Tete-a-Tete (7 page)

The way Sartre talked about Jollivet threw Beauvoir into torments of jealousy. “He frequently set her up as an example to me when trying to goad me out of my inactivity.”
²¹

 

Sartre disliked jealousy. He believed it important for individuals to control their passions, not to let themselves be swept up by them. Otherwise, they were denying their liberty, he told Beauvoir, and reacting rather than acting.

Years later, Sartre told an interviewer that Simone Jollivet was his “first serious affair,” and that with her he had experienced “the most unpleasant emotion that has ever laid hold of me and which, I believe, is most often described as jealousy.”

He had asked her to stop sleeping with other men. “Do you own me?” Jollivet had retorted. “Am I supposed to sit here and wait for your occasional appearances? Are you prepared to abandon
L'Ecole Normale
?”

“I paced back and forth in her lush, heavily scented bedroom,” Sartre recalled. “She was right, of course, and I knew it. I concluded that jealousy is possessiveness. Therefore, I decided never to be jealous again.”
²²

Sartre tended to see any violent emotion as an affectation. And he had no time for self-pity. Simone Jollivet once made the mistake of telling him she felt sad. The twenty-one-year-old Sartre had written back:

Sartre was adamant that people should not use their emotions as an excuse. Beauvoir would have a lifelong struggle with jealousy, but she worked hard on herself. It made her all the more impatient with jealousy in others.

After René Maheu's visit to Limousin that summer, his and Beauvoir's platonic romance continued. In October 1929, Maheu took up a teaching post in Normandy. He saw Beauvoir when he came to Paris a few weeks later, but she did not disclose to him that she and Sartre had become lovers. In December, Maheu read a letter from Sartre on her desk that left the nature of their relationship in no doubt. Maheu said he would never trust her again. Beauvoir wept. In the New Year, when he heard that Sartre had just spent a week in Paris, Maheu sent Beauvoir a note:

Beauvoir copied the note for Sartre's perusal. She had little sympathy with Maheu, she told Sartre. This was “mere jealousy of a thoroughly disagreeable kind.”

 

Sartre firmly believed that with willpower one could transcend all emotions, discomforts, and obstacles. According to him, tears and
bad nerves were weaknesses. Seasickness was a weakness. We are free beings, Sartre said, and we can choose. He attributed almost no importance to physiological functions, and none at all to psychological conditioning.

With some reservations—she was prone to seasickness and tears—Beauvoir went along with Sartre's extreme voluntarism. As she writes in her memoirs, nothing compelled them to see things otherwise. They were young, in good health, with a lot of free time and enough money to do what they wanted. As philosophers, they were convinced that they appraised the world with a detached, objective gaze.

Beauvoir recalls a fierce argument in the Café Balzar between Sartre and his philosopher friend Georges Politzer. A Hungarian Jew who had emigrated to France as an eighteen-year-old, Politzer was far more politically conscious than Sartre. He pointed out that Sartre was in every way a product of the French bourgeoisie. Sartre said that this was nonsense. He despised the bourgeoisie. An intellectual could transcend class ideology, and he himself had done so. His sympathies were with the working class. He felt more comfortable among the common people. Politzer disagreed. “Politzer's shock of red hair glowed flamelike, and words poured out of him,” Beauvoir writes, “but he failed to convince Sartre.”
²⁵

For the next ten years, Sartre and Beauvoir maintained their belief in an almost absolute individual freedom. It took the cataclysm of the Second World War (in which Politzer, a courageous Resistance fighter, was tortured and killed by the Gestapo) to make them discover history. They finally understood that it was precisely because they belonged to the privileged bourgeoisie that they had been able to entertain their grand illusion for so long.

 

Whenever Sartre was in Paris, he and Beauvoir spent time with Madame Morel and Pierre Guille. Madame Morel had a car, and occasionally she, Guille, and Beauvoir drove to Tours to see Sartre. Beauvoir liked the handsome Guille a great deal, mostly because Sartre liked him so much.

Guille was discharged from his military service a few weeks before Sartre. He decided to celebrate by making a ten-day trip across France,
visiting relatives and friends on the way. Madame Morel was happy to lend him her car, but she had to stay behind and look after her invalid husband. Guille asked Beauvoir if she would like to join him.

“A
real
car journey, the first trip of the sort I had ever made!”
²⁶
Beauvoir was equally exhilarated by the thought of ten days alone with Guille. And then a complication arose. Two days before they were due to leave, René Maheu turned up. He was staying in Paris for a fortnight, without his wife, and planned to spend time with Beauvoir. They had patched up their quarrel months before. But now she had to break the news that she was about to go away with another man. Maheu issued an ultimatum. If she went, he would never see her again. She protested that she could not let Guille down. Her choice, Maheu said. The two of them went to the cinema and she wept throughout the film.

Once she and Guille set off, she cheered up. They drove through the hills of Morvan, stopping to see some sights. In Lyon, Guille spent the night with friends, and Beauvoir stayed with cousins, who teased her mercilessly. “Because I was traveling with a man they assumed that I must be familiar with every kind of vice, and the coarseness of their jokes took me aback. Over the dessert they offered me what they called a ‘Grenoble nut': this turned out to be an empty nutshell with a condom inside.”
²⁷

It was her first time in the South of France. She loved the bareness of Provence, the colors, the sight of cypresses bent by that fierce wind, the mistral. In her memoirs, she paints a picture of a particularly cozy evening in Les Baux. It was nighttime when she and Guille arrived. The wind was blowing hard. Lights twinkled down in the valley.

In her old age, Beauvoir admitted to her biographer that she slept with Guille on that trip. Did she tell Sartre? “I didn't have to. He knew.”
²⁸

The return to Paris was a shock. After “ten days of the closest intimacy,” she and Guille were back with Madame Morel and Sartre, and a gulf opened up between them. Sartre had just heard that he had not got the teaching job in Kyoto, and was bitterly disappointed. And there was a nasty little farewell note from René Maheu.

 

Now that Sartre's Japan adventure had fallen through, his immediate future was in the hands of the French Ministry of Education. In March 1931, a teaching post opened up in Le Havre. Sartre decided to accept. Le Havre was at least not far from Paris. Then Beauvoir heard she had been assigned to a school in Marseille. She panicked. Marseille was eight hundred kilometers away. Marseille was exile.

She fell into such a state of anxiety that Sartre finally suggested they get married. That way they would be given postings in the same town. It was pointless to martyr themselves for a principle, he said. Marriage was merely a legal formality. In the long run, it would not seriously affect their relationship.

Beauvoir knew what marriage represented for Sartre. She had no desire to become the little wife he resented. She could also see that he was undergoing a crisis of his own. His dream of a posting in some exotic place had been dashed, leaving him with the prospect of years ahead as a schoolteacher in the provinces. “To have joined the ranks of the married men would have meant an even greater renunciation,” Beauvoir writes. “Mere elementary caution prevented my choosing a future that might be poisoned by remorse.”
²⁹
She chose a less conventional future. They revised their two-year pact. This time it was for life.

 

That summer—Sartre was twenty-six and Beauvoir twenty-three—they crossed the French border for the first time in their lives.
³⁰
Fernando Gerassi had invited them to stay with him in Madrid. (Stépha was temporarily back in Paris with their baby son.) Sartre paid their fares out of his grandmother's legacy.

“We're in Spain!” they kept saying incredulously, as they strolled around the town of Figueres on their first evening. They wandered
around the poorest parts of Barcelona, convinced that the slums held the key to the soul of Spain. Beauvoir consulted her guidebook with manic thoroughness; she wanted to see
everything.
Sartre, after a morning of sightseeing, preferred to sit in a café and smoke his pipe, “soaking up the atmosphere,” as he put it.

Beauvoir treasured the precious days alone with Sartre. When they got to Madrid, Fernando was waiting for them at the station, and after they deposited their bags in his apartment, he took them on a tour of the city. At the end of the afternoon, Beauvoir was in tears. “I was feeling nostalgic,” she admits, “not so much for Barcelona as for my long private tête-à-tête with Sartre.”
³¹

They went to cheap restaurants and sampled grilled shrimps, black olives, and peach ice cream. They sat in cafés, where workers talked animatedly about a forthcoming revolution, and sipped Manzanilla, a pale-colored dry sherry. At the Prado, they admired the El Grecos, argued about the Goyas, and disliked the Titians. On Sundays they went to bullfights.

At the end of September, they took the train together as far as Bayonne, just over the French border. Then Sartre headed to Le Havre, and Beauvoir caught the express from Bordeaux to Marseille.

 

She stopped at the top of the flight of steps at the St. Charles station, and looked down at the scene below. “I was in Marseille—alone, empty-handed, cut off from my past and everything I loved. I stood staring at this vast unknown city, where I now had to make my own way, unaided, from one day to the next.”
³²

Beauvoir embraced her solitude with the fervor of a young monk. She got herself a room within easy walking distance of her school, the Lycée Montgrand, near the Old Port. In the mornings she would stride through the ornate front gates, march into the staff room without greeting anyone, and sit in a corner with a book.

In her spare time, she went on long walking trips. In her memoirs, she describes this as obsessive behavior. “If I had given up even one trip through indifference or to satisfy a mere whim, if I had once asked myself what the point of it all was, I would have destroyed the
whole carefully contrived edifice.”
³³
The exhausting rambles preserved her from “boredom, regret, and several sorts of depression.”

Every Thursday and Sunday, whenever she did not have to teach, she left home at dawn in an old dress and canvas espadrilles, with a
Guide Bleu
and a Michelin map in her backpack, and walked as much as forty kilometers a day. She did not consider joining one of the town's walking groups. She never bought herself decent walking shoes. By herself, she climbed steep hills, strode along copper-colored cliffs, and clambered down gullies. Older female colleagues warned her that she could be raped. She pooh-poohed this “spinsterish obsession,” and continued to hitch rides in passing cars.

One hot afternoon, she was trudging down a dirt road, and two young men pulled up. They said they would give her a lift as far as the next town. They drove a little way, then pulled off the main road, mumbling something about a shortcut. She realized they were heading for the only deserted spot in the area. When they slowed down at a crossing, she opened the door and threatened to jump out. They stopped and let her go. It was not the only occasion on which she extricated herself from a difficult situation just in time.

When her sister visited in November (Sartre paid her fare), Beauvoir marched her over the mountains. Poupette developed bad blisters, but did not dare complain. On one famous walk, she became feverish. Beauvoir finished the trek alone, leaving her sister shivering for several hours in a gloomy waiting room until a bus took her back to Marseille. It turned out to be the onset of influenza.

One brave colleague tried to pierce Beauvoir's solitary carapace. In
The Prime of Life,
published in 1960, Beauvoir called her “Madame Tourmelin,” but otherwise she made no attempt to disguise her. The woman's real name was Suzanne Tuffreau.
³⁴
She was one of the English teachers at the school, and with her brown hair, fresh pink complexion, thin lips, and tortoiseshell glasses, she looked, to Beauvoir, like an Englishwoman. She was thirty-five, twelve years older than Beauvoir, and crazy about Katherine Mansfield—both her work and her life. Beauvoir noticed that Tuffreau did not seem nearly as passionate about her husband, who was recovering from tuberculosis in a distant clinic.