wanda suggesting they meet at the Dôme at two in the afternoon, and one from Olga asking for money. He found the two sisters sitting on the terrace of the Dôme. He and Wanda walked to the Rue Mouffetard “affectionately entwined.”

Sartre's next letters, addressed to Beauvoir
and
Bost, announced an unexpected turn of events. He had allowed himself to be distracted by a young actress, Colette Gilbert (his interest was piqued by the fact that Maurice Merleau-Ponty was also pursuing her), and Wanda had gone home to Laigle early, in a huff.

Meanwhile, Sartre told Gilbert he loved her, but that there was no room for her in his life with Beauvoir and Wanda. As Sartre told his two readers, Gilbert nevertheless spent three nights with him, in his room at the Mistral:

Sartre was fairly sure that on their last night together, before she left for vacation, he had taken Gilbert's virginity. (“How can I tell you in terms delicate enough not to shock Bost?”)

At seven the next morning, he accompanied Gilbert to the station. When they said good-bye, her eyes filled with tears. Back at the hotel, he found blood on his sheets.

 

Sartre was infatuated by the theater of seduction, and he knew it. He described it as a “literary labor,” which, much like writing, involved fine words, adroit silences, and skilled use of viewpoint. The difference, he reflected in his journal, was that seducing women did not make him feel noble. “I'd come back from a rendezvous, mouth dry, facial muscles tired from too much smiling, voice still dripping with honey and heart full of…disgust.”
¹⁸
Writing, on the other hand, made him feel worthwhile. When he first heard that
Nausea
was going to be published, he told Beauvoir: “I feel more likeable with this than the sort of happiness that comes to me through the bounty of a good woman. I…can think of myself with pleasure.”
¹⁹