Tete-a-Tete (10 page)

In terms of Olga's studies, Sartre and Beauvoir had been quite unrealistic. They expected her to study in isolation, without fellow
students and without the supportive structure of university life. But Olga lacked motivation at the best of times. Beauvoir knew Olga's limits, and would stop her lessons after an hour and a half. Sartre's lectures, however, went on and on, and after three hours, Olga would start to nod off. Sartre chided her. Reproaches merely had the effect of paralyzing Olga. She did less and less work. After some months, Sartre and Beauvoir were forced to abandon their plan.

They continued to support her financially. From now on, Olga whiled away her time sleeping, listening to music, dancing, worrying about her future, and trying to steer a path through the impossibly contradictory roles—friend, lover, muse, and protégée—that had been thrust upon her by two older and much stronger personalities.

Years later, on one of the rare occasions Olga Kosakiewicz consented to an interview, she commented that she, her sister Wanda, and Jacques-Laurent Bost were submerged by their two larger-than-life mentors. “We were all like snakes, mesmerized,” she said. “We did what they wanted because no matter what, we were so thrilled by their attention, so privileged to have it.”
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Colette Audry looked on from afar. “I saw enough to know that it was an awful experience for Olga,” she recalls. “The poor girl was too young to know how to defend herself really.”
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At that time, Sartre understood “authenticity” to be pure, unreflective spontaneity—the capacity to be entirely caught up in an immediate feeling. On that basis, he concluded that he was not authentic. “With everything that I feel, before actually feeling it I know that I'm feeling it,” he wrote in his notebook. “And then, bound up as I am with defining and thinking it, I no longer more than half-feel it…. I fool people: I look like a sensitive person but I'm barren…. I know it—and often I'm weary of it.”
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He believed this was the source of his attraction to “drowning women”—tentative, tremulous women who felt intensely and could hardly articulate their feelings.

To Sartre, Olga represented radical authenticity. He philosophized about liberty; Olga
was
liberty. He was eternally analyzing his behavior; she was swept by pure, violent feelings. Whereas he projected himself toward the future, she lived in the present. She refused to
make plans, and despised routines, responsibilities, and social duties. Sartre and Beauvoir's methodical work habits horrified her. Olga happily spent three hours washing her hair with egg yolks. Her willpower, such as it was, mostly took the form of refusals. She would refuse to sleep, drinking tea all night to keep herself awake, or refuse to eat, saying she did not want to put on weight. Her health, diet, and body were major preoccupations.

Olga's narcissism fascinated Sartre. There were times when he felt a violent desire to
be
her, “to feel those long slender arms from within.”
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He saw his own body through her eyes. When he first came back from Berlin, Guille had teased him about his paunch. At the time, Sartre had found it amusing. No longer. Olga was horrified by fat people. Sartre was also painfully conscious of his thinning hair.

“I placed her so high…that, for the first time in my life, I felt myself humble and disarmed before someone,” Sartre wrote later. He abandoned his ultrarationalism and strode eagerly toward passion. “I entered a world that was blacker, but less insipid.”
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As time went on, Beauvoir felt increasingly stifled by the trio. Sartre's Berlin passion had at least been out of her sight. With Olga, Sartre “experienced feelings of alarm, frenzy, and ecstasy,” and he confided all his ups and downs to Beauvoir. She writes: “The agony which this produced in me went far beyond mere jealousy.”
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Sartre was determined to supplant her in Olga's life, and Beauvoir took the view that she might as well let him. She could not bear dissension between herself and Sartre. She tried hard to see things through Sartre's eyes, but soon realized that she and Sartre simply did not see things the same way. Whereas she saw through Olga's childlike behavior, Sartre took Olga's every whim seriously. For two years, there were quarrels and reconciliations, with Beauvoir in the unenviable middle position. If she sided with Olga, Sartre became furious. If she sided with Sartre, Olga sulked for days.

There were moments when Sartre seemed a complete stranger to her. Beauvoir tried to take comfort in the thought that his relationship with Olga was a mirage, like the lobsters. But if that were so,
what did it say about her own relationship with him? “At times, I asked myself whether the whole of my happiness did not rest upon a gigantic lie.”
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In the next few years, Sartre and Beauvoir would both paint fictional portraits of Olga. In Sartre's novel
The Age of Reason,
Mathieu Delarue is a thirty-four-year-old philosophy teacher in Paris. He's balding, has a paunch, and keeps telling himself with disgust, “I'm getting old.” He's been with his girlfriend, Marcelle, for seven years. She is “his comrade, his witness, his counselor, and his critic,” and they have a pact to tell each other everything. But Mathieu is in love with Ivich, a pale blond, frail young woman, the daughter of a Russian aristocrat, whose hair smells of egg yolks.

Mathieu is always analyzing people. He can never forget himself. It has been a long time since he forgot himself while making love to Marcelle. She tells him there's something slightly sterile about the way he thinks. “Everything is so neat and tidy in your mind. It smells of clean linen; it's as though you had just come out of a drying-room.”

Ivich is emotional and unpredictable. Mathieu yearns to know what the world is like from inside her head. “If I could be granted a wish,” he tells her, “it would be that you should be compelled to think aloud.”

He is terrified of her judgment. “You used to look at me above the forehead, just at the level of the hair,” he tells her. “I've always been so nervous of getting bald…. I thought you had noticed a thinning patch and couldn't take your eyes off it.” When she looks at another man, he is eaten up with jealousy. He tells himself he could not endure life without her.

 

Beauvoir freely admitted that her novel
She Came to Stay
was very close to reality. Despite the minor fictional elaborations, the novel, with its rich use of dialogue, gives a far more vivid picture of the lived experience of the trio than Beauvoir's memoirs.

Pierre and Françoise, intellectuals immersed in the world of Paris
theater, have an open relationship, and tell each other everything. At the beginning of the novel, Pierre says he's tired of all his affairs that go nowhere. “With the exception of my relationship with you, everything about me is frivolous and wasteful,” he tells Françoise.

Françoise's young friend Xavière is about to return, unwillingly, to her family in Rouen. Pierre suggests to Françoise that they “take her in hand.” They form a trio. Soon Pierre's personal neuroses come to the fore:

The novel's only radical departure from reality is the ending. Françoise goes up to the gas range in Xavière's room—Xavière is about to go to sleep—and quietly turns on the gas. It's so psychologically unconvincing, this murder, that it completely lets down the novel. But it shows Beauvoir's need to get her rival out of her system. Astonishingly, she dedicated the book to Olga Kosakiewicz.

 

Among their various inventive games, Sartre and Beauvoir used to conjure up a character they called Petit Crâne—Little Noddle—a handsome, upright man, a man of action rather than words, who thought little and spoke little, and in the place of ambition had small, obstinate desires. When Little Bost joined their circle, they joked
that Little Noddle had materialized in real life. “Light as that young man's presence is, you feel something like a vacuum when he goes,” Sartre observed to Beauvoir.
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Little Bost was tall, with jet-black hair that fell in his face, green eyes framed with dark lashes, and a dazzling smile. He never pushed himself forward, and did not like to talk about himself. Sartre and Beauvoir attributed his reticence and integrity to his Protestant Huguenot upbringing. He did not have an original mind, and he was always afraid of saying something stupid. But he thought he would like to be a writer, like Sartre, whom he idolized.

In October 1935, Marc Zuorro landed a teaching post in Rouen and joined their circle. He was a friend of Pierre Guille and Madame Morel's, and over the years Sartre and Beauvoir had sometimes met him in Paris. Zuorro, too, was a handsome fellow. He had a beautiful singing voice, and firmly believed he would one day be a famous opera singer. From his future lofty heights, he looked down on the world, mocking everyone, including Sartre and Beauvoir, who appeared to acquiesce in its mediocrity. “Despite this he affected to treat his friends with the greatest consideration,” Beauvoir writes. “We were amused by his love of intrigue, his indiscretions, and his scandal-mongering.”
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She warned Olga: “The handsome Zuorro…will surely try to catch you in the nets of his dirty little intrigues.”
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Indeed, Zuorro quickly added to the atmosphere of tension and jealousy that was growing, like thick brambles, around the trio. He moved into the Hôtel du Petit Mouton and struck up a friendship with Olga. Zuorro could see that Sartre was interested in her, far more so than he publicly let on. The competition spurred Zuorro on. He played Olga his classical records. In the street, he sang her arias from operas. The stories he told her were even more extravagant than Sartre's.

Sartre would watch the two of them going off somewhere, arm in arm, and became wildly jealous. Beauvoir did her best to mollify him.

 

Sartre and Beauvoir had continued, every year, to apply for teaching posts in Paris. Beauvoir, who knew that her chances were not helped by her living in hotels and consorting with a former student in seedy
Rouen dance bars, was astonished when, in the early summer of 1936, she was offered a post at the Lycée Molière, a girls' school in the affluent sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. Sartre was also promoted, but to a school in Lyon. He decided to turn this down in favor of a less prestigious job in Laon, an hour from Paris by fast train. He calculated that taking the more modest job would give him a better chance of being considered for a Paris post the following year.

Beauvoir moved into the Royal Bretagne Hotel in the Rue de la Gaîté, near the Montparnasse station. Zuorro, who had also landed a post in Paris, installed himself in a more expensive hotel in the nearby Rue Delambre. Little Bost was going to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, and he lived ten minutes away, in his brother Pierre's apartment in the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Sartre insisted that Beauvoir bring “the daughter of the Cossacks” to Paris.
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Beauvoir half hoped that Olga's parents would make her go back to Laigle. But Olga was almost twenty-one, and eager to move to the big city. Beauvoir rented a small room for her in the Royal Bretagne, and Olga found herself a part-time job as a waitress. Sartre spent every spare moment in Paris. He and Olga would often spend whole nights together, wandering the streets of Paris till dawn.

They called themselves “the Family.” Like most families, theirs was rife with tensions and rivalries.

 

Sartre's obsession with Olga was devastating for his ego. She told him repeatedly that she was not in love with him. She rarely let him touch her. For more than two years he had waited patiently, making tentative efforts to seduce her. Occasionally, when her defenses were down, he managed to kiss her. But Olga never slept with him.

In Rouen, Zuorro had made a great show of his courtship of Olga. In Paris, Zuorro finally realized he was homosexual. He had always been keen on Bost. Now he declared that Bost was his undying passion.

Bost was embarrassed—this was not a passion he reciprocated—and he began to hide from Zuorro. Olga was hiding these days from Sartre. Bost and Olga had always been a little wary of each other. One of the things that distanced them was Bost's wholesale admiration for Sartre. But things now took a different turn.

One evening, Zuorro peeped through the keyhole of Olga's room in the Royal Bretagne and saw exactly what he had feared: Bost and Olga locked in an embrace. At Christmas, Zuorro accompanied Sartre and Beauvoir to the ski slopes of Chamonix. The three of them shared a hotel room (“a bare, bleak barn of a place, with three beds in it”), and Zuorro loudly cried himself to sleep.
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On that vacation, Sartre even shed a few tears himself.
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For the next few months, Zuorro went around raging and sobbing, then took to prowling around Montparnasse with a revolver in his pocket.
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Sartre suffered the most ferocious jealousy he had ever known. He had never made public his real feelings for Olga. Now he acted as if he did not mind. He even encouraged Bost. To Beauvoir, he fumed and despaired.