Tete-a-Tete (3 page)

One morning in spring, Beauvoir looked up from her books at the Bibliothèque Nationale and saw Maheu walk in. She watched him
take off his blue overcoat and scarf and sit down to work. At lunchtime she saw him get up, leaving his books behind. Normally, she ate a sandwich in the gardens of the Palais Royal. That day, she went to the library café. Maheu flashed her a smile and cleared a place for her at his table as if they had arranged to meet. They talked about Hume and Kant.

After that, whenever he came to the library, Maheu would greet her warmly. Before the Easter break, he came and sat next to her in one of Leon Brunschvicg's lectures. (Sartre and Nizan boycotted these.) After Easter, when lectures resumed, he sat next to her again. He told her he was “an individualist.” So was she, she said. He stared at her. “What? You!” He had been convinced that she was a good Catholic, devoted to good works. Not at all, she assured him.
⁹

“Meeting with René Maheu, or with myself?” Beauvoir wrote in her journal that evening. “Who else has ever made such a strong impression on me? Why am I overwhelmed by this meeting, as if something had
really
happened to me at last?”
¹⁰

She started to save the seat next to hers in the library. Maheu turned up most days. For weeks, he called her “Mademoiselle,” in that slightly ironic voice of his. One day, he reached across, took her notebook, and wrote on the cover in large capital letters:
BEAUVOIR
=
BEAVER
. Her name resembled the English word, and she also worked like a beaver. From that day on, he called her Beaver,
le Castor.

He told her about the “little comrades,” as they called themselves. He had met them at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, when he first came to Paris from the provinces, at the age of eighteen. They were now twenty-four. Maheu was “the Lama,” Nizan “the Grand Duke,” Sartre “the Little Man.”
¹¹
Maheu admired his two friends with a passion, especially Sartre, whom he thought a genius. But Sartre was very different from him, he explained. Sartre belonged to the Parisian bourgeoisie; Maheu felt like an upstart in that milieu. Maheu liked to enjoy life; Sartre never for a second stopped analyzing. Maheu liked the countryside and fresh air; Sartre didn't give a damn about such things.

There was something princely about Maheu. He reminded Beauvoir of Jacques, the cousin she had been in love with throughout her adolescence. They were both graceful, boyish characters, who
often smiled in place of speaking. Both valued beauty—in art, nature, and people. To her, they were artists, poets.

Beauvoir's friendships had always been exceptionally formal. Even with her bosom friend, Zaza, whom she had known since the age of ten, she used the formal
vous
rather than the informal
tu.
(Zaza used
tu
with all her other friends.) And when they met or said good-bye, they shook hands. There was only one person who ever hugged or kissed Simone, and that was her exuberant Polish friend Stépha, who was extroverted and unrestrained to a point that left Simone a little dizzy.

Maheu made Beauvoir conscious of her body in a way she had never been before. He would put his hand on her arm and wag his finger in her face mockingly. He commented on her appearance, her clothes, her husky voice. He found it very appealing, he assured her. Beauvoir had never thought about her voice before.

She was equally conscious of Maheu as a physical presence. “I would watch him come striding through the gardens with his rather awkward grace; I would look at his ears, transparent in the sun as pink sugar-candy, and I knew that I had beside me not an angel, but a real man,” she would write in her memoirs. His laugh was irresistible. “When he gave vent to his laughter, it was as if he had just unexpectedly dropped in on a strange planet and was making a rapturous discovery of its prodigious comicality.”
¹²

In the three weeks running up to the written examinations, they saw each other almost every day. On the rare occasions when Maheu did not work in the library, he would turn up at the end of the afternoon and invite her for tea or coffee.

Beauvoir was enchanted by their conversations. Maheu knew a lot about history and myth—more, she thought privately, than about philosophy—and had a wonderfully entertaining way of bringing the past to life. “My greatest happiness is Maheu,” she wrote in her journal.
¹³

He was also her greatest source of anguish. When they said goodbye at the end of the day, she felt sad. He was going home to his wife. He rarely talked about his personal life, but he had told her that Inès was five years older than he, and represented all the mysteries and paradoxes of femininity. He loved her. She was beautiful. She came from the Catholic nobility.

There were times when Beauvoir found Maheu disappointingly
conventional, particularly when it came to women. He admitted that bright women brought out a certain resistance in him. When Beauvoir told him about her tormented relationship with her cousin Jacques, Maheu said he thought she should marry Jacques. Society did not respect unmarried women. Beauvoir lent Maheu a recent English novel she had enjoyed,
The Green Hat,
by Michael Arlen. She admired its independent heroine, Iris Storm. Maheu did not. “I have no liking for women of easy virtue,” he told her. “Much as I like a woman to please me, I find it impossible to respect any woman I've had.” Beauvoir was indignant. “One does not
have
an Iris Storm!”
¹⁴

The written exams were held in the middle of June. Beauvoir and Maheu walked into the library of the Sorbonne together. “Good luck, Beaver,” he said to her gently. They found their seats. Beauvoir placed a thermos of coffee and a box of biscuits by the side of her desk. The topic was announced: “Liberty and Contingency.” She gazed a while at the ceiling, and soon her pen was flying across the page. When they came out, she looked for Maheu, but he had disappeared.

The exams continued for several days. After the last one, Maheu called around at the Beauvoir family apartment, on the Rue de Rennes, and invited Simone for lunch. He was about to join his wife in Normandy, he told her, but when he got back, the little comrades were going to prepare for the orals together. Would she like to join them?

 

When he failed his
agrégation
the previous year, Sartre had been obliged to move out of his room at the Ecole Normale. He was now living in one of the student residences at the Cité Universitaire, on the southern edge of the city. On Monday July 8, 1929, Maheu turned up in the morning, as arranged, with Mademoiselle de Beauvoir. Sartre opened the door and greeted her politely, his pipe in his mouth. Paul Nizan looked at her dubiously through his tortoiseshell glasses.

Beauvoir was taken aback by the filth of Sartre's tiny student room. There were cigarette butts on the floor, and the air was thick with stale body odor and tobacco fumes. Books and papers were piled every
where, and satirical sketches were stuck on the walls. They brought in a second chair for Beauvoir. The others took turns on Sartre's chair, desk, and narrow bed. Beauvoir, who had prepared for this all weekend, gave a close reading of Leibniz's
Discourse on Metaphysics,
feeling as nervous as if she were taking the actual oral exam.

At the end of the day, the men decided that Beauvoir needed a nickname. They teased her with various possibilities. Sartre wanted to call her Valkyrie. To him, she was like a Viking virgin warrior goddess. No, said Maheu. She was Beaver,
le Castor.
They clenched their fists about her head. It was official.

They devoted two days to Leibniz, and decided that was enough; then Sartre set about explaining Rousseau's
Social Contract.
Beauvoir proved by far the best at finding the flaws in Sartre's arguments. Nizan frowned and chewed his nails. Maheu looked at Beauvoir with frank admiration. Sartre accused her of making him trot out everything he knew. But Sartre clearly loved imparting his knowledge, and did so with passion. He knew how to untangle complicated ideas and make them comprehensible and exciting. And while he did so, he had the other three in fits of delighted laughter. “More and more, his mind seems to me quite extraordinarily powerful,” Beauvoir wrote in her journal. “I admire him and also feel huge gratitude for the way he gives himself so generously.”

The men did not hold themselves back in Beauvoir's presence, and Beauvoir was often shocked by the things they said. But she had been rebelling for years against the stiflingly conventional world in which she had been brought up. Their defiance was a tonic.

Beauvoir had never imagined that fierce intelligence could go along with such a sense of fun. When they stopped work, the men started singing, joking, and acting out different characters. Sartre put a jazz record on his gramophone, then they strolled over to the fun fair at the Porte d'Orléans and tried out the shooting gallery. Whenever Sartre scored a prize—an ugly bit of crockery or a dime novel—he gallantly handed it to Beauvoir.

On Wednesday afternoon the group gave themselves what they called “a very big recreation,” at the Café Dupont, in the sleazy Pigalle district of Montmartre. The men drank beer; Beauvoir drank lemonade. She got into a fierce discussion with Sartre, and realized she was arguing with him for the sheer fun of it.

Sartre and Nizan started to plan the group's evening. Maheu cut the discussion short. He was taking the Beaver to the cinema, he said. “Fine, fine,” said Nizan. “So be it,” said Sartre.

On the bus ride back home that evening, Maheu told Beauvoir: “I'm happy you get on with the little comrades, but…”

“But you're the Lama, I know.”

“You won't ever be one of the little comrades.”

“Of course. I'm your Beaver.”
¹⁶

On Thursday morning, Nizan turned up with his wife, Henriette. To Beauvoir's dismay, this meant they did not work. Instead, they squeezed themselves into Nizan's car and went for a drive around Paris, stopping in a bar for a coffee and a game of Japanese billiards. The women did not warm to each other. Henriette Nizan thought that Beauvoir dressed atrociously, and seemed pathetically eager to copy the men—smoking, drinking, even adopting their private language.
¹⁷
For her part, Beauvoir had little interest in Henriette's worries about her new baby. She scrawled in her journal: “I spoke to her about her daughter with an air of sympathy, which apparently made her like me, and which amused Sartre and Maheu, who saw it as proof that I am feminine after all.”

At lunch Beauvoir joined the men in a glass of beer. The Nizans
dropped them back at Sartre's student residence and went home to Montparnasse. Beauvoir, Sartre, and Maheu settled down to work. It was hot. Sartre drew the curtains to keep out the sun. Maheu sprawled on the bed, handsome in his shirtsleeves. Sartre puffed at his pipe. For Beauvoir, in that semi-obscure retreat from the world, time seemed to melt away. She was at her brilliant best that afternoon, and she knew it. “I felt unleashed,” she wrote in her journal.

At 8
P.M.
, she hurried off to the Bois de Boulogne where she was meeting other friends—a more conservative group of philosophers who were still practicing Catholics. Among those rowing on the lake that evening was Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It was Beauvoir who had introduced Maurice to Zaza, and that magical summer, while so much was going on in Beauvoir's own life, Maurice and Zaza were falling in love. But Zaza had been forbidden to join them that evening. Her family did not approve.

 

Zaza Lacoin, the third of ten children, came from a well-to-do, devoutly Catholic family. She and Simone had been best friends since the age of ten, when they rivaled each other as star pupils at the Cours Adeline Désir, a private Catholic girls' school in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which placed far less emphasis on education than on prayer, the catechism, piety, and deportment. The girls were taught the piano, knitting, crochet, and etiquette at tea parties.

Monsieur de Beauvoir, an atheist, had wanted to move his two daughters to a secular school, which would have given them a better education without his having to pay fees, but Simone would not contemplate leaving her friend behind. She idolized Zaza. Whereas she herself was timid, childish, and in every way the model obedient pupil, the dark-haired Zaza was precocious and rebellious. Beauvoir would never forget the school musical recital at which Zaza, a talented pianist, played a piece her mother had insisted would be too difficult for her. When she finished a perfect performance, the triumphant Zaza, in front of all the teachers and parents, stuck her tongue out at her mother. Madame Lacoin merely smiled.

But when her daughters reached a marriageable age, Madame Lacoin turned into a tyrant. She had significant social aspirations for
her daughters; nothing was more important than a good marriage. Before Zaza was allowed so much as to play a game of tennis with a group of young people, her mother needed to know that they came from good Catholic families.

The Beauvoir girls could not aspire to a bourgeois marriage, because they did not have a dowry. Their marriage prospects had plummeted in 1918, when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar in a dramatic revolution that rendered Georges de Beauvoir's Russian railway and mining stocks worthless. Most of his inheritance had been invested in these, and after the war he no longer had the capital to open his law practice again. For the rest of his life he drifted from one salesman position to another. The family struggled to keep up appearances, but Georges would tell his daughters bitterly, “You girls will never marry. You'll have to work for a living.”