Tete-a-Tete (50 page)

“Everyone knew why she did it,” Beauvoir told Deirdre Bair afterward. “I was the only other person who had a key, and she was afraid of my legitimate claim to many things there.”
⁵⁰
Sartre had not made a will. On Beauvoir's behalf, Le Bon and Lanzmann asked Elkaïm for certain mementos—the Schweitzer family chair Sartre had loved, a Picasso drawing, a painting by Riberolle, which she felt had been given to her as well as to Sartre. “Let her ask me for them if she wants them that much,” Elkaïm told them. Beauvoir preferred to let them go.

Beauvoir had already suggested to Le Bon that she adopt her legally. Le Bon had resisted the idea. She did not want in any way to be compared with Elkaïm. She also knew the public would say that she and Beauvoir were simply imitating Sartre. But Beauvoir now pressed her more urgently. The situation was difficult. Beauvoir's legal heir was her sister, Poupette. French law was strict, and Beauvoir's doctors were only legally entitled to discuss Beauvoir's condition with her family—in other words, with Poupette. Poupette and her husband, Lionel de Roulet, lived in Goxwiller, in Alsace, and Beauvoir was terrified that the doctors might force her to go and live with them. Beauvoir had never much liked Roulet, a career diplomat and a political moderate. And behind Poupette's back, Beauvoir had been quite scathing, over the years, about her sister—her lack of talent, as Beauvoir saw it, and her delusions about this.
⁵¹
In any event, Poupette was merely two years
younger than she was. Beauvoir needed a younger heir and literary executor.

Le Bon could see that the adoption would give Beauvoir peace of mind, and she agreed. Although she did not use the name until after Beauvoir's death, she became Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.

“After Sartre died, Sylvie was everything to Beauvoir,” Liliane Siegel says. “If Sylvie hadn't been there, I know Beauvoir would not have lived long.”
⁵²

When Beauvoir could gather her strength, she sat down to write
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre.
She began by addressing Sartre: “This is the first of my books—the only one no doubt—that you will not have read before it is printed.”

Beauvoir had always dealt with turmoil and grief by writing about it. This book, based on her journals from the last ten years, depicted her protracted farewell to the man she had loved. She did not resort to sentimentality. She portrayed Sartre's physical deterioration with her usual concern to tell the truth, however brutal. Many readers, including Arlette Elkaïm, Michelle Vian, and Lena Zonina, considered the book in bad taste. Others were moved by the love, anguish, and sorrow straining beneath the narrative surface, and Beauvoir's struggle not to mention her sense of betrayal.
⁵³

Beauvoir was fair to Benny Lévy (whom she still called Pierre Victor), though she made no bones about her dislike of him. Elkaïm was pushed to the background of her narrative. The only comment Beauvoir made that was actually negative was where she talked about the alliance Elkaïm and Victor had formed.

Amid the general critical uproar after the book's publication in 1981,
Libération
published an open letter to Simone de Beauvoir from Arlette Elkaïm Sartre:

Beauvoir did not reply. Two years later, she published the letters Sartre had written her over the years. “Anyone who reads his letters to me will know what I meant to him,” she told friends.
⁵⁶
To protect a handful of people, she censored some of the harsh comments Sartre had made about others, but in the interest of truth-telling, she deposited the originals in the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Robert Gallimard knew the letters would create a scandal, and they did—particularly those passages where Sartre clinically described taking a girlfriend's virginity. The shock would be even greater when Beauvoir's letters to Sartre were published in 1990, after her death, without any censorship whatsoever on the part of Sylvie Le Bon. The scathing comments about others (including Beauvoir's sister, Poupette) were left intact, and so were the details of her lesbian relationships. With each new publication, readers shook their heads in wonder. Was this the famous Sartrean pact of transparency? This voyeurism and exhibitionism, this lying to others? Many remarked that the complicity between Sartre and Beauvoir resembled the scheming Viscount of Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil in
Les Liaisons dangereuses.

At the same time, there was something refreshing about this couple close up. Here were Sartre and Beauvoir frolicking around on paper with the sheer voluptuous pleasure of telling each other every detail of their lives. Here was Sartre, an ugly little man who owned a
few clothes, a pipe, and a fountain pen, and who seemed to care only about thinking, writing, and loving. Here was Beauvoir, who dared to live as freely as Sartre, whose intelligence shone as brightly as his own, and whose passion for life was inexhaustible.

Beauvoir died on April 14, 1986, six years after Sartre almost to the day. Like him, she died of pulmonary edema. Over five thousand people followed her hearse through the streets of Montparnasse. Her ashes were buried beside Sartre's.

There are always fresh bouquets of flowers on their tomb in the Montparnasse Cemetery. Their books have been translated into dozens of languages. A vast industry has grown up around them, with shelves of biographies, monographs, and memoirs, as well as innumerable articles, conferences, and university courses on their work and their lives. Tourists haunt the cafés—now the most fashionable drinking places on the Left Bank—where the couple used to write during the war, eager to work in the warmth, surrounded by the bustle of life.

The Hôtel Mistral, on the Rue de Cels, has a large plaque in front, stating that Sartre and Beauvoir lived there on several occasions during the war. Under Sartre's name is a quotation from a letter he wrote 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.” Under Beauvoir's name there's a passage from her memoirs: “I was cheating when I used to say that we were only one person. Between two individuals, harmony is never a given; it must be constantly conquered.”

The Place Saint-Germain, the cobbled square in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with the Deux Magots in one corner and Sartre's old apartment at 42 Rue Bonaparte in another, has been renamed the Place Sartre-Beauvoir.

PREFACE

1
.
Jacques-Pierre Amette, “Simone de Beauvoir: Ces lettres qui ébranlent un my the,”
Le Point,
April 15, 2004.

2
.
Michel Contat, “Sartre/Beauvoir, légende et réalité d'un couple,” in
Literature and Its Cults,
ed. Péter Dávidházi and Judit Karafiáth (Budapest: Argumentum, 1994), pp. 1542–43.

CHAPTER ONE: NINETEEN TWENTY-NINE

1
.
Hélène de Beauvoir,
Souvenirs
(Paris: Librairie Séguier, 1987), p. 90.

2
.
“Mon petit poulet,” “mon poulot,” “ma poulotte,” or “ma poulette” are terms of endearment in French, and mean “my little chicken.” “Poulou” is an amusing variation.

3
.
Sartre interview with John Gerassi [hereafter Gerassi interview with Sartre], December 18, 1970, Beinecke Library, Yale, and with Catherine Chaîne,
Le Nouvel Observateur,
Jan./Feb. 1977. Jan. 31, pp. 74–87 and Feb. 7, pp. 64–82.

4
.
Sartre [hereafter S] to Simone Jollivet, undated letter, 1926, in
Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1926–1939
[hereafter
Witness
], trans. Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992), p. 21.

5
.
Raymond Aron,
Mémoires
(Paris: Julliard, 1983), p. 32. Aron was shocked, at times, by the harshness of the pranks Sartre thought up.

6
.
Paul Nizan,
Aden Arabie
(Paris: Rieder, 1931).

7
.
Sartre's foreword to the 1960 edition of
Aden Arabie.

8
.
Simone de B [hereafter S de B],
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
[hereafter
MDD
], trans. James Kirkup (Cleveland: World Publishing Co, 1959), pp. 310–13.

9
.
MDD,
p. 311.

10
.
Beauvoir quotes this passage from her journal in
MDD,
p. 311.

11
.
“Little Man” is the hero of Kipling's
The Jungle Book—
the boy who grew up in the jungle and is finally brought back to civilization by the sight of a beautiful young woman.

12
.
MDD,
pp. 312–13.

13
.
Beauvoir's journal (unpublished) [hereafter Beauvoir's journal], May 3, 1929, Beauvoir papers, Bibliothèque Nationale, manuscript room, microfilm 6538–6539.

14
.
MDD,
p. 325. (Trans. modified.)

15
.
MDD,
pp. 336–37.

16
.
Beauvoir's journal.

17
.
Henriette Nizan and Marie-José Jaubert,
Libres Mémoires
(Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989).

18
.
MDD,
p. 160.

19
.
MDD,
pp. 339–40.

20
.
Zaza's journal, July 14, 1929,
Zaza: Correspondance et Carnets d'Elisabeth Lacoin (1914–1929)
[hereafter
Zaza
] (Paris: Seuil, 1991), pp. 304 and 367.

21
.
MDD,
p. 194.

22
.
Unpublished journal, May 6, 1927, quoted in Margaret A. Simons,
Beauvoir and the Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), p. 195.

23
.
An Ecole Normale Supérieure for women had been established at Sèvres, just outside Paris, in 1881, but it was not nearly as prestigious as the male institution in the heart of the Latin Quarter, and did not include philosophy in its curriculum.

24
.
Simone de Beauvoir,
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre
[hereafter
Adieux
], trans. Patrick O'Brian (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 294–95.

25
.
Marron to S, November 4, 1927, Sotheby's catalogue,
Collection Littéraire,
Paris, June 26, 2002.

26
.
“Sartre et les femmes,” interview with Catherine Chaîne,
Le Nouvel Observateur,
January 31, 1977, pp. 74–87.

27
.
Simone de Beauvoir,
The Prime of Life
[hereafter
PL
], trans. Peter Green (New York: World Publishing, 1962), p. 77.

28
.
S to Jollivet, undated, 1926, in
Witness,
p. 19.

29
.
S to Jollivet, April 1926, in
Witness,
p. 9.

30
.
Ingrid Galster, “Cinquante ans après
Le Deuxième Sèxe:
Beauvoir en débats,” Lendemains 94 (1999).

31
.
Toril Moi makes these points in
Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman
(London and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994).

32
.
PL,
p. 12. (Trans. modified.)

33
.
Hélène de Beauvoir,
Souvenirs,
recueillis par Marcelle Routier (Paris: Séguier, 1987), p. 94.

34
.
Beauvoir's journal, September 2–4, 1929.

CHAPTER TWO: THE PACT

1
.
Beauvoir's journal, September 10, 1929.

2
.
PL,
p. 73.

3
.
PL,
p. 39.

4
.
Sartre,
The War Diaries, November 1939–March 1940,
trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 75.

5
.
Zaza to her father, August 27, 1929, in
Zaza,
p. 355.

6
.
Zaza to S de B, August 28, 1929, in
Zaza,
p. 359.

7
.
Deirdre Bair,
Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 147.

8
.
MDD,
p. 294.

9
.
Merleau-Ponty to S de B, undated (probably early 1959), Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir private archives.

10
.
In 1928, Germaine Marron's parents hired private detectives to investigate Sartre. They came snooping around the Ecole Normale. It seems that whatever it was they found out, the Marrons did not find it encouraging.

11
.
Bair,
Simone de Beauvoir,
p. 152. In 1958, when Beauvoir asked Sartre's mother, who also lived in La Rochelle back then, whether she knew about the affair, Mme Mancy said that everyone in town knew about it.

12
.
S de B to S, January 6, 1930.

13
.
S to S de B, undated, in
Witness,
p. 32.

14
.
Beauvoir's journal, 1929–31. Some of this journal is quoted in Margaret A. Simons's article “Lesbian Connections: Simone de Beauvoir and Feminism,” Signs 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1992): 148.

15
.
S de B, “Conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre” (1974), in
Adieux,
p. 159.

16
.
PL,
pp. 72–73. (Trans. modified.)

17
.
Simone de Beauvoir,
The Second Sex,
trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1953), p. 653.

18
.
PL,
pp. 70–74.

19
.
Ibid., p. 47.

20
.
Ibid., p. 40. I have replaced the fictional pseudonyms, Mme. Lemaire and Pagniez, with their real names, and slightly modified the published translation.

21
.
PL,
p. 82.

22
.
Gerassi interview with Sartre, February 26, 1971.

23
.
S to Simone Jollivet, undated, 1926, in
Witness,
pp. 16–17.

24
.
Beauvoir copied Maheu's letter for Sartre, January 6, 1930,
Letters to Sartre, 1940–1963
[hereafter
Letters to Sartre
], trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1991), p. 4.

25
.
PL,
p. 20.

26
.
Ibid., p. 63.

27
.
Ibid., p. 65.

28
.
Bair,
Simone de Beauvoir,
p. 172.

29
.
PL,
p. 89.

30
.
As a child, Sartre had once gone to Switzerland with his grandparents.

31
.
PL,
p. 99.

32
.
Ibid., p. 104.

33
.
Ibid., 109.

34
.
Lycée Montgrand files at the Archives de Marseille. Suzanne Tuffreau was born in 1895, which made her thirty-five years old when Beauvoir met her. A married woman, she had been teaching English at the Lycée Montgrand since July 1927.

35
.
PL,
p. 114.

36
.
Ibid., p. 115.

37
.
Ibid., p. 119.

38
.
Bair,
Simone de Beauvoir,
p. 176.

39
.
PL,
p. 133. Since the correspondence between Beauvoir and Sartre during the Marseille period was lost or destroyed (except for one published letter from Sartre, dated October 9, 1931), there is no documentary evidence to hold up against Beauvoir's memoirs.

CHAPTER THREE: OLGA KOSAKIEWICZ

1
.
PL,
p. 143.

2
.
Annie Cohen-Solal,
Sartre: A Life
(1985) (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 79.

3
.
Gerassi interview with Sartre, March 26, 1971.

4
.
Colette Audry, “Portrait de l'écrivain jeune femme,”
Biblio
(November 1962).

5
.
Colette Audry interview with Deirdre Bair, March 5, 1986, Bair,
Simone de Beauvoir,
p. 183.

6
.
The affair is known about in Sartre circles. Raymond Queneau mentions it in his
Journeaux 1914–1965
(Paris: Gallimard, 1996), July 24, 1951, p. 767.

7
.
Gerassi interview with Sartre, March 26, 1971.

8
.
Sartre,
War Diaries,
p. 285. (Trans. modified.)

9
.
Ibid., p. 62.

10
.
In
PL,
Beauvoir writes ambiguously: “There was no feeling of jealousy on my part. Yet this was the first time since we had known one another that Sartre had taken a serious interest in another woman; and jealousy is far from being an emotion of which I am incapable” (p. 220).

11
.
PL,
p. 220.

12
.
Ibid., p. 188.

13
.
Ibid., pp. 189–90; p. 94.

14
.
In 1944, after the Liberation, the town of Laigle changed its name to L'Aigle.

15
.
S de B to Olga Kosakiewicz, July 1934 (undated), Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir archives.

16
.
Ibid., July 1934.

17
.
Beauvoir said this to Sartre later (January 24, 1940;
Letters,
p. 269).

18
.
Sartre,
War Diaries,
p. 123.

19
.
Ibid., p. 87.

20
.
Sartre,
War Diaries,
p. 76. It was a quotation from the Swiss writer Rodolphe Töpffer.

21
.
Marie Ville told this to Beauvoir. Simone de Beauvoir,
Journal de guerre: Septembre 1939–janvier 1941
(Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 91.

22
.
Sartre,
War Diaries,
p. 77.

23
.
Both of them wrote about that afternoon: S de B,
PL,
p. 249, and Sartre,
War Diaries,
p. 77.