And the Rest Is History (16 page)

Jean-Paul's destiny, Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, was born in a Left Bank apartment in Paris to a
bas bleu
(bluestocking) family that had an aristocratic ancestry but very little in the way of finances. Another problem for the family was Simone's father, George, who began sleeping with his friends' wives and visiting brothels. His fanatically Roman Catholic wife abhorred his behavior, and violent fights ensued. From this situation Simone originated her philosophy,
“Chez l'homme, l'habitude tue le desir”
(“With men, habit kills desire”).

Simone's lack of dowry made marriage uncertain and, needing to make her own way in the world, she enrolled in the Sorbonne. It would turn out to be an adventure that would shape not just her destiny, but that of her milieu. And in it, she'd meet the man who was to become the love of her life.

The two brilliant students heard of one another, and Sartre, in the hope of an introduction, sent Simone a drawing of Leibniz (the subject of her thesis) accompanied by an invitation to a group study session.

The first time Simone met Jean-Paul was on June 8 in Sartre's room at the Cité Universitaire. For the meeting, Sartre wore the least-soiled shirt he possessed and slippers; his room was in shambles. As soon as she started to expound on Leibniz, the group declared the topic boring and broke into a discussion on Rousseau. Nevertheless, the two had found their soul mates, which Simone was to refer to as “their twinness.” So attuned were they to one another, they took to finishing one another's sentences. Sartre never forgot his first impression of Simone: “I think she's beautiful. I have always found her beautiful, even though she was wearing a hideous little hat when I met her for the first time. The miracle of Simone de Beauvoir is that she has the intelligence of a man and the sensitivity of a woman. In other words, she is everything I could want.”

Despite their existentialist studies they were not beyond nicknames: Sartre was “the Kobra” and Simone was “the Beaver” (because of its similarity to the name Beauvoir). From her journal it was apparent that the Beaver was equally smitten: “Sartre corresponded exactly to the dream-companion I had longed for since I was fifteen: he was the double in whom I found all my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of incandescence.”

A few days after their meeting, Simone and Jean-Paul raced to their universities to discover the results of their
agrégation
, the fiercely competitive exam. At age twenty-one, Simone was the youngest person ever to pass in philosophy and only the ninth woman to have done so. The only one whose results surpassed her own was Sartre. This was to set a pattern; for the rest of her life de Beauvoir believed she was second only to Sartre.

In October the inseparable couple strolled beside the pond in Paris's Luxembourg Gardens, which were graced with the stone statues of the queens of French history. However, Sartre's mind was not on the past, but on the future, which he wanted to spend with Simone. There, Jean-Paul, the more conventional of the two, proposed. Simone told him “not to be silly,” and reminded him that he had condemned marriage as “a despicable bourgeois institution.” Sartre, ever the thinker, came up with a “romantic” compromise. “What we have is an essential love; but it's good if we both experience contingent affairs.” The crux of his offer was that they would both have the freedom to experience affairs with other people while remaining committed emotionally to each other. Moreover, as part of their arrangement they would conceal nothing of any liaisons from one another. His philosophical proposal had the same effect on Simone as a diamond ring has on other women. They pledged undying troth, existentialist style. The date of their agreement, October 14, 1929, became their “wedding anniversary”; the pact forever barred the door marked
normal
. Their legendary union made them pioneers of the sexual revolution, and although their unique pact lasted for half a century, it was to carry carnage in its wake. If the couple expected their arrangement to spare them the heartaches of a conventional marriage, they were sorely mistaken.

After graduation, Sartre obtained a teaching position in Le Havre and de Beauvoir obtained one in Marseilles, and the two lost no time in turning their pact into reality. It was at her post that Simone began an affair with a Jewish student, Bianca Bienenfeld, who had the misfortune of escaping from anti-Semitic Poland only to find herself in a France that was soon to be occupied by the Nazis. Simone subsequently introduced Bianca to Jean-Paul, who ended up taking her to a hotel, and, after some resistance, as Bianca had never slept with a man, she succumbed to his advances. Soon after, at Simone's prompting, they both broke up with Bianca, which, when compounded with the Nazi invasion, led to a major nervous breakdown. De Beauvoir and Sartre justified their actions as part of their ideology, which was embodied in Dostoyevsky's quotation, “If God is dead, than everything is permitted.” Inevitably the two would always gravitate to one another, wherein they subjected their sexual escapades to a postgame analysis over drinks at a café.

In between their numerous couplings, the couple turned their philosophies into books, which were always edited with each other's help. De Beauvoir's greatest work was
The Second Sex
. In it she argued,
“On ne nait pas femme; on le deviant”
(“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”). With its publication, de Beauvoir's scandalous reputation was sealed. She was considered even more outrageous than her cross-dressing female author predecessors George Sand and Colette. The book was promptly blacklisted by the Vatican.

However, it was in her memoirs where she truly entered the confessional of her and Sartre's relationship, and they proved that the woman who publicly declared she was immune to jealousy actually writhed in it in private. It would have been far better for Simone's emotional equilibrium had Sartre left much unsaid; honesty did not prove their best policy.

Sartre's first published book was titled
Nausea
. Its dedication read:
To the Beaver.
In 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature on his book titled
Words
; however, he declined the award on the premise that the award was too bourgeois and would therefore compromise his intellectual integrity. His public statement on his refusal: “The writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.”

Together de Beauvoir and Sartre traveled the world and met the famous: Roosevelt, Khrushchev, Camus, Picasso, Castro, and Che Guevara. Despite the ever-changing carousel of partners, the couple remained committed to their pact and one another. In tribute to them, the Hotel Mistral on France's Rue de Cels has a large plaque in front, stating that the legendary couple stayed there on several occasions during the war. Under Sartre's name is a quotation from a letter he had written to de Beauvoir: “There is one thing that hasn't changed and cannot change: that is that no matter what happens and what I become, I will become it with you.” De Beauvoir made a statement that is equally emotionally revealing: “Our relationship was the greatest achievement of my life.” At the end, the only thing that could sever their souls was death.

For years Sartre had subsisted mainly on a regime of vast quantities of coffee, whiskey, cigarettes, sleeping pills, and the drug corydrane (a combination of aspirin and amphetamines), which enabled him to maintain his frenetic regime of writing, and in March 1980, when Simone went to wake up Jean-Paul, she found him gasping for breath. He was diagnosed as suffering from pulmonary edema, caused by hypertension, and was rushed to the hospital. As de Beauvoir was hovering over his bed, while his eyes were closed, Sartre took her by the wrist. He then said his last words to his first love: “I love you very much, my dear Beaver.” The twin was left alone.

Simone crawled under the sheet to spend one final night with Jean-Paul. The epitaph she wrote for the burial plot they would one day share said, “His death separates us, my death will not unite us. This is how things are. It is enough that our lives were in harmony for so long.”

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A
s with most girls raised on “Once upon a time,” Bessie Warfield dreamed of one day marrying a handsome prince who would carry her off to the realm of happily-ever-after. In a twist on this tale, she did end up with the prince, albeit one who relinquished his kingdom for the sake of his true-life princess.

Bessie Warfield was born in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, an inauspicious start for the woman who was to send shock waves of scandal throughout the British Empire. Her father died five months after his only child's birth, and to make ends meet, her mother took in boarders and depended on the largesse of a wealthy uncle, Solomon Warfield. Despite her straitened circumstances, Bessie was spoiled by her widowed parent, and her first words were “me me,” as opposed to “mama.” From a young age she had a desire for high society and named her dolls Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt. Believing the name Bessie was more suitable for a cow than an aspiring socialite, she adopted her more genteel middle name, Wallis. During an argument over her coming-out party, she fought with her uncle, who not only did not throw her a reception, he cut her out of his will.