Tete-a-Tete (16 page)

On Friday afternoon she was taking her last class for the day when one of the cleaners knocked and came in. She walked up to the teacher's desk and whispered that a “Monsieur Bost” was waiting in the visitors' parlor. “My hands started to tremble and my heart to
thump, and I had the greatest difficulty in continuing on the subject of sociology—that last quarter of an hour passing in the strangest agony of impatience,” Beauvoir wrote to Sartre afterward. “I rushed down—and there, all solitary amid the green settees and mirrors of a vast visitors' room, I found Little Bost waiting for me.”

They went for a long walk in the snow—by the Seine, along the Canal St. Martin, and to the Gare de l'Est, where they had a coffee in the dreary basement café that had come to mean so much to Beauvoir. Bost did not seem to notice his surroundings. He talked manically—about life at the front, his comrades, the officers, everything but himself.

By dinner, he had become slightly calmer. He wanted to know all about Sartre, the Kosakiewicz sisters, and everyone else. He and Beauvoir spent a “tender and passionate night” in the Hôtel Oriental on the Place Denfert-Rochereau. “It's pretty sumptuous—elevator and fine, warm rooms with velvet drapes and a pink counterpane,” Beauvoir reported to Sartre, “but I slept very badly because of the stifling heat—and also, I think, because my nerves were overwrought.”
³³

The next day, she showed her companion Sartre's notebooks, and Bost read passages with “wild exhilaration.” She told him the latest stories about Bienenfeld and Wanda. “From the standpoint of principle he finds us infamous,” she wrote to Sartre, “but his heart's with us.”

She and Bost spent three days and nights together, staying in different hotels each night. Bost left her on Monday evening, in front of his brother Pierre's apartment in the Place Saint-Germain. He was going to spend the next six days with Olga, who was under the impression that he had just arrived in Paris.

For the next few days, Beauvoir dreamed about Bost. She missed his kisses, longed for his body, and envied Olga. But she knew it was fair this way, and Bost's tenderness had left her feeling strong. “There's one thing of which I'm now sure,” she told Sartre. “Bost forms part of my future in an absolutely certain—even essential—way.”
³⁴

She was forgetting the rules. Their “contingent” affairs were not meant to become “essential.”

 

Just as Beauvoir was feeling calmer at last, Sartre plunged into another crisis. He had left Paris smitten with Wanda. No sooner was he back in the war zone than his nightmare came true. He was faced with days in a row of silence from her. No letters. And then came a bombshell—a four-page screed foaming with rage.

It seemed that Sartre's past had caught up with him. Colette Gilbert, the actress with whom he had had an affair the previous summer, had told the whole story to Marcel Mouloudji, an eighteen-year-old drama student at L'Atelier, who was a close friend of Wanda's. Gilbert claimed that Sartre had virtually raped her. She even showed Mouloudji the love letters Sartre had written her.

Mouloudji felt more than friendship for Wanda Kosakiewicz. In his memoirs,
Le Petit Invité,
he writes that he was besotted with her.
³⁵
He loved her Russian-doll manner, her laughter, and the short blond hair that made him think of a thatched roof. He was daunted by her intellectual language; it seemed she could talk analytically about the slightest thing. On Friday nights they often went together to the famous Bal Nègre, on the Rue Blomet, and he would watch her shimmying around the dance floor with her African and West Indian partners. To him, she was inaccessible, a sort of goddess. She had introduced him to the Sartre clique, that intimidating group who went around saying “vous” to one another. Wanda talked about Sartre with wonderment. But Mouloudji had no idea that she and Sartre were lovers.

Mouloudji passed on Gilbert's story, and Wanda seemed to react calmly enough at the time. Only decades later, when Sartre's letters to Beauvoir were published in 1983, did Mouloudji discover that Wanda was not as indifferent as she had made out, and the reason why.

“I am doing my best not to let this obscenity fill me with childish
loathing,” Wanda wrote to Sartre, “but I just can't help feeling a terrible physical anguish.”
³⁶

Feeling alarmed and ashamed, Sartre tried to retain his dignity with a show of anger. He told Wanda that he, too, had a right to be angry. Why had she listened to Mouloudji's version of things rather than his? Wanda should reread his letters. How could she doubt his love?

He wrote Colette Gilbert a blisteringly nasty letter. “I never loved you,” he fumed. “I found you physically pleasant though vulgar, but I have a certain sadism which was attracted to your vulgarity nonetheless. I never—from the very first day—intended to have anything but a very brief affair with you…. My letters, which were exercises in passionate literature and gave the Beaver and me many a good laugh, did not entirely deceive you.”
³⁷
He sent the letter to Wanda, asking her to find out Gilbert's address and send it on. And he sent a copy to Beauvoir.

He had been “a grubby bastard” with Wanda, he lamented to Beauvoir. He was thoroughly ashamed of his behavior with Gilbert, and with women generally:

In a flurry of letters, Sartre begged Wanda to understand how fragile she made him. He loved her. He could not bear to think he disgusted her. “You well know that I'd walk all over everyone (even the Beaver)…to have a good relationship with you.”

He quoted this comment in his next letter to Beauvoir. “The end justifies the means, but I was not proud to have written that,” he con
fessed.
³⁸
When he did not hear from Beauvoir for five days, he started to worry about
her.

He was greatly relieved when a firm but forgiving letter from Beauvoir came the next day. “You mustn't be too afraid that your letters have a pretty good whiff of reprimand,” he replied, “you've got to rub my nose in what I've done. Or else, aren't you my little moral conscience any more?…I feel that this whole period will be set to rights, stamped, buried, only when we two have been able to talk about it together. It's as though you have a little seal and have to stamp everything I see.”

He assured her he would not be having any new affairs for a good while. The whole episode had made him realize once again how much
their
relationship meant to him. As for “conjugal” relationships, Wanda was more than enough.
⁴⁰

 

Intent on tidying up his emotional life, Sartre wrote to Bianca Bienenfeld, announcing that they were finished.

Beauvoir saw Bienenfeld shortly afterward. “She restrained herself with astounding guts—but she was transfigured by anger. And honestly, I don't know what got into your head,” she chided Sartre. “That letter, with its moral exhortations and protestations of esteem, was quite unacceptable…. She was humiliated that you didn't even take the trouble to explain things to her properly. Humiliated and disgusted by the passionate letters you were writing her only a fortnight
earlier. I found it desperately unpleasant…. She knows there's a lie some where and is wondering what the truth is—she's not without her suspicions even with respect to me.”
⁴¹

A few days later, Beauvoir admitted she was not innocent either. “I never blamed you for making the break, since after all that's what I'd advised you to do. But I blamed us—myself as much as you, actually—in the past, in the future, in the absolute: the way we treat people. I felt it was unacceptable that we'd managed to make her suffer so much.”
⁴²
Beauvoir would become even more convinced of this in the future, when Bienenfeld suffered a major nervous breakdown.

 

At the end of March 1940, six weeks after his first leave, Sartre was back in Paris on another home leave. On April 9, in the train taking him back to Alsace, he and his comrades heard that the Germans had invaded Denmark and Norway. The “Phony War” was over. Bost never had a second home leave.
⁴³

For one more month their lives continued more or less as before, except for a drama on the home front. Olga was having an affair. She and Wanda tried to hide it from Sartre and Beauvoir, but Beauvoir eventually found out. The man was Niko Papatakis, a heart-stoppingly handsome fellow, half-Greek, half-Ethiopian, who hung around with the theater and film people at the Flore and danced at the Bal Nègre with such grace and lack of self-consciousness that he put all the other men in the shade.
⁴⁴

What did Sartre think? Beauvoir wanted to know. Should she tell Bost? She and Bost had vowed to be open with each other, and she felt very uncomfortable knowing something he didn't. She did not want to be complicit in Olga's guilt. And if Bost ever found out, he would be angry that Beauvoir had kept it from him.

Sartre was shocked. Wasn't Olga a bit disgusted with herself for cheating on Bost at the very moment when Bost was in grave danger of being blown up? Sartre was also angry that Wanda had hidden the affair from him.
⁴⁵
But his advice was not to tell Bost. He did not think Beauvoir had the right to say anything unless she was prepared to replace Olga in Bost's life, if Bost decided to leave her. But Beauvoir could not do that, because she had him, Sartre, and one could not
have two “absolute” relationships at the same time. He thought it better that Olga tell Bost herself, on his next leave. That way Bost would at least have the opportunity to talk it over with her. A man at the front did not need to be emotionally weakened.
⁴⁶

A few days later, still mulling over the question, Sartre, out of the blue, pointed to two other culprits in the whole story. Where Olga was concerned, he told Beauvoir, their guilt was absolute. However much Olga might at times irritate them, they had partly made her the person she had become. They had created the situation in which she lived, and they maintained her in a bubble of lies. In his opinion, they could never feel enough remorse toward the little vixen.
⁴⁷

 

In his memoirs,
Tous les désespoirs sont permis,
Niko Papatakis writes that he had an affair during the “Phony War” “with a young actress, of Russian origin,…a member of the Sartre clan.” Because he was not French, he had not been called up, and he was one of the few young men to be found in Paris. The women were throwing themselves at him.
⁴⁸

In his eighties, Papatakis is still a handsome man, occasionally to be seen at the Café de Flore. “Olga was sexy,” he recalls. “Not beautiful, but sexy. She had a Slavic charm. You know, mysterious, without really being so. Her figure was androgynous, almost boyish. She had no breasts to speak of. She had a very attractive, deep voice. I think she liked to seduce.”

Papatakis believes their affair lasted a couple of months. Since Olga tried to hide it from Beauvoir, they did not go out much together, especially not in Montparnasse. But Papatakis remembers going with Wanda and Mouloudji to the Bal Nègre, where they were not likely to bump into Beauvoir.

He found Wanda far less appealing than her sister. “Olga seemed a bit lost in life, and Wanda even more so. She gesticulated a lot, I remember, and tried to keep up with her sister.”
⁴⁹

 

“My little one, I was completely worn down yesterday,” Sartre wrote to Beauvoir. German planes had dropped a bomb on a town fifteen
kilometers away, but that was not what was worrying him. It was Wanda. She had a lesion. They would not know how serious it was until she was X-rayed. She had written to him. “Dear God, how I wish you would come, come at any price.”