Tete-a-Tete (4 page)

Looking back later in life, Beauvoir thought it the best thing that could have happened to her. When she left school, she decided to take the
agrégation,
which would mean a secure job as a secondary-school teacher in a state school. She wanted to study philosophy. The nuns at the Cours Désir were appalled. “To them a state school was nothing better than a licensed brothel,” Beauvoir writes. “They told my mother that the study of philosophy mortally corrupts the soul.”
¹⁸
She agreed to study classics and mathematics instead, at an all-female Catholic institution on the outskirts of Paris. Not for another year did her parents consent to let her study philosophy at the Sorbonne.

Zaza's parents would not let Zaza near the Sorbonne. They belonged to the traditional French Catholic bourgeoisie, who distrusted intellectuals, especially philosophers. They considered the classics, Greek and Latin, to be full of crudities. As for modern literature, they dreaded to think what effect it might have upon a young girl's imagination. While Beauvoir was studying Greek, Latin, philosophy, and pedagogy, Zaza's life became an endless round of churchgoing, tea parties, bridge games, picnics, and social visits. She had no illusions about the emptiness of her existence. She complained to Beauvoir that she could not sleep, and she suffered from frequent headaches.

Despite the differences between their families, the girls' friendship endured. A turning point came when Simone, at the age of nineteen,
finally admitted to Zaza that she no longer believed in God. Zaza prayed for her soul, but remained loyal to her friend in the face of intense opposition from her mother. By the summer of 1929—Zaza and Simone were twenty-one—the situation had reached a crisis point. Madame Lacoin would no longer allow the godless Simone in their house. Nor would she allow Zaza to go boating in the Bois de Boulogne with Simone and her freethinking philosopher friends from the Sorbonne.

 

Sartre and Beauvoir were among seventy-six students across the nation who sat the highly competitive written
agrégation
examinations in philosophy in 1929. Passing the
agrégation
guaranteed lifelong tenure as a secondary-school teacher in France's state school system, and the number of successful candidates was determined by the posts available in the nation's high schools. Philosophy had a long and venerable tradition in France, and attracted the best and the brightest.

The results were displayed on the afternoon of July 17, an oppressively hot day in Paris. Twenty-six candidates had been successful, six of them women. This group was now eligible to proceed to the orals. Sartre, Beauvoir, and Nizan were among them. Maheu was not.

Maheu left Paris that same afternoon, telling Sartre to give Beauvoir his best wishes for her happiness. That evening Jean-Paul Sartre took Beauvoir out to celebrate their success. “From now on, I'm going to take you in hand,” he said.

 

It was scarcely an atmosphere conducive to romance. The orals were famous for being extremely grueling. They involved four separate tests in front of a six-man jury. The hardest was
la grande leçon,
in which candidates pulled a topic out of a hat and were given five hours in the Sorbonne library to prepare a class lesson at the tertiary level. In addition, there were three close readings of texts, in Greek, Latin, and French, for which the students were given only an hour to prepare. The orals were public events. The best students, like Sartre and Beauvoir, had a large audience.

For those two weeks, while they prepared for their orals, Sartre
and Beauvoir barely left each other's company other than to sleep. They went along to hear their friends perform. Between sessions, they continued their own preparations—sometimes with Nizan, in his study in the Rue Vavin, under his large poster of Lenin. But mostly they preferred to be alone together.

They talked in bars and cafés that had always been out of bounds for Beauvoir. She had only ever gone to the cinema to see serious art films; Sartre now took her along to cowboy movies. They walked in the Luxembourg Gardens, and strolled past the secondhand-book stalls along the banks of the Seine, where Sartre bought her some of the swashbuckling cloak-and-dagger historical novels he had loved as an adolescent. “He was interested in everything and never took anything for granted,” Beauvoir wrote later. “How cramped my little world seemed beside this exuberantly abundant universe!”
¹⁹

 

People tend to assume that it was Jean-Paul Sartre who transformed Simone de Beauvoir from a dutiful daughter of the French bourgeoisie into the independent freethinker who did more than any woman in twentieth-century France to shock that bourgeoisie. It was not so. Sartre merely encouraged Beauvoir to continue down the path on which she had already embarked. Even Zaza, who thoroughly disliked the “frightful, learned Sartre,” had to admit that Simone had chosen this route of her own accord. “The influence of Sartre might have hurried things along a bit; that's all,” she mused in her journal in July 1929.
²⁰

Beauvoir also kept a journal, and those square-ruled notebooks, written in her scarcely legible, forward-thrusting hand, reveal a young woman who was prepared to go out on a limb long before she met Sartre. Already at fifteen—the same age she set her heart on becoming a writer—she had realized she no longer believed in God. For a long time she told no one. When she admitted her dark secret, at the age of nineteen, it caused a major rupture between her and her mother.

At nineteen, inspired by the French writers André Gide, Maurice Barrès, Paul Valéry, and Paul Claudel—men who were now middle-aged, but who, like her, came from the bourgeoisie and were also in
revolt against its hypocrisy—Simone de Beauvoir embraced “sincerity toward oneself” and the commitment to “calling a spade a spade.”
²¹
She was already questioning marriage on ethical grounds. “For me a choice is never made, it is always being made…. The horror of the definitive choice, is that it engages not only the self of today, but that of tomorrow which is why basically marriage is immoral.”
²²

By the age of twenty, Simone de Beauvoir had chosen a path that she increasingly realized would condemn her to loneliness. “I can't get rid of this idea that I am alone, in a world apart, being present at the other as at a spectacle,” she wrote in her journal. “This morning…I passionately wished to be the girl who takes communion at morning mass and walks in a serene certainty…. The Catholicism of Mauriac, of Claudel,…how it's marked me, and what place there is in me for it! And yet…I do not wish to believe: an act of faith is the most despairing act there is and I want my despair to at least keep its lucidity. I do not want to lie to myself.”

Beauvoir came from a world in which women were extraordinarily sheltered and constricted. As she would show in
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter,
men and women inhabited sharply divided worlds. Women could not vote. France's best educational institutions were for men only.
²³
Women were expected to go to church; men could be atheists. Not only did women never go in bars, they did not even venture into cafés. (When Beauvoir set foot in a café for the first time in her life, at the age of twenty, she considered herself wildly rebellious.) Men drank and smoked in public; women did not. Women remained virgins until marriage; men did not. Unmarried women were pitied. And even if a young woman was beautiful and cultivated, the only way she could aspire to a socially desirable marriage was by means of a substantial dowry.

There were times when Beauvoir called her solitary rebellion “an intoxication.” And yet she was aware that she was going to need extraordinary strength. “I would so like to have the right, me as well, of being simple and very weak, of being a woman,” she confided to her journal. “In what a ‘desert world' I walk, so arid, with the only oases my intermittent esteem for myself.”

She sensed that for women love came at a cost, and that there was part of her that no man was ever likely to accept. “I speak mystically
of love, I know the price,” she wrote. “I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.”

 

The stakes were different for Sartre, as a male. He could indulge his romantic concept of love without risking his subjecthood. He dreamed of moonlit walks and tender talks on a park bench by the seaside. His fantasy was that he would take charge of a beautiful young woman, protect her, save her. He liked sentimentality, adoration, whispered sweet nothings. It reminded him of his doting childhood relationship with his mother. Even now, Anne-Marie still called him Poulou.

As a man, his sex life could be neatly separated off from his dreams of love. Sartre lost his virginity at eighteen, with a married woman who was thirty. She took the initiative. (“I did it with no great enthusiasm,” Sartre said later, “because she wasn't very pretty.”) After that there were prostitutes picked up in the Luxembourg Gardens. In his Ecole Normale years, Sartre and his friends regularly visited brothels. They felt contempt for these women. “We felt that a girl shouldn't give herself like that.”
²⁴

When Sartre was twenty-one, he courted a young woman who lived in Lyon. Their romance was nourished by long narcissistic letters. “I love you to the point of madness,” Germaine Marron wrote to him. “You find me simple, without affectations, which is true, but in fine Lyonnaise society I give the impression of a wild animal.”
²⁵
They became engaged. At twenty-three, Sartre, as a good bourgeois son, asked his mother and stepfather to formally request the girl's hand in marriage.

When Sartre failed his
agrégation
in the summer of 1928, the Marron family called off the engagement. “Instead of joining my friends at tennis I went by myself to a meadow with a bottle, and I drank,” Sartre recalls. “I even cried. Cried because I had drunk, but it felt good…. I was relieved. I'm not sure of having acted quite correctly in this whole affair.”
²⁶

Behind his fiancée's back, Sartre had enjoyed a tempestuous liaison
with Simone Jollivet, a theatrical blonde who since the age of eighteen had worked as a courtesan in a fashionable brothel in Toulouse. Her clients would find her standing in front of the fireplace reading—entirely naked except for her Rapunzel-like hair. “Her cultured mind, her proud bearing, and the subtle technique she brought to her task knocked town clerks and lawyers flat,” Beauvoir wryly reports in her memoirs.
²⁷

Jollivet was three years older than Sartre and had grand ambitions to be a writer. Sartre drew her up a reading list, encouraged her, lectured her. He saw his role as preventing her from botching her life. She risked being nothing other than a dreaming Madame Bovary; he would make her into an artist. She complained that his letters were “little lectures.”
²⁸
He wrote back: “Who has made you what you are? Who is trying to keep you from turning into a bourgeoise, an aesthete, a whore? Who has taken charge of your intelligence? I alone.”
²⁹

Sartre took her along to the Ecole Normale ball one year. He appeared in spats, with Simone Jollivet on his arm in one of her sensational costumes. She created quite a stir. As a token of friendship, she gave Sartre and Nizan a lamp shade for their study, made out of a pair of skimpy lace purple panties—her own.

 

The
agrégation
results were displayed on July 30, 1929. Twenty-one students had competed for the orals (several of the eligible students had not turned up), and thirteen were successful. First place went to Jean-Paul Sartre. The runner-up, just two points behind him, was Simone de Beauvoir. There was a considerable gap between her and the third student. Paul Nizan came fifth.

Four of the thirteen successful candidates were women. It was a record. There were only eight women in France with an
agrégation
in philosophy. The head of the jury of examiners, Professor André Lalande, felt obliged to comment on the phenomenon. There had been no special indulgence shown to the women, he assured people. The written exams were anonymous, and it was impossible, he said, to determine the sex of educated people from their handwriting.
³⁰

The most staggering intellectual triumph that year was undoubtedly Simone de Beauvoir's. Having taken on a daunting double load,
she was, at twenty-one, the youngest ever to pass the
agrégation.
She had been studying philosophy at a tertiary level for just three years. Sartre had been taking it for seven.
³¹
Unlike him, she had not had the rigorous intellectual training of two years of preparatory classes (
hypokhâgne
and
khâgne
) for the entrance exam to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, followed by the ENS itself. She was just a lowly Sorbonne student. Nor had she had a practice run at the exams.

It would emerge in later years that the 1929 jury had debated at length whether to give the prize to Sartre or to Beauvoir. The members had been inordinately impressed by the young woman's rigorous argumentation. Finally, they had decided on Sartre. He was, after all, the
Normalien,
and he was sitting the examination for the second time.

 

On August 5, 1929, Simone de Beauvoir left with her family for their annual vacation in Limousin. She loved that region of France. Her childhood summers spent with her father's family on the vast estate called Meyrignac, in the hilly countryside near Uzerche, were idyllic. That summer her grandfather was no longer there—it was his death she had been mourning that spring—and they stayed with her aunt and cousins in the second family house, La Grillère, four kilometers away from the village of Saint-Germain-les-Belles. Beauvoir knew it would probably be her last summer vacation with her family. The thought had once filled her with anguish. But this year, her future seemed wholly exciting.