Tete-a-Tete (47 page)

Olga and Bost came to Rome for a few days and were horrified to find Sartre looking like a doddering old man. He could not stand being fussed over. He hated people taking him by the arm, as if he were a blind man. At most, he allowed friends to steer him by lightly touching his elbow. They had to pretend that nothing had changed. It was heart-rending.

 

The tables had turned. It was no longer Sartre who was doing the medical round. Now his women were doing it. At the age of sixty-eight, Sartre had become totally dependent on others. His legs hurt if he walked the slightest distance. He could make out lights and colors, but could no longer recognize objects, and certainly could not read or write. His life as a writer was completely destroyed.

It was decided that Sartre should move into a two-bedroom apartment, so that Beauvoir and Elkaïm could take turns sleeping over. The ever-practical Liliane Siegel found an apartment in a modern high-rise, at 22 Boulevard Edgar Quinet, on the other side of the Montparnasse Cemetery from Beauvoir. They installed Sartre there in October 1973. The apartment was again on the tenth floor, with a superb view over Paris. Sartre could not see it, though he could vaguely appreciate the evening sunsets. He never felt at home there. “This apartment is the place where I don't work anymore,” he told Beauvoir.
¹⁵
During the week, when it was her watch, he preferred to sleep at the Rue Schoelcher. At weekends, he stayed at Elkaïm's.

Sartre battled with depression. He had always looked toward the future. What was left for him now? The whole point of his life was writing. “I think
with my eyes,
” he had written to Beauvoir when he had eye troubles during the Second World War. “If I cannot
focus
them, I cannot focus my thoughts.”
¹⁶

In a group, Sartre would sometimes sit and say nothing. Lena Zonina made another visit to Paris at the end of the year, and Sartre had been looking forward to seeing her again. But at their first lunch together—Beauvoir and Le Bon were also there—the atmosphere was dismal. Le Bon tried hard to provide some animation. Sartre hardly said a thing.

One morning in Venice, during Easter 1974, Beauvoir was reading
to Sartre in his hotel room. Outside, the sunshine looked inviting, and they decided to go down to the hotel's terrace, beside the water. When Beauvoir went to take the book they had been reading, Sartre said plaintively, “
Before,
when I was more intelligent, we didn't read. We talked.”

Beauvoir was hurt to the quick, and they spent the rest of the morning talking. But privately she had to admit to herself that conversations with Sartre were no longer the same:

In Rome that summer, they talked into a tape recorder, with Beauvoir asking Sartre questions about his past. “At present nothing interests me,” Sartre told her. Beauvoir gently prodded answers out of him. They told themselves it would provide an oral sequel to
Words.
¹⁸
In the afternoons and evenings, they took short walks. Beauvoir read him two thick books: Solzhenitsyn's
Gulag Archipelago
and Joachim Fest's biography of Hitler.

 

By the end of that summer, Sartre was facing up to the fact that he would never see again. He told himself that he could still hear and speak. He would get friends to read to him, and he would try to think aloud, with a tape recorder.

He asked Pierre Victor—who was always saying that the “new intellectual” should work in collaboration—to be his “secretary.” He meant a kind of intellectual collaborator, somebody with whom and against whom he could think, now that he no longer had access to the printed word. Victor hesitated. Liliane Siegel rang him up and told him he
must.
It was agreed. Sartre would keep on André Puig to do the daily administrative work. Pierre Victor would come for three hours
every morning, except the Sabbath, to read to Sartre and discuss ideas with him.

Elkaïm phoned Beauvoir in a panic. She did not trust Pierre Victor, she said. He had an aggressive, overpowering personality, and she was afraid he would become “Sartre's Schoenmann.” She was referring to Ralph Schoenmann, the authoritarian secretary-general of the Russell Tribunal, who had made himself a laughingstock at the Stockholm and Copenhagen meetings by constantly claiming to speak on behalf of the absent Bertrand Russell, too old and fragile to be there himself.

Beauvoir did not like Pierre Victor much either. But Sartre seemed happy at the idea of working with him. She was pleased for Sartre, and relieved to have some time for herself. It was tiring to read aloud to Sartre every morning. What could be the problem with paying Pierre Victor to be Sartre's eyes for three hours a day, and to bring back some joy and stimulation to his life? Later, she would terribly regret her attitude.

 

In November 1974, Sartre signed a contract with French national television to write ten programs on his relationship to twentieth-century French history. For nine months, Beauvoir and Pierre Victor read relevant books and documents to Sartre. And then, in August 1975, the contract was canceled, ostensibly for budget reasons. At a press conference, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Victor spoke of “indirect censorship.”

All that remained for Sartre now, in the way of work, was the book he and Pierre Victor were planning, based on their tape-recorded discussions. The provisional title was
Power and Liberty.
They knew they did not think the same way. Like most of his contemporaries, Victor was more interested in Deleuze and Foucault these days, and in the new intellectual fashion known as structuralism. The point of their collaboration, as they saw it, was to think in opposition to each other, to think dialectically.

Victor was convinced the book was going to be important. To some extent, Sartre let himself be carried along by his young friend's enthusiasm. But he was aware of the problems. “You have ideas that
are not mine and that will make me go in certain directions that I used not to take,” he told Victor. As he saw it, this would be “a work set apart” from the rest of his work, “not belonging to the whole.”
¹⁹

Beauvoir and the old-timers at
Les Temps modernes
were grateful that Pierre Victor was keeping Sartre intellectually stimulated. They admired Sartre's fighting spirit. But privately, Jean Pouillon recalls, they looked upon this new project as “the delusion of an old man who refused to give up.”
²⁰

 

Pierre Victor was not his real name, and he sometimes disguised himself with a false beard and sunglasses as well. Benny Lévy, alias Pierre Victor, was born in Cairo to a Sephardic Jewish family who left Egypt during the 1957 Suez crisis, when Victor was eleven. The Algerian War was blazing, and Victor found it difficult to work out his relationship with France. At the age of fifteen, he read Sartre and was bowled over. “For me, the French language was Sartre,” Victor said later.
²¹
He was bright, and by the age of twenty, he was studying at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. But he had never managed to obtain residence papers, which meant he could be thrown out of the country at any time. As a Maoist militant who came in frequent contact with the police, he hid behind a false identity.

Beauvoir was convinced, even in hindsight, that Pierre Victor took on the job of Sartre's secretary out of a genuine and deep affection for Sartre. As usual, Sartre gave more than he received. Victor was rewarded for his three hours a day with a salary that was generous even for a full-time job. What's more, Sartre wrote to President Giscard d'Estaing on Victor's behalf, and managed to get him French citizenship.

As Pierre Victor saw it, his task was to keep the little flame in Sartre alive:

Sartre and Victor quickly abandoned the fourth volume of Flaubert, and spent their time discussing history and philosophy instead. Victor was charismatic, fiery, and inclined to be hectoring. Elkaïm, hovering in the background, was sometimes alarmed. “He would come up with a very crucial, complex question at the moment Sartre was about to give in to his fatigue,” she remembers. “At other times, he would start reading to him very loudly, with extraordinary zest and passion, as if in a state of exaltation: It was quite scary.”
²³

When he felt up to it, Sartre enjoyed himself. At other moments, Victor's haranguing voice simply tired him. “Pierre would quite like to absorb me,” he told Liliane Siegel. “Some days he baits me, we have a row, sometimes that amuses me and I stand up to him, but at other times it bores me so I give in.”
²⁴

 

To commemorate Sartre's seventieth birthday, in June 1975,
Le Nouvel Observateur
published an interview with him. Michel Contat asked Sartre about politics, books, his relationship to music, friends, and money. Sartre agreed he had made a lot of money in his life, and still had plenty coming in from royalties, foreign contracts, interviews, and his teacher's pension, but he always spent it faster than he made it. “There are people who are financially dependent on me,” he explained. (He did not say that he was paying salaries to Puig and Victor, monthly allowances to Wanda, Michelle, and Arlette, supporting a new girlfriend, Hélène, paying his cleaning woman, and helping out the local beggar.) “At the moment there's nothing left, and for the first time I'm wondering how I'm going to manage.”
²⁵

“There are several women in my life,” he said. “Although in a sense Simone de Beauvoir is the only one, really there are several.” Nevertheless, he mentioned only Arlette Elkaïm and Michelle Vian by name, referring to Elkaïm as “my adopted daughter,” and Michelle as “the wife of Boris Vian.”

He made it clear that his intellectual relationship with Simone de Beauvoir had meant everything to him:

The interview was the summation of a life. There were things Sartre wanted to say, and he knew this might be his last chance to say them. He had dedicated books to other women; he had been photographed with them in the press. But at the age of seventy, he was making a public declaration of his love and his gratitude to Simone de Beauvoir.

 

Sartre's women were middle-aged now. In 1975, the year Sartre turned seventy, Wanda was fifty-eight, Michelle Vian was fifty-five, and Arlette Elkaïm was almost forty. Behind their backs, Sartre had embarked on a last romantic attachment with a young woman. Hélène Lassithiotakis, a dark-haired Greek woman in her early twenties, had rung his doorbell sometime in 1972. “Do you remember me? We met in Athens at one of your lectures.”

Sartre paid for her to come to Paris for a year and study philosophy. He saw a lot of her. “When I'm with her, I feel as though I were thirty-five,” he told Beauvoir.
²⁶
Near the end of that year, Lassithiotakis had a psychotic episode in the street. Le Bon drove her to Saint Anne's psychiatric hospital. “The Beaver and I used to joke with Sartre about all his mad women,” Le Bon says. “We told him: ‘It's
you
who drive them nuts!'”
²⁷

Sartre was blind by then, but it did not stop him from making several visits to Athens, accompanied by Beauvoir or Pierre Victor. And Lassithiotakis made trips to Paris. “Because of the medicines she took she had gained over twenty pounds,” Beauvoir writes. “Furthermore, she was as silent now as she had been talkative before her illness. But she was still beautiful and Sartre liked being with her.”
²⁸

The affair lasted five years. In 1977, Sartre called it off, telling Beauvoir that Lassithiotakis was too self-seeking. But just as he had with his other women, he continued to see her as a friend.

 

In March 1977, Sartre did the unthinkable. He had bad pains in his left leg. His doctor had told him that if he did not give up smoking he would have to have first his toes amputated, then his feet, then his legs. Sartre said he would think it over. Two days later, he decided to stop. He handed his cigarettes and lighters to Le Bon. (Beauvoir rarely smoked anymore.) He never went back to smoking, and did not seem to find the deprivation burdensome. He even encouraged friends to smoke in front of him.