Tete-a-Tete (12 page)

His desire to seduce was only partly due to his sense of ugliness. As a child he had learned to please the adults around him with his little antics. He writes in
Words
that early on, he became “a buffoon, a clown, a sham.” Even before his walleye was noticeable, he had gone
to considerable lengths to win little girls' hearts through his talents as an actor and storyteller. In his adolescence, his hated stepfather once made the casual remark that Sartre was like him: “He'll never be able to talk to women.”

Sartre's dream was to be “a scholarly Don Juan, slaying women through the power of his golden tongue.” Since he himself felt so hideously ugly, it was essential that the women were beautiful. (“An ugly man and an ugly woman—the result is really…rather too conspicuous.”
²¹
) The only problem, he admitted, was that once he had conquered a woman, he scarcely knew what to do with her. “To be honest, for a long time—and perhaps to this very day—nothing struck me as more moving than the moment at which the avowal of love is finally wrenched forth.”
²²

Sartre's lifelong practice of harsh self-analysis was disconcerting—slippery, almost. His friends ended up admiring if not his behavior then at least the merciless lucidity with which he scrutinized himself. But what did it add up to? Critics have regularly discussed Sartre's self-excoriation. Was it exhibitionism? Was he taking responsibility for his actions? Or was it a form of exoneration?

 

Sartre had been courting Wanda for over a year, and their relationship was still unconsummated. Like her sister, she was horrified by his unhealthy diet, which she blamed for his bad skin. She made it clear that physically, he disgusted her. This made Sartre all the more determined in his pursuit.

Feeling contrite about making her jealous with Gilbert, he took the train to Rouen. Wanda consented to meeting him there for the
weekend. They shared a room at Le Petit Mouton (where Beauvoir and Olga had once lived). They even shared a bed. Wanda let him contemplate her naked body, but she resisted any incursions. “To tell the truth, I gain territory each time,” Sartre reported to Beauvoir.
²³

After Wanda caught the train back to Laigle, Sartre had a few hours to kill before returning to Paris. It was a dreary, gray Sunday. He sat in the Brasserie de l'Opéra and wrote a tender letter to Wanda. He called her his “dear little marvel.” He had been wandering the streets of Rouen, missing her, he said. He could still see the charming little smile she had flashed him when she left. He imagined her in the train, downhearted to be returning to Laigle. “I love you, my dear little Wanda.” He believed, or
wanted
to believe, that she was at least a bit fond of him.
Was
she?
²⁴

Wanda was persuaded to return to Paris for a few more days. However, Sartre wrote to Beauvoir (still in the mountains with Bost), progress had been stalled:

They had spent the evening drinking. Wanda looked very pretty, “in an angelic little jacket.” Afterward, in her room at the Mistral, Sartre tipped her back on the bed and kissed her. She dashed to the bathroom, and Sartre heard her vomit. He supposed the rum and sherry had upset her stomach. The next afternoon, he met her at the Dôme. “I froze her out all day, abruptly dropping my game and declaring that we were through unless she became more loving with me. She promised anything I wanted.”

Sartre and Beauvoir had arranged to meet at the railway station in Marseille on the morning of July 30. They were going to take a boat across the Mediterranean to Morocco. “I'm feeling a sort of departure anguish right now, the whole year's behind me,” Sartre wrote to her.
“O charm of my heart and my eyes, mainstay of my life, my consciousness and my reason, I love you most passionately, and I need you.”

 

Beauvoir had been having an enjoyable time in the Savoy with Bost. He was waiting for her at the station at Annecy, “tanned and looking very nice in his yellow pullover.”
²⁵
For the first few days they had risen at six in the morning and hiked grueling distances. They wound their way through gorges, climbed narrow mountain paths, scrambled across screeds of rock, and traversed stretches of snow. In a hailstorm, they hurried down a steep mountain, sliding down slippery ferns, and Beauvoir gashed her left hand on a rock. Bost washed the wound with spirits, bandaged her hand with a handkerchief, and insisted they find a doctor in a nearby hamlet. One afternoon, Bost threw up from sheer exhaustion, and Beauvoir had a violent nosebleed. In the evenings, after a hearty dinner washed down with local wine, Bost smoked his pipe and filled in their travel log, while Beauvoir wrote letters. In fine weather, they slept in a small tent. When it was wet, they took a room in an inn. On the fifth night, it was pouring, and they slept in a barn. Beauvoir would write to Sartre from Albertville:

The following weekend, Beauvoir and Sartre, on their way to Tangiers, stood in the bow of the boat, underneath the shooting stars, watching the moon disappear into the sea. Sartre showed no signs of jealousy, but told Beauvoir, without any real reproach in his voice, that by sleeping with Bost she was being “ignoble” to Olga. Had Beauvoir considered how complicated her life was going to be in the coming year?

It was true, what Sartre said. Beauvoir and Olga had remained close friends, despite their ups and downs over the years. (They had long since ceased being lovers.) And it mattered a great deal to Olga that Bost was faithful to her. But Beauvoir kept thinking of the previous summer, when Bost had been with them in Greece. They had crossed from Marseille to Piraeus in a rickety boat called
Cairo City,
and she had gazed at the sleeping Bost with longing. Throughout those three weeks with Bost, she had been painfully conscious that Bost was a delightful young man of twenty-one, and she was about to turn the ripe old age of thirty.

This summer she
was
thirty, and she would never forget the way Bost had murmured “I love you” at the station at Chambéry. She felt as if her youth had been returned to her. She was not going to spoil it with remorse.

 

Tangiers, Casablanca, Marrakech, Fez, Ksar el Souk, Meknès: they marveled at the shuttered palaces, the mosques, the labyrinthine streets and noisy marketplaces, the veiled women, the donkeys struggling under their loads. In the stifling heat of August, there were few
European tourists in Morocco. Sartre and Beauvoir tried to spend the hottest part of the day in cafés, reading, writing, and drinking mint tea. In Meknès, Sartre stayed and worked in their hotel while Beauvoir went off for the day by herself, steeling herself against the inevitable harassment by Arab men. She had completed her book of novellas that year, while teaching, and she was giving herself a break from writing. Sartre had finished his volume of short stories, and was now writing a daring article for the
Nouvelle Revue Française
in which he attacked the establishment Catholic writer François Mauriac. In years to come, the article would be considered among his most brilliant pieces of literary criticism.

They moved between two worlds, European and Arab. In the native shantytowns, they came across the worst poverty they had ever seen. They told themselves that the French were responsible. They made a twelve-hour trip south, crossing the burning desert in a bus that felt like a furnace, and the driver, the only other European on board, insisted that they sit next to him. They were horrified by the tyrannical way he treated the Arabs to whom he delivered goods along the route.

When Beauvoir heard a love song on a crackling little radio in an Arab bar, she fought back tears. She thought constantly about Bost. “In three weeks I have forgotten none of your smiles, your kisses,” she wrote to him. “I am about to go to bed, I have a terrible desire to see you. You remember Emborio, how hot and thirsty we were, how we were tortured by our need for shade and water. Well! That is nothing beside the kind of anguish I feel tonight. My love, my love, how I wish you were here, your body pressed against mine.”
²⁷

Bost wrote that he was reading and rereading her letters with the most perfect joy. He was having “a devil of a time” with her handwriting. He felt like a bad Hellenic scholar, who needed a dictionary to read Greek texts.

He had a hard time getting to sleep the previous night, he wrote. “I tossed and turned until three in the morning in the tent and got up at one point to drink. I had an incredible desire to have you beside me in the tent, and two months seems interminable.”
²⁹

In Fez, Beauvoir learned that Bianca Bienenfeld's mother had come across a love letter Beauvoir had written to Bienenfeld, and had raged about this “spinster with peculiar habits.”
³⁰
The publishing house Grasset had rejected her novellas (already turned down by Gallimard), saying they lacked originality.
³¹
A tender letter from Bost helped her face these bits of bad news stoically.

But an unusually warm letter from Olga left her uneasy. Bost was now with Olga in Marseille, in a dilapidated hotel overlooking the Old Port. Beauvoir was anxious. How did he feel, she asked Bost, strung between two women? There were moments, Bost replied, when he felt very bad about it.

 

In October 1938, back in Paris, Beauvoir and Bost stole as much time together as they could. They spent several nights at the Hôtel du Poirier, in a charming square in Montmartre, well away from Olga's daily stamping ground. They roamed the canals and wandered beside the Seine. Beauvoir felt insecure at times, realizing that she had complicated Bost's life, and convinced that she loved him more deeply than he loved her. Bost tried to reassure her. He had wanted this relationship every bit as much as she did. “I'm happy with my life now.”
³²

At the beginning of November, Bost had to leave for military service in Amiens. And this time—unlike when Sartre did his—the
prospect of war hung over them. Bost was a soldier at the bottom of the hierarchy. Normally, for a man with his education, it would have been natural to climb the ranks to officer status. But Bost, fiercely democratic in spirit and stubborn as a mule when it came to making what he considered “compromises,” firmly refused to do so. He did not want to give orders, he said. He wanted to belong to the common herd. He and Beauvoir both knew what this decision meant. In wartime, he would be among the first men to be offered up as cannon fodder.

Bost came to Paris most Sundays. Some weekends Beauvoir went to Amiens to see him. Olga was always scrounging up money to go to see Bost herself, and frequently it was Sartre or Beauvoir who paid her fare. From now on, Bost had to juggle his free time among Olga, Beauvoir, and his parents. (“The pastor” and “the pastoresse,” as he called them, lived at Taverny, twenty kilometers northwest of Paris.) This meant habitually lying to Olga.