Tete-a-Tete (5 page)
Authors: Hazel Rowley
She wandered in the fields and chestnut groves, breathing in the fragrance of freshly mown hay and honeysuckle, and feeling passionately happy. On the second day, a letter arrived from Sartre. Beauvoir wrote in her journal that she missed his presence. She had so many things she wanted to tell him. But she was not in love. “I need Sartre, and I love Maheu. I love Sartre for what he brings me, and Maheu for what he is.”
When she did not hear from Sartre for several days, she was filled with anguish. “Why this silence, just after a letter where I let myself go?” Finally a thick envelope arrived, which gave details about his imminent visit.
She met his train from Paris on August 20. “Immense joy,” she
wrote, “and some timidity which made me artificial.” The prospect of entertaining him in Limousin was daunting. Would he be bored away from Paris? On the first day, she suggested a walk. Sartre laughed at her. He was allergic to chlorophyll, he said, and the only way he could cope with it was to forget it. They would find a nice meadow and sit and talk. By the end of that day, Beauvoir could see that boredom would never be their problem. “I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.”
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Sartre stayed at the Hôtel de la Boule d'Or in Saint-Germain-les-Belles, the village where Beauvoir's cousins went to mass each Sunday. Beauvoir would wake up at seven o'clock, remain awhile in bed, exhilarated by the thought of seeing him, then run over the meadows to meet him, thinking about all the things she wanted to tell him that day. If she was expected home for lunch, she took cider, cheese, and gingerbread for him to eat while waiting for her in the meadow. Sometimes, Poupette and their cousin Madeleine left him a picnic in an abandoned pigeon loft down the road from the house.
Sartre was an attentive listener, and Beauvoir found stories pouring out of her. They lay close together in the grass, and while the shadows lengthened around them, she talked about her lifeâher parents, Poupette, the Cours Désir, Zaza, Jacques. Sartre had a talent for seeing things from her perspective. When she told him about her cousin Jacques and the hopes she once had of marrying him, Sartre commented that it must be difficult for a woman with her background not to marry, but personally he thought it a trap. He admired her “Valkyrie spirit,” and hoped she would never lose it.
Sartre was encouraging; he was also full of projects and plans for their future life together. They would have adventures and travels, he told her, and while they would work extremely hard, they would also lead dazzling lives of freedom and passion. He would give her everything he could. The only thing he could not give her was his person. He needed to be free.
It was clear that Sartre's help would not be the conventional sort. He scorned anything that smacked of conformity or conventionality. The idea of a regular job, with colleagues and a boss, was anathema to him. Nor did he want to be a professional literary man, scribbling away in a musty study lined with books. The thought of settling down
in one place had no appeal. And though he had once been engaged, these days the idea of getting married, having children, and acquiring possessions horrified him. He had a mission: to be a great writer. Nothing else mattered. In order to write, he had to experience the world.
Sartre explained to Beauvoir his theory of liberty and contingency. It was the subject on which they had written in their exams, and he had been thinking about it for some time. As he saw it, individuals lived in a state of fundamental absurdity, or “contingency.” There was no god; life had no preexisting meaning. Each individual had to assume his freedom, create his own life. There was no natural order; people held their destiny in their own hands. It was up to them to determine the substance of their lives, even the way they chose to love. It was frightening to be free. Most people fled from their freedom. But Sartre embraced his. He was not going to allow any preestablished code to determine
his
life. His life was going to be his own construction. Beauvoir thought this a beautiful philosophy.
In the first few days, they met in the mornings in the village square. Curious faces watched them behind curtains. Later they chose a more discreet place, a chestnut grove between La Grillère and the village. In Paris, Beauvoir had felt awkward when Sartre kissed her. But in those Limousin meadows, surrounded by birdsong, she enjoyed his soft kisses and caresses. “Now I accept without embarrassment the slightly disturbing sensation of being in his arms and feeling his power,” she wrote in her journal. “My admiration and my faith in Jean-Paul are absolute, and my tenderness for my dear Leprechaun is without reservation.”
Five days into Sartre's stay, the two of them were sprawled close together in a meadow when they saw Simone's parents walking toward them. They sprang up. Simone's father looked embarrassed. He told Sartre that people were gossiping, and he was afraid he had to ask him to leave the district. Simone flushed with anger and told her father that that was no way to talk to her friend. Her mother started to shout at her. Sartre quietly but firmly said he would leave as soon as he could, but he and their charming daughter were working on a philosophical inquiry, and they had to finish it first. The parents retreated to the house.
Sartre usually ate dinner at his hotel, and Simone went back to the house. After the meal, she would reappear with Poupette and their cousin Madeleine. Sartre organized endless high-spirited games. He had them improvising plays and acting out parts. Leading the way with his fine tenor voice, he got them to sing. “We laughed and laughed,” Poupette would recall, “and the summer softly slipped away.”
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Sartre left on September 1, and Beauvoir jotted down her thoughts and memories about those “perfect days.” He had called her “my sweet love.” He had told her he loved her, and assured her he would always love her. He said he was afraid of hurting her. “You do not know how tender your expression can be, dear little girl.”
“This was the âlife' I was waiting for,” she wrote. For the first time ever, she had met a man whom she considered her superior. She felt understood by him, loved and supported. Sartre would help her to be a strong, joyous Valkyrie. His love was full of promises, full of certitude. With him she felt a quite extraordinary harmony (“Oh! Much more than with the Lama or Jacques”). There was something incredibly vital about this man. He made her want to discover herself; he made her want to discover the world. With him, she knew she would never stagnate.
It was not “an overwhelming passion,” she wrote in her journal. Not yet. It was not comparable to the “madness” and “obsession” she had once felt for Jacques. “But it's happiness.” Most exciting was the feeling that through Sartre she had found herself. “Never have I loved so much to read and think. Never have I been so alive and happy, or envisaged such a rich future. Oh Jean-Paul, dear Jean-Paul, thank you.”
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A week after Sartre left, late on a Friday evening, Beauvoir was on the platform of the railway station at Uzerche to meet Maheu. It was a mark of her new independence from her parents. Maheu was coming for the weekend, and he had invited her to stay with himâin two separate rooms in a hotel.
He stumbled out of a second-class compartment tired, unshaven, his coat slung over his shoulder, and his hat crooked. They caught a
bus to a little hotel on the banks of the Vézère. Beauvoir heard him singing in the room next door as he washed and shaved, and she thought to herself how happy she was. After dinnerâhe was not hungry, and she ate most of his meal as well as her ownâthey climbed the hill to the church and looked at the stars. They talked for an hour in her room, then he kissed her hand tenderly, wished her good night, and went to his room.
The next day they walked by the river. He sang “So Blue” and told her stories about the Romans and the Gauls in that region. They had lunch at an inn. He climbed a tree. “I will never forget the young erudite René Maheu perched on a branch, his gray flannel trousers turned up, his hair in his face, his feet the color of the sunset,” Beauvoir wrote in her journal. Her shoes were drenched, so she walked barefoot. Maheu threw pebbles into the water.
That evening at dinner, he ordered a bottle of Chablis Villages, 1923. When she got up from the table, her head was spinning. Maheu stretched out beside her on her bed. They lay close to each other, but Maheu did not make a move. He did not seem to want to leave, and she did not want to tell him to. He talked, and she gazed at him through a mist. After he left, she was sick. “Atrocious night.”
The next morning was sweet. She loved his “Good morning, Beaver,” his blue pajamas, his eau de cologne, and the soap he lent her. She was still not feeling well, and he was full of tender solicitude. He took her arm. He kissed her hair. He was, as usual, gay and witty, distant and close, ironical and tender, her “prince of lamas.”
After he departed on the train, Beauvoir wrote in her journal: “It was like a dream lasting two days.” She concluded: “I know exactly what he is, what Sartre is. But I'll talk about that later.”
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When she returned to Paris in mid-September, Simone de Beauvoir moved out of her parents' home and rented a fifth-floor room from her maternal grandmother at 91 Avenue Denfert-Rochereau, in Montparnasse. Her grandmother treated her exactly like her other lodgers; Simone could come and go as she pleased. Beauvoir bought some cheap furniture: a table, two chairs, bookshelves, an orange divan. Her sister, Poupette, helped her put up some bright orange
wallpaper. Beauvoir pinned up a Michelangelo drawing Maheu had given her, and some satirical sketches by Sartre and Nizan. Stépha, her Polish friend, brought flowers, which Beauvoir put on the table, along with some books, her fountain pen, and her English cigarettes. She looked around rapturously. At last she was beginning her new life.
On October 14, 1929, in that fifth-floor orange-papered room overlooking the plane trees on the Avenue Denfert-Rochereau, Beauvoir gave up her virginity.
Maheu's visit to Limousin had clarified things. She had been in love with him for months. He was a handsome man, and she frankly desired him. He was kind and affectionate. But he was married, and in any case, he vaguely disappointed her. More than once, he had said to her: “You mustn't judge me.” She could never quite decide whether he was asking her a favor or giving her an order. But now she had met a man who was not afraid of judgment, a man who believed that his character was the sum total of his actions, a man who
asked
to be judged.
By the time Maheu left Limousin, Beauvoir had understood. She needed “Sartre and no one else.” He might be the Little Man, but he lived life so intensely, he seemed bigger than any man she knew. He was burning with ambition, but not in the worldly sense. Material things did not interest him, nor did hobnobbing with famous people. Quite simply, he was convinced he was going to be a great man and that his task was to get on with it. Sartre needed his liberty, but he also wanted Beauvoir to embrace hers. This was not a man who was going to urge her to comply with social conventions.
She still loved her Prince of Lamas. Theirs was “the most tender of friendships.” But he was bound by other people's opinions, and too
eager to cut a figure in society. Intellectually, he did not satisfy her. “In everyday life, one could be bored with himâ¦. One can't let one self go, expansively, with this man.”
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After Maheu left Limousin, she rationalized: “It is good that precisely with this sensual man there is nothing physical between us,â¦whereas with Sartre, who is not sensual, the harmony of our bodies has a meaning which makes our love more beautiful.”
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There were two weeks of “feverish caresses and lovemaking”
2
before Sartre left for Saint-Cyr, at the beginning of November, to begin his military service. Late every night, Sartre left Beauvoir's flat and went back to his grandparents, the Schweitzers, who had a large apartment in the Latin Quarter.
The young lovers talked a great deal about the future. Sartre did not suggest marriage. Instead, what he proposed was a “two-year lease.” While he was doing his military service, they would see as much of each other as possible. Beauvoir, instead of entering the teaching profession straight away, which would mean being sent to the provinces, would remain in Paris, make a start on a novel, and do some part-time tutoring. Sartre had inherited a small legacy from his paternal grandmother, and would help Beauvoir out as much as he could.
At the end of those two years, when Sartre's military service was finished, he envisaged a period apart. He had applied for a position as a French teacher in a Japanese school in Kyoto, a job that would begin in October 1931. This would mean a separation for a couple of years. Then they would meet up in a new placeâAthens or Istanbul, maybeâand live near each other again for a couple of years before striking out again by themselves. That way, their relationship would never degenerate into dull routine.
Beauvoir did not share Sartre's lone-hero dreams. She would have much preferred to undertake exotic adventures with him at her side. Her dream was the “Grand Amour,” and she dreaded the idea of long separations. But for the time being, two years seemed a long way off, and she did her best to suppress her fears. She knew Sartre would regard them as a weakness.
Sartre had made clear from the beginning that monogamy did not interest him. He liked women (far more than men, he always said), and he did not intend to stop having affairs at the age of twenty-three. Nor should Beauvoir, he said. The love they had for each other was “essential,” and primary. They were “two of a kind,” each other's double, and their relationship would surely last for life. But they should not deprive themselves of what he called “contingent” affairs, meaning secondary and more arbitrary.
Sartre felt strongly that love was not about possession. To him, a more generous kind of love meant loving the other person as a free being. When Beauvoir raised the thorny question of jealousy, Sartre said that if they told each other everything, they would never feel excluded from each other's lives. They should have no secrets from each other. In their love affairs, doubts, insecurities, and obsessions, they should aim for complete openness. He called it “transparency.”
Beauvoir found the idea as frightening as it was exhilarating. She valued truth and sincerity, but she also treasured her inner life. Throughout her adolescence she had learned to keep her thoughts to herself. She had long since stopped recounting her sins to her father confessor. And yet, here was Sartre wanting her to share her thoughtsâ
all
her thoughtsâwith him.
Did Beauvoir point out that they were not quite “two of a kind,” that the stakes were not even, that society regarded women in a completely different light from men? Probably not at the time, though both of them knew it. Twenty years later, in
The Second Sex,
she would make the point that women were not the “other sex,” but the “second sex.” They were not seen as equal; they were viewed as inferior.
While Sartre did not want to lose a freedom he had already enjoyed for several years, Beauvoir could not even quite imagine what her freedom would look like. Her female friends all aspired to marriage, and Beauvoir was as contemptuous of spinstersâ
vieilles filles
âas everyone else. She knew her parents would be ashamed if she did not marry. Many people would pity her. Even her close friends, like Zaza and Maheu, would be taken aback by the idea of her having an open relationship with Sartre. And she herself had to come to terms with the idea. “I had not emancipated myself from all sexual taboos,” she admits. “Promiscuity in a woman still shocked me.”
3
Despite her professed disdain for marriage in her 1927 journal, Beauvoir had spent her teenage years hoping to marry her cousin Jacques. Up until her meeting with Sartre, she envisaged herself as a wife and mother, as well as a writer. And she had never aspired to sexual libertinage. On the contrary. Throughout their adolescence she and her sister, Poupette, had been mortified on those nights when their father did not come home. They knew that while their mother chafed and wept, he was escorting some mistress or other to the theater. At the age of twenty, Simone was aghast when she discovered that her cousin Jacques had been having an affair with one of those heavily painted young women who hung around bars. She was horrified to think that her Polish friend, Stépha, might actually be sleeping with her Spanish painter boyfriend, Fernando. When Stépha gently tried to enlighten her, Simone shut her eyes and put her hands over her ears. Even at the age of twenty-one, when she met Sartre, she was shocked to hear that the Nizans had an “open marriage.” These people all maintained a public façade of married respectability; Sartre was proposing none at all.
Sartre, it seems, was surprised that Simone de Beauvoir accepted his terms. Ten years later, he analyzed his need for freedom with vaguely disconcerting self-mockery. Since his bookworm youth, he had taken for granted that he would one day be a great writer. Early on, he had understood that a male adventurer had to preserve his freedom. In everything he readâfrom Greek myths, classical tragedies, nineteenth-century novels, to the swaggering detective novels he devoured one after the otherâthe lone male hero steered his way through treacherous obstacles, the most dire of which were women. Sartre was determined, he writes, to avoid this trap himself.
It was all the more comical in that women certainly weren't running after me, indeed it was I who was running after them. Thus, in the few adventures that came my way at that time, after I'd gone to immense trouble to get round some young lady, I used to feel obliged to explain to her, like some dragon of virtue, that she must take care not to infringe my freedom. But within a short space of time, as I was good-natured, I'd make her a gift of that precious freedom. I'd say: âIt's the finest present I can give
you.'â¦Happily for me,â¦circumstances independent of my will would intervene in time to restore me (after a bit of a drubbing) to that dear freedom, which I'd forthwith make haste to bestow upon some other young lady.
On one occasion I was hoist with my own petard. The Beaver accepted that freedom and kept it. It was in 1929. I was foolish enough to be upset by it: instead of understanding the extraordinary luck I'd had, I fell into a certain melancholy.
4
It seems Beauvoir had no difficulty accepting the idea that they would not have children. Their relationship was on an entirely different basis. They were writers. They needed their freedom, and they needed a great deal of time, without distractions. Moreover, she saw that Sartre was disgusted by pregnant women's bellies, and by babies, which he said smelled of piss. Whether he influenced her on this is a moot point, but over the years, several of their friends would comment that Sartre and Beauvoir were visibly repelled by pregnant women. It is obvious in their writing.
Beauvoir felt desolate at the beginning of November, when she saw Sartre off on the train to Saint-Cyr. For the first two weeks, the conscripts were allowed no visitors. By the time Beauvoir was permitted to visit him, Sartre had been transformed into a soldier, in dark blue puttees and a beret. They were obliged to meet in a room packed with other soldiers and their families. Sartre was fuming at his loss of freedom and the waste of eighteen months. Beauvoir felt as if she were visiting a man behind bars.
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In mid-November, Zaza Lacoin was seriously ill, with a high fever and delirium, in a small hospital in Saint-Cloud, southwest of Paris. The doctors called it meningitis or encephalitis; they were not sure. Beauvoir was convinced Zaza was suffering from a broken heart.
For the last five months, Madame Lacoin had put Zaza under an intolerable strain. Zaza and Merleau-Ponty were deeply in love. They had decided to get married in two years, after Merleau-Ponty had finished his
agrégation
and military service. But Madame Lacoin was not happy. Merleau-Ponty was an outstanding student and a practic
ing Catholic, but he was not wealthy, and though he aspired to a university position, his financial prospects were modest compared with those of Monsieur Lacoin, a businessman.
Madame Lacoin was also concerned about the social status of Merleau-Ponty's family. Zaza admitted she did not know much about them, except that Maurice's mother was a widow and that his father had been a naval officer, and Maurice was one of three children. She assured her parents there was no need to worry. “Knowing our family as he does, he would never have breathed a word about his feelings if for whatever reason it would not be admissible for him to enter it.”
5
Her mother was not satisfied. She arranged for Zaza to spend a year in Berlin, in the hope that she would forget this man. “It's so hard, Simone,” Zaza wrote to her friend at the end of the summer of 1929. “One really has to believe in the virtue of suffering and to want to carry the cross with Christ to accept this without a murmur.”
6
Zaza was torn between her mother and the man she loved. Her extreme piety taught her obedience. In the face of all the difficulties, Merleau-Ponty, instead of battling with Zaza's mother, retreated slightly. Just when the tormented young woman most needed his reassurances, they were not forthcoming.
In October, Simone received a mysterious letter from Zaza: “Mama has told me something astonishing which I cannot explain to you now.” In her next letter, Zaza asked: “Can children bear the sins of their parents?”
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At the beginning of November, Zaza fell ill. In the hospital she was allowed no visitors other than her family. When Beauvoir saw her again, at the end of that dreadful month, Zaza was laid out on a bier in the hospital morgue, her hands folded over a crucifix on her chest.
Beauvoir held it against Merleau-Ponty that he had not had the moral courage to support Zaza against her mother, and she made this quite clear in her memoirs. By 1958, when
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
was published, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a well-known left-wing philosopher (he no longer believed in God), with a teaching position at the prestigious Collège de France. In her memoirs, Beauvoir calls him “Jean Pradelle.” In a further attempt to put readers off the scent, she calls him once by his real name: “My fellow pupils were Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss; I knew them both a little. The former I had
always admired from a distance.”
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But she leaves the reader in no doubt that she did not admire the man she calls “Jean Pradelle.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty had remained close friends with Beauvoir over the years. When he read
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter,
in 1958, he wrote to her. He had reread the letters he and Zaza wrote each other during those painful months in 1929. (He called her by her real name, Elisabeth.) “Reading these, as well as your book, made me realizeâintensely, to the point of despairâthe extent to which I was passive, unconscious, and nonexistent in those years. Everything you say about me is true.” At twenty-one, he had been too immature, he said, to deal with the pressures “Elisabeth” and her family were putting him under:
I have never doubted that she was the woman I could have lovedâ¦but I was not ready to love somebody, not even herâ¦. It would have taken some months for it to become love, for me to have been changed by her and by her presence. The attitude of her family, her own anxieties (which she hid from me more than she did from you), instead of touching me, they chilled meâ¦. But there is something you don't know, which I myself did not know about at the time when Elisabeth fell ill, and which she had to bear all alone, without it being any fault of mine.
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