Tete-a-Tete (2 page)

Jean-Paul Sartre had been interested in her for months. At twenty-one, she was the youngest of the Sorbonne students preparing that year for the
agrégation
in philosophy, the competitive national teacher's examination. She had given a talk in class on Leibniz, and Sartre was struck by her beauty and brilliance, her husky voice, and her rapid-fire speech.

His friend René Maheu had been courting her since the spring. Maheu was married, but he and Simone de Beauvoir seemed very taken with each other. They both went to the Bibliothèque Nationale, the National Library, to prepare for their exams, sat beside each other to work, and often had lunch together. Sartre had been hoping for an introduction, but Maheu guarded her fiercely. One afternoon, the two men had been strolling together in the Luxembourg Gardens when they saw Mademoiselle de Beauvoir across the pond. She was by herself, and it was obvious she had seen them, but Maheu chose to ignore her rather than present her to Sartre.

Early in May, she disappeared. A week or so later, Sartre and Maheu were sitting on a windowsill outside the lecture theater in one of the long, labyrinthine corridors of the Sorbonne when she appeared, wearing a black dress and little black hat swathed in crepe. Maheu went up to her, grasped her hand warmly, and asked why she was in mourning, but he did not introduce her to his friend.

Then Sartre took the initiative. During dull lectures, he and his friends entertained themselves by drawing humorous sketches in which they none too delicately expressed what they thought of certain philosophers and their philosophies. He picked out a particularly irreverent one, wrote on it, “To Mademoiselle Simone de Beauvoir, in memory of an explication of Leibniz,” and asked Maheu to give it to her, which he did.

Sartre then made a suggestion to his two friends René Maheu and Paul Nizan. They were planning to prepare for the oral exams together. Simone de Beauvoir knew her Leibniz well and was clearly very bright; suppose they asked her to join them?

By mid-June, the written exams were over and there was only a month before the orals. Maheu was off to join his wife in Normandy for ten days. Sartre told him he would like to make the acquaintance of Mademoiselle de Beauvoir before they started working together as a group. He suggested a tearoom on the Rue de Médicis, across from the Luxembourg Gardens, five minutes from the Sorbonne. Maheu passed on the message but told Beauvoir he was afraid Sartre would take advantage of his absence to make off with her himself. “I don't want anyone to get in the way of my most precious feelings,” Maheu said. He had talked about Sartre in glowing terms, but as far as women were concerned, he did not trust him an inch.

On the designated afternoon, Sartre waited in the tearoom, reading and smoking his pipe. He was taken aback when a fair-haired young woman walked up to him, introduced herself as Hélène de Beauvoir, and explained that her sister was unable to come. “How did you know I was Sartre?” he asked. Poupette, as everyone called her, looked sheepish. “Because…you are wearing glasses.” Sartre pointed out that the man sitting in the other corner was also wearing glasses.

Sartre thought he knew why Simone de Beauvoir had not turned up, and he could guess how she had described him to her younger sister. He was right. Beauvoir had told Poupette that she would have no trouble recognizing Sartre. He was extremely short, he wore glasses, and he was “very ugly.”
¹

Sartre was gallant, and took Poupette to see the new American film
A Girl in Every Port.
The conversation flagged. When she got
home, Poupette told her sister that Jean-Paul Sartre was nothing like the lively dynamo Maheu had cracked him up to be.

 

This was not an auspicious beginning. Sartre could not stand being rejected by women. Throughout his life, he would never forgive his mother for betraying him, as he saw it, by marrying again, when he was eleven. Then there was that traumatic episode in La Rochelle, when he was twelve.

His father, Jean-Baptiste Sartre, had died when Jean-Paul was fifteen months old. Twenty-four-year-old Anne-Marie bundled up her little “Poulou” and went to live with her parents in Paris.
²
She belonged to the dynasty of Schweitzers, a Protestant family from Alsace (the famous Albert Schweitzer was her cousin), and like all the Schweitzers, Anne-Marie was tall and slim. Physically, Poulou would take after his diminutive father. And when he was two, he went almost blind in his right eye.

Poulou was the little prince in his grandparents' house, doted on and idolized by his mother, grandmother, and grandfather. In that patriarchal household—dominated by the lanky, bearded, and imperious Charles Schweitzer—Anne-Marie felt to Poulou like an older sister. She was financially dependent on her parents, and they condescended to her. There were three bedrooms in the house: the grandfather's, the grandmother's, and the one they called “the children's,” which Anne-Marie shared with her son.

Anne-Marie gave Poulou her undivided attention. They told each other their troubles. She read to him. She played the piano for him. On rainy Sundays they would earnestly debate whether to go to the circus, a museum, or a movie. Charles Schweitzer would appear at the door of his book-lined study. “Where are you children off to?” he would ask. It was usually the movies.

“All I wanted to see was Anne-Marie, the young girl of my mornings,” Sartre would write in his autobiography,
Words.
“All I wanted to hear was her voice.”

When he grew up, Sartre intended to marry Anne-Marie. Then, in 1916, when he was eleven, she married again. For Sartre, this was a catastrophe. It broke his heart. The stranger who stole his mother was Joseph Mancy, a naval engineer. Until the day he died, Sartre would always hate his “Uncle Jo.”

The following year, when Sartre was twelve, the awkward trio moved to La Rochelle, a small port town on the Atlantic coast. Sartre detested the place. His new classmates were the sons and daughters of local fishermen and oyster farmers. They did not like him—a prissy Parisian with a walleye and a funny way of speaking—and they did not hesitate to beat him up. It did not take Sartre long to become a tough little hoodlum himself.

In a bid for popularity, he stole money from his mother's handbag to treat the other kids to cakes from the local pastry shop. The provincial boys all seemed to have girlfriends, and Sartre told tall stories about his girl, back in Paris, with whom he had gone to a hotel and made love. They did not believe him. At school in La Rochelle, he picked out a pretty blond girl, the daughter of a ship chandler, and boasted about her to his classmates. They warned her of Sartre's interest.

Sartre never forgot that afternoon. He found the girl, Lisette, standing with a group of her friends. He was on his bicycle. Not sure what to say, he rode in circles around the group. Finally, she said: “Have you finished, you cross-eyed old fool, with your glasses and big hat?”
³
Her friends jeered.

The realization that he was ugly hit Sartre like a stone from a catapult. His adolescence was tormented by it. At the end of his teens, he made a decision. He told a girlfriend, Simone Jollivet, “Until last year I was very melancholy because I was ugly and that made me suffer. I have absolutely rid myself of that, because it's a weakness. Whoever knows his own strength must be joyful.” He added, “I call that state moral health, because it is exactly like when one is in excellent physi
cal health, one feels strong enough to bend lampposts with a single hand.”
⁴

Sartre, the future existentialist, had made a fundamental existential choice. If he could not seduce women by means of his physical assets, he would seduce them with words—
les mots.

 

At sixteen, Sartre was sent back to Paris to his old school, the prestigious Lycée Henri IV, this time as a boarder. Among his classmates was Paul Nizan, equally talented and ambitious, and equally set on becoming a writer. For the next few years, Sartre and Nizan became inseparable friends.

As schoolboys, the young Sartre and Nizan took themselves for supermen. Convinced they were far superior to the common herd, they would strut around Paris for hours at a time, imitating their literary heroes, acting out roles, inventing a private language. Sartre gorged himself on adventure stories; Nizan introduced him to contemporary literature. They read each other's writing, and discussed narrative technique.

From Henri IV, Sartre and Nizan went to the equally prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand, for two years of hard cramming in preparation for the competitive entrance examination to the most elite all-male institution in the nation. Two years later, they moved together to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in the Rue d'Ulm, near the Pantheon, where they shared a study.

They were so often together that people mixed them up, though their only common physical attribute was a squint. Nizan's eyes rotated inward; Sartre's roamed outward. Whereas Sartre's wandering eyes were intensely disconcerting, Nizan's cross-eyed look was quite appealing. Sartre was stocky, and at 158 centimeters (five foot one), he was cruelly short. His skin was pale and dull, with pockmarks and blackheads, and he looked as if he needed a bath and a good sleep. Nizan, dark and handsome, dressed with a dandy's elegance and sometimes appeared at lectures in plus fours, dangling a monocle or twirling a malacca cane. Sartre greatly admired his friend's costumes, but did not try to compete.

By their early twenties, their temperaments were pulling the two
friends apart. Sartre was in his element during the four years he spent at the Ecole Normale. He reveled in his newfound independence and enjoyed the security of an easygoing, elitist male community, in which he shone. He threw water bombs on friends in evening attire; he wrote a highly obscene sketch for the school's annual review, in which he acted the part of the school principal. The other
normaliens
would hear him singing in his fine tenor voice as he dashed between lectures, and playing the piano evenings in the common room. He once stepped into the middle of a fight because he saw an acquaintance, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, being picked on. And yet he was one of the leaders when it came to hazing, the semi-sadistic initiation rituals to which new recruits were subjected.
⁵

Nizan, on the other hand, was profoundly unhappy in that environment. In his autobiographical narrative
Aden Arabie
(published in 1931, when he was twenty-six), Nizan, by then a Marxist, was scathing about the Ecole Normale, that “laughable and odious” institution with the esprit de corps of seminaries and regiments, where adolescents, tired after years of cramming for competitions, were taught vapid sophisms by stuffy professors who lived in the affluent western districts of Paris.
⁶

Nizan had always been prone to melancholy, and at the Ecole Normale his moods grew darker. In one of the most tender and penetrating portraits Sartre would ever write, his foreword to the 1960 reprinting of
Aden Arabie
(Nizan was killed in battle in 1940), he was harshly critical of his own inability to understand the depths of Nizan's anguish. As a student, he preferred to see Nizan's rage and despair as emotional extravagance—an affectation, such as his wearing a monocle.

In their shared study, whole days would pass when Nizan did not speak to his companion. Sartre was hurt. And when Nizan took a
year's leave from the overheated atmosphere of the Normale and caught a boat to Aden, in Yemen, Sartre felt as if he'd been jilted.

Almost a year later, Sartre was alone in his study one evening, moping over a girlfriend, when Nizan burst in without knocking. Sartre was overjoyed. The two went out drinking. It was like old times. Over brimming beers, they again put the world on trial. Sartre thought they had taken up their friendship where they left off. But Nizan did not return to board at the Ecole Normale. Instead, he moved in with his fiancée's family, in Montparnasse. A few months later, he got married. Sartre was appalled. “I had made of bachelorhood a moral precept, a rule of life—thus it couldn't be otherwise for Nizan.”
⁷

Sartre was known for his brilliance, and was expected to come first in the
agrégation.
In June 1928, to everyone's astonishment, he failed the written exams. That was why he was sitting them again a year later, in the summer of 1929, at the same time as Paul Nizan, who had lost a year by going to Aden, and as Simone de Beauvoir, who had gained a year by taking her teacher's diploma at the same time, giving herself a double load.

 

Beauvoir had heard considerable gossip about Sartre and Nizan, those godless young men who mocked bourgeois hypocrisies and Catholic sanctities and only bothered to drop in on certain lectures. Around Sartre, in particular, there swirled rumors of drunken binges and visits to brothels. The third member of their trio, René Maheu, did not share their legendary reputation. Although he, too, held himself aloof from most of his fellow students, Maheu was slightly less intimidating.

In January 1929, Maheu had given a talk in class that provoked an animated discussion. Beauvoir was charmed by Maheu's slightly mocking voice, his “broad, liquid smile,” and the “ironical twist he gave to his mouth.”
⁸
Despite his well-cut suits, his ruddy complexion and blond hair lent him the air of a country boy. She wished she could get to know him.