Tete-a-Tete (41 page)

 

Zonina came to Paris in December 1964. Sartre had been worried about her visit. His apartment was Spartan. Would she be comfort
able there? He planned to have her sleep on his narrow divan, with him on a folding bed by her side. Beauvoir insisted they should have her Rue Schoelcher apartment. She moved to Sartre's place.

Sartre had thought Zonina would be impressed by his decision to turn down the Nobel Prize. She wasn't. She deplored these accommodating gestures he kept making towards the Stalinists, she told him.
²⁸
In the last few weeks, Khrushchev had been forced out of power, and there were going to be further restrictions on liberties in the USSR. It was a dark time for the Russian people. The Soviet intellectuals fervently wished that Sartre had taken the opportunity to speak out, rather than playing up to the communists as he had. And why on earth had Sartre claimed that Sholokhov deserved the prize more than Pasternak? Didn't he realize that Sholokhov was a Stalinist lackey? In Russia, her dissident friends were laughing at him.

In the end, Sartre said they should not argue anymore about what they were saying in the USSR. The fact is, he was also concerned with reactions in the West.
²⁹

There were other strained conversations. Sartre had to break the news to Zonina that he was going to adopt Elkaïm. Despite her reservations, Zonina could hardly doubt Sartre's love. If he had won the Nobel Prize, it was for
Words,
the book he had dedicated to her, which she had translated into Russian, and which had been a best seller these last few months in the USSR. And if he had refused the Nobel Prize, Zonina could see that his decision was largely an expression of solidarity with her homeland, Russia, and partly, at some level, with her.

Zonina stayed for three weeks. Sartre and Beauvoir both went to the airport to see her off. The three of them wondered how on earth she would get through Soviet customs with the presents she was taking back.

“I love you more than ever,” Sartre wrote to Zonina the next day. He had spent the night at Beauvoir's apartment on the Rue Schoelcher, and it was still full of memories of Zonina. He and Beauvoir had talked till one-thirty
A.M
. “About you,” he told Zonina. He had gone upstairs to sleep. Beauvoir had slept downstairs on the sofa, as usual. At three in the morning she had woken up and, noticing light under Sartre's door, had come upstairs to enjoin him to sleep. She
had found him on the floor, his head on a detective novel, his glasses beside him. Apparently he had murmured, “Lena darling,” and without opening his eyes, had slipped into bed and gone straight back to sleep.

 

On March 18, 1965, Arlette Elkaïm, at the age of twenty-eight, became Sartre's legal daughter. Beauvoir and Sylvie Le Bon were the official witnesses at the signing ceremony. Arlette was being given legal and moral rights that Sartre had never given to any other woman. She was now officially called Arlette Elkaïm Sartre. After Sartre's death, she would become his heir and the manager of his literary estate. Along with Gallimard, she would inherit the money that came in over the years from Sartre's royalties, copyright permissions, and translations. One day, she would be a very wealthy woman.

The news made the front page of
France Soir,
with a large photograph of Sartre and his “Jewish-Algerian daughter.” Readers were shocked. Sartre a
father?
Had he not declared in
Words:
“There are no good fathers…. It is not the men who are at fault but the paternalbond which is rotten?”
³⁰
Sartre's friends and acquaintances, none of whom had been forewarned, were hurt and bewildered. They felt abandoned, left out of a family secret. As for Wanda, Michelle, and Evelyne, they were beside themselves with grief and rage.

A few months earlier, when he first tried to broach the subject with his women, Sartre had promised each in turn that he would not adopt Arlette without that woman's consent. He made the same promise to Liliane Siegel, whom he had been psychoanalyzing for the past five years. Siegel recalls that Sartre kept asking her: “Have you changed your mind yet?” She had not. Nor had the others.

That evening, when the news burst over Paris, Wanda started breaking the furniture in her apartment. Evelyne wept. “You didn't have the right to do that to me,” she told Sartre. “You told me you would never do anything to hurt me. Well, you have hurt me.” Michelle had threatened to kill herself if Sartre went ahead with the adoption. She did not carry out her threat, but she felt utterly betrayed.
³¹
Liliane Siegel, who was never a lover of Sartre's (though he had pressured her) found herself unable to finish the yoga class she
was teaching that evening. She went home and sobbed. Finally, when she was able to speak, she phoned Beauvoir:

Sartre told both Beauvoir and Zonina that the reaction of the other women left him cold. He saw envy and material interest behind their sobs and complaints, he said.

 

Soviet intellectuals kept wishing that Sartre would take more advantage of his influence, which, since his rejection of the Nobel Prize, was greater than ever before. When Sartre and Beauvoir returned to the Soviet Union in July 1965, Zonina and her friends were outraged by the Brodsky trial. Joseph Brodsky, a young Jewish poet, had been condemned to five years of forced labor in a remote state farm, accused of “social parasitism.” Although he earned his living as a translator, he did not belong to the Writers Union, or any other state organization, so this was “parasitism.” At Ehrenburg's urging, Sartre, for the first time since he had started regularly coming to the USSR in 1962, made an intervention. He wrote to the president of the Supreme Soviet, asking for Brodsky to be pardoned. His letter was so courteous that it verged on sycophantic: “Mr. President, If I take the liberty of addressing you,
it's because I am a friend of your great country…. I know perfectly well that what the western enemies of peaceful coexistence are already calling ‘the Brodsky affair' is a regrettable exception.”
³³

Zonina was more forthright in the report she wrote the Soviet Writers Union about Sartre's visit. “The arguments of [Brodsky's] accusers are so absurd and incredible that the friends of the USSR, including Sartre, have trouble defending our country.”
³⁴

 

After their month with Zonina, Sartre traveled for three weeks with Arlette, then two weeks with Wanda. Beauvoir went on vacation with a new friend, Sylvie Le Bon.

In the spring of 1960, Sylvie Le Bon, a seventeen-year-old baccalaureate student from Rennes, had written Beauvoir an admiring letter. A few months later, Le Bon came on a visit to Paris, and Beauvoir took her out to dinner. The girl was clearly extremely bright and had a lively, attractive face, but she was painfully shy, nervous, and fidgety. She wanted to study philosophy at the Ecole Normale. Beauvoir encouraged her. When they parted, Beauvoir bought her a bunch of newspapers and magazines from a press kiosk, telling her it was important to know something about politics.

Over the next three years they met from time to time. They drew closer after Françoise de Beauvoir's death, in November 1963. Beauvoir found Le Bon a great comfort. By that time, Le Bon was living at the Ecole Normale for women on the Boulevard Jourdan (near the Cité Universitaire, where Sartre had once lived), and doing brilliantly in her studies. She and her girlfriends were often in trouble with the authorities for their unruly behavior, and Beauvoir enjoyed hearing about these wild doings. The two women liked to discuss books and films. By 1964 they were seeing each other regularly.

Le Bon was flattered to be sought out by the most famous woman writer in France. As for Beauvoir, with the twenty-one-year-old Le Bon as a companion, there were moments when she felt almost young again. The pages she would write about Le Bon in
All Said and Done
were as warm as any she ever wrote:

That summer, in August 1965, the two women went to Corsica. Le Bon had done extremely well in her
agrégation,
and they had reason to celebrate. Le Bon calls it their “honeymoon.”

 

After their travels with others, Beauvoir and Sartre spent six weeks together in Rome. They were besieged by desperate phone calls from Paris. Rehearsals were in progress for a new production of
The Condemned of Altona.
Six years after the original production, Serge Reggiani was again playing Frantz. The lead female roles had again gone to Evelyne and Wanda. Sartre had insisted on this.

According to the phone calls, the rehearsals were going badly, very badly. The producer, François Périer, and Serge Reggiani both told Sartre the same thing: Wanda had not been up to it six years ago, and now, after all the drugs she had taken, she was an embarrassment to the rest of the cast. She spent her time in the dressing room, she had not learned her lines properly, and she did not have her heart in it. Sartre was firm: “You play it with Wanda or you don't play it.” There were tearful phone calls from Evelyne, who threatened to drop out of the play if Sartre did not do something about Wanda. Sartre lectured Evelyne about family loyalty.

The production was a disaster. Both the women, Evelyne and Wanda, were flayed by the press. One critic after another complained that they were inaudible and acted mechanically. It was as if Serge Reggiani were alone onstage, they said. “I have never seen an actress
so completely without talent,” one critic said of Wanda. He described Evelyne Rey as a “magnificent block of ice.”
³⁵

On October 12, dreading the domestic scenes that awaited him, Sartre said good-bye to Beauvoir in Naples. He was taking the overnight train back to Paris; Beauvoir was driving back alone in her car. They arranged to meet in the evening of the fourteenth, at seven
P.M
., at her place.

Sartre's train got to Paris on the morning of the thirteenth, and he launched straight into what he called his “official duties,” which meant seeing the women, one after the other. That night he went to bed early, exhausted. On the fourteenth, he got up and read through his correspondence, and was at his mother's in time for lunch.

He and his mother were at the table when Lanzmann rang. It had been announced on the news that Beauvoir had had an accident, and was in a hospital in Joigny. That afternoon, Lanzmann and Sartre drove down the motorway at a hundred miles an hour. They found Beauvoir in a private room, fussed over by nurses, with four broken ribs, a swollen face, and a massive bruise over her left eye, where she had had stitches. She told them, with the febrile excitement of someone in shock, that she had rounded a bend too fast and found herself in front of a huge truck, and that the driver had saved her life by swerving to the left. The front of her sturdy Peugeot 404 was smashed in. The police had told her there were lots of accidents on that curve. She had not at first realized she was hurt. When she was helped out of the car, all she could think of was how she would get to Paris by seven that evening. And then the ambulance men had arrived and made her lie on a stretcher, and she saw that she was bleeding and felt the pain.

Lanzmann returned to Paris, and Sartre stayed the night in a nearby hotel. The next day, he accompanied Beauvoir back to the Rue Schoelcher in an ambulance. She was in pain, unable to undress herself. Sartre helped her upstairs and assured her he would stay with her until she could walk again. “What good are you to me,” she said, “since with your earplugs and sleeping pills I need to shake you to wake you up?” He promised to compromise and not use his earplugs.

She was in bed for three weeks. Sartre, Lanzmann, and Le Bon took turns looking after her. A nurse came for an hour every day to
help. “The hardest thing is to keep people away,” Sartre told Lena. “Her apartment is literally invaded by flowers.”

 

Zonina came back to Paris in mid-November 1965, for three weeks. It had not been easy getting a travel visa from the Soviet government. Sartre had had to write letters stating that Zonina was his translator and she had been invited by the
Temps modernes.
She stayed in a hotel on the Boulevard Raspail, close to Sartre's apartment. This time, Sartre did not tell the other women about her visit.

In December, Sartre and Beauvoir accompanied Zonina to St.-Raphael, a resort town on the Riviera, where Zonina was speaking at a conference. Sartre told the women he was with Beauvoir.
France Soir
reported that Sartre and Beauvoir had been seen walking around St.-Raphael with their Russian friend and interpreter Madame Zonina. As soon as Sartre was back in Paris, Michelle was on the phone: