Tete-a-Tete (13 page)

Sartre and Beauvoir regularly discussed Olga's situation. What was the exact nature of false happiness such as Olga's? What freedom did she have within it? Should Beauvoir feel remorse about her affair with Bost? Sartre usually came up with rationalizations that appeased Beauvoir's conscience. Olga had been furious when Sartre had first starting courting Wanda, and she was still angry with him. Sartre took the view that there were some people one simply had to lie to.

 

Sartre was urging Beauvoir to write about her own life. One day that summer, the two of them had been sitting in the Dôme discussing their writing. Sartre leaned forward, Beauvoir recalls:

It was a bold idea, some thirty years before intimate self-revelation became commonplace. At first Beauvoir worried that it was self-indulgent. And there were other people's feelings to consider. But in the autumn of 1938 she suddenly felt a strong desire to write about the complicated relations between the four people she knew best in the world—Sartre, herself, Bost, and Olga. She wanted to write a novel about freedom, love, friendship, and jealousy. She wanted to explore the question of the “Other” that she and Sartre were always discussing. Sartre thought it an excellent idea.

People think of
She Came to Stay
as a novel about the trio that Françoise and Pierre form with the whimsical young Xavière. But a fourth character in the novel is just as important, and he's by far the most tenderly portrayed. Gerbert, with his green eyes and shock of soft black hair falling over his eyes, resembles Jacques-Laurent Bost to the letter.

In the novel, Xavière puts an end to the tortures of the trio by falling in love with Gerbert. “I'm always fond of what belongs to me,” she tells Françoise pointedly. “It's restful to have someone entirely to yourself.”
³⁴
Olga had said exactly the same thing to Beauvoir.

Soon after that, Françoise goes on a hiking trip with Gerbert. One wet night, the two hikers throw their sleeping bags close together on some hay in a barn. The candle flutters. They suddenly feel awkward with one another. Gerbert asks Françoise why she is smiling. She plucks up her courage:

Back in Paris, Gerbert tells Françoise: “I've never loved any woman the way I love you, nowhere near the way I love you.” This was truly the novelist's revenge.

One sunny afternoon, Françoise is reading on the terrace of the Dôme. When she opens her handbag to pay, she discovers that the key to her writing desk is missing. Her heart misses a beat. She runs back to the hotel, rushes up the stairs, opens the door of her room,
and finds her desk ransacked. Letters from Gerbert are scattered all over the carpet.

In the novel, Françoise is so upset by Xavière's knowing the truth that she murders Xavière in order not to have to face her accusing eyes. And yet here was Beauvoir, the writer, effectively
telling
Olga that she was having an affair with Bost.

No one knew better than Olga how much the novel was true to reality, with some bits of dialogue taken straight from life. Nevertheless, to Olga, Beauvoir and Bost would always insist that the romance between Françoise and Gerbert was pure invention. Olga must have often wondered: Where did the truth lie in this bewildering hall of mirrors? First came the flattering dedication: “To Olga Kosakiewicz.” And then the epigraph from Hegel: “Each conscience seeks the death of the other.”

 

While she was in love with Bost, Beauvoir was also having a passionate affair with Bianca Bienenfeld. (Bost knew about Bienenfeld, but Bienenfeld did not know about him.) Bienenfeld was eighteen now, and studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. She saw Beauvoir three times a week, and their lovemaking was ardent.

For their Christmas 1938 vacation, Sartre and Beauvoir went to Mégève. (Beauvoir asked Bost to write to her, “Mme Sartre,” at the hotel Les Primevères.) Bienenfeld was staying in a youth hostel at Mont d'Arbois, on the other side of the mountain. Some mornings, the three took skiing lessons together. Bienenfeld looked charming on the slopes, with her curly red hair wrapped in a little headscarf. One afternoon she came back to their hotel, and Sartre explained phenomenology to her while Beauvoir thumbed through magazines. After dinner, Bienenfeld lay on their bed and free-associated, and Beauvoir and Sartre psychoanalyzed her. On New Year's Eve, they invited Bienenfeld to a celebratory dinner with them in their hotel. It
was too late to go back up the mountain, so Bienenfeld wrapped herself in an eiderdown and slept on the floor.

When they got back to Paris, in January 1939, Sartre started to court Bienenfeld seriously. Bienenfeld was flattered. This was Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir's idol. At the Sorbonne, Bienenfeld's three closest men friends were Sartre's former pupils, all of whom thought the world of him. In January, Sartre's book of short stories,
The Wall,
came out (dedicated to Olga Kosakiewicz). His name was in all the newspapers. Reviewers talked about his brilliant, innovative writing.
³⁶

Sartre was “a master of the language of love,” Bienenfeld would write years later, in her memoirs. “Just as a waiter plays the role of a waiter, Sartre played to perfection the role of a man in love.”
³⁷
She no longer noticed his wandering eye or the blackheads on his face and neck. He told her she had beautiful eyes. He said he found her slightly hunched posture touching. He called her all sorts of funny nicknames.

They walked across the cobblestones of Montmartre to the Café Rouge, and in that cozy interior, next to the large warm stove, he declared his love for her. He asked whether she thought she could fall in love with him. Bienenfeld said she might be able to, but she did not want to hurt Beauvoir—not ever. Sartre assured her that the Beaver would not mind at all.

He talked about consummating their relationship. Bienenfeld, who was still a virgin where men were concerned, writes in her memoirs that she felt an anticipatory thrill. They chose the day. As they walked down the Rue Cels towards the Hôtel Mistral, Sartre remarked that the hotel chambermaid would be in for a surprise, for he had taken another girl's virginity the day before. “I shuddered inside,” Bienenfeld says, “but I said and did nothing.”

Bianca Bienenfeld Lamblin wrote her memoirs,
A Disgraceful Affair,
in the early 1990s, after having read the newly published correspondence between Sartre and Beauvoir. She had been horrified to learn what they had said to each other about her behind her back, while professing their tender love to her. Her account of that afternoon was no doubt colored by these insights:

Sartre got nowhere with her that day. He earnestly explained the difference between a vagina and a clitoris. Bienenfeld thought him like a teacher, or “a doctor preparing for an operation.” A few days later he achieved his goal. Bianca Lamblin writes that she was never able to enjoy sex with Sartre. When she looked back on this period of her life, after far happier sexual experiences with her husband, it seemed to her that Sartre's practice of coitus interruptus was part of his inability to let go of himself, and even an aspect of what she came to regard as his sadism. She points out that he could have simply worn a condom.
³⁹

Behind Wanda's back, Sartre created a new trio. “My love,” he wrote to Bienenfeld, “
Our
future is
your
future.”
⁴⁰
The old patterns began again. Sartre would knock on Beauvoir's door at nine in the morning to tell her about his evening with Bienenfeld. The girl confessed to Beauvoir that she was in love with Sartre but did not feel passion toward him, and she was afraid Sartre could not accept that, and she was scared of losing him, and could Beauvoir please explain things to him so he would understand?

Until Sartre came between them, Beauvoir had nothing negative to say about Bienenfeld. Now she frequently complained about her to Bost. The three of them had endured a tense evening at the Café Rouge, she wrote to him in his barracks at Amiens. The conversation was forced, and Bienenfeld was irritating. “She does not realize that effusions of tenderness work with two but not with three…. She
took our hands, squeezed them, let them go, took them again, being careful to share herself evenly.”
⁴¹

 

To Beauvoir, it was beginning to seem as if the Kosakiewicz sisters would be her lifelong bête noire. In her letters to Bost, the “Kos” factor was an anguished refrain. Every time Bost had a brief leave, it was agony for Beauvoir. “My love,…do try to spend as much time as you can with me; can't you tell K that you'll be arriving later than you'll actually be coming?…I would love to meet you at the station and spend the first moments with you.”
⁴²

Bost did not always tell her his plans. On his first leave, he saw Olga before seeing Beauvoir. He did not dare to tell Beauvoir until the last minute. She was upset, and told him she felt like his mother, “the pastoresse,” someone to whom he only ever told things afterwards, when they were
faits accomplis.
⁴³

And then there was “the littlest Kosakiewicz,” as Sartre called her. She had become his new obsession. If Wanda was still not sure what she felt about Sartre, she
was
sure what she felt about Beauvoir. She did not like her. In fact, she loathed her, she told Sartre, who did not hesitate to pass this information on.

In the spring of 1939, Wanda came to live in Paris. Sartre supported her financially. “You would make a good little painter,” he told her. He arranged for her to take lessons, and for Poupette, Beauvoir's sister, to share her art studio with her. When Wanda asked him what exactly was the nature of his relationship with Beauvoir, he assured her that they were no more than friends. Then he told Beauvoir what he had said.

The whole situation was “grimy,” Beauvoir fumed to Bost. She felt betrayed. She blamed Sartre's women, who, as she saw it, obliged Sartre to tell lies. And she resented the way the Kosakiewicz sisters talked about her. “It's very unpleasant for me to feel dismembered by these two consciences.” Bost, for once, had no sympathy:

Beauvoir was mortified. A week later, she and Bost had an even more upsetting exchange. She had written to him describing the pleasant Sunday she had spent with Bianca Bienenfeld. The young woman had come to the Mistral as usual, at midday, looking very beautiful, Beauvoir said, in a blue dress and mauve coat. They went to the Coupole and ate a sumptuous lunch, with a bottle of champagne. Then they went to the Flore for a coffee. They must have been flirting with each other rather obviously, because a group of men started to mock them, with coarse gestures. Back at the Mistral, they called by to say hello to Sartre, who was working in his room, still in his nightshirt.

Bost wrote that the word
charming
had stopped him in his tracks. It seemed to him “dreadfully obscene” for Beauvoir to talk about Bienenfeld in that way. He went on to say that he was glad the Beaver had mentioned feeling some remorse about Olga. He had been grappling with his guilt to the point of feeling quite sick about it. The last time he saw Olga, she had been unusually straightforward and sincere with him. He had felt ashamed.

His letter provoked an attack of anxiety that Beauvoir described as “pathological.” She read it in the evening, just before going out with Olga. For hours she felt numb. When she climbed into a taxi at the end of the evening, she struggled to retain her tears until she reached her room, and then she dissolved in a paroxysm of weeping. She woke up in “a despair that was absolutely morbid.” She had lunch with her mother and just managed to control herself until she left. As she went down the stairs, she felt tears coming on like a wave of nausea. The only thing she was able to do, she told Bost, was to go home and cry.