Tete-a-Tete (17 page)

Sartre was informed that there would be no marriage leaves while the battle was raging. He begged Wanda not to feel abandoned, either materially or psychologically. “You are
my whole life
, my love,” he wrote to her.
⁵¹
He asked Beauvoir to give her money.

 

On May 10, 1940, the Germans invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. That same day, Bost and his friends were transported by convoy to the woods near Sedan, close to the Belgian border. Nervously, they assured one another that the Maginot Line was the most impenetrable line of defense in history.

But the Maginot Line was incomplete. It did not run along the Belgian border. On May 12, the Germans swept around it, through the Ardennes forest in Belgium, and into France. The French divisions found themselves surrounded and isolated. On land they were shelled; from the air they were bombarded.

Sartre wrote Beauvoir a second letter in the evening of May 12: “My darling Beaver, you sent me a really pathetic little letter, so distressed, my dearest…. Where exactly is Bost at the moment?”

On May 21, 1940, Bost was wounded, hit in the abdomen by flying shrapnel. He was pulled from the front lines, bleeding badly, and carried by relays of stretcher bearers to a Red Cross station. From there,
he was taken by ambulance to a military hospital, where he was operated on. The surgeon told him he was lucky to have survived.

“It gave me a hell of a shock to get your letter,” Sartre told Beauvoir a few days later.
⁵²
Like her, he wondered whether Bost was understating the severity of his wounds, but he thought it a good sign that Bost had been able to scrawl her a brief note. Provided he survived, this was the best thing that could have happened to him. At least, he would be away from enemy lines for the next few weeks.

During the following days, Bost's regiment was almost entirely wiped out. Two days after Bost was wounded, Paul Nizan, also on the Belgian front, was killed by a German bullet.

 

Late in the evening of June 9, 1940, Beauvoir got back to the Hôtel du Danemark to find a note in her mailbox. Bianca Bienenfeld had been looking for her all day. Would Beauvoir come straight away, whatever the time, to the Flore?

There were no taxis on the deserted streets, so Beauvoir took the metro to Saint-Germain-des-Prés. She burst into the Flore and found Bienenfeld with friends, looking very distressed. Her father had inside knowledge that the Germans were about to enter Paris. The schools in Paris were going to close. Bienenfeld and her father were leaving Paris the next day in his car. It was less urgent for Beauvoir—she was not Jewish—but they hoped she would pack her bags and join them.

That was the moment when the bitter truth finally hit home for Beauvoir. France was defeated, humiliated, on its knees, about to surrender to the Germans. And Sartre would inevitably become a prisoner of war. She wept hysterically. For a while, she was totally out of control.

The next day, she joined the Bienenfelds in their car. It was the famous exodus. Almost three million people took to the roads, heading south or west. The Bienenfelds headed west. They were going to Quimper, in Brittany. Beauvoir asked them to drop her in Laval, the nearest point to her friend Madame Morel's country house, La Pouèze, fourteen miles from Angers.

On June 14, Paris fell to the Nazis. Within days, France surrendered. On June 22, the eighty-four-year-old French military man
Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain signed an armistice with the Germans. The Nazis were to control the northern section of France, including Paris, and a large section in the south would be governed by the French, with Pétain at the head. The capital of the so-called “Free Zone” was Vichy. Whether Pétain realized it at the time or not, he had signed up for almost complete collaboration with the Nazis. Beauvoir sat around in La Pouèze listening to the news bulletins, reading detective novels, and weeping.

By the end of the month, Beauvoir was impatient to return to Paris. She was sure there would be messages from Sartre and Bost waiting for her at the hotel. She even imagined that one or both of them might have made his way back to Paris.

She accepted a lift for part of the way from a German military truck. The back section, under the tarpaulin, was packed with French refugees. They could not move, the air was stuffy, and the smell of gasoline turned her stomach. Beauvoir threw up.
⁵³

All that awaited her at the Hôtel du Danemark was a cheery letter from Sartre dated June 9. She fled to her room and sobbed her heart out. The Nazi flag, with its large swastika, was flapping over the Senate in the Luxembourg Gardens. The streets were deserted. Never had Paris felt more grim. Never had Beauvoir felt more utterly alone.

 

During those first difficult days, Beauvoir would sit on the terrace of the Dôme, gazing across the street at the Rodin statue of Balzac, and fantasize that Sartre would materialize behind the statue, dressed in his blue uniform and beret, his knapsack slung across his shoulder, and walk toward her smiling.

She was given another teaching job, and was relieved to spend her mornings at the Lycée Duruy. She telephoned the Bost household, in Taverny. One of Bost's sisters said that Bost had been moved to a military hospital in Carpentras, near Avignon. Beauvoir rang Olga in Laigle. The town had been bombarded and their windows had been shattered, but the Kosakiewicz family was safe.

Nathalie Sorokine returned to Paris, and Beauvoir had never been more pleased to see her. Sorokine was an inveterate thief, and she proceeded to steal two bicycles, one of which she gave to Beauvoir.
Beauvoir learned how to ride it, and soon the two women were swooping around the empty streets of Paris on their new wheels.

On July 11, Beauvoir received a penciled note from Sartre. The envelope had been opened, and at first she did not recognize the handwriting. He had been taken prisoner on June 21, his thirty-fifth birthday, the day before the Armistice. He seemed in good spirits. “If I'm writing in pencil, it's not that a shell shattered my pen, but that I lost it yesterday…. I have high hopes of seeing you again soon, and everything is fine with me…. I love you with all my might.”
⁵⁴
Only later did he tell her that the prisoners were sleeping on the bare floor, with almost nothing to eat, and that they were in a “strange emotional state.”
⁵⁵

 

People were beginning to come back to the city. On July 18, Olga arrived from Laigle. There had been standing room only on the train. Beauvoir wrote in her journal:

They spent the rest of the day in cafés, anxiously talking. In the evening, they returned to Beauvoir's hotel room. Olga brewed some tea. They shared Beauvoir's bed, and slept badly. Beauvoir's war journal ended there.

Over the next few weeks, Beauvoir and Olga were involved in something Vichy France regarded as a crime of the highest order. Olga was pregnant. The man in question was Niko Papatakis. The affair was over.
⁵⁶
Even if the father had been Bost, Olga did not want a child. She was going to have to have one of those illegal, dangerous back-alley abortions that every woman in France dreaded. Under the Vichy government, it was even more difficult than usual to find a willing abortionist.

Beauvoir managed to obtain an address. The abortionist was a skinny old woman, and Beauvoir and Olga were terrified that she
might not be sufficiently conscious of hygiene. They moved temporarily into Beauvoir's grandmother's vacant apartment at Denfert-Rochereau, where they spent “two sinister weeks.”
⁵⁷
In her next novel,
The Blood of Others,
Beauvoir would include an abortion scene, and Sartre would work a gnarly old woman abortionist into the novel he was writing,
The Age of Reason.

 

“Getting your letters gave me back my joy,” Sartre wrote to Beauvoir. “You are my life, my little sweet, my whole life.”
⁵⁸
Communication was sporadic. Prisoners were authorized to write only two postcards a week. Sartre sent longer letters from the local civilian post office, but this required “cunning and the right opportunity.”
⁵⁹

In mid-August, he was transferred to Stalag XIID, a prisoner-of-war camp near Trier, in Germany. The prisoners' conditions were much improved. Sartre was cheerful, he assured Beauvoir, and neither bored nor hungry. In fact, he had never felt so free. He liked his fellow prisoners, he had found a good chess partner, and had become a good bridge player. He boxed or wrestled for three-quarters an hour every day. He was reading Heidegger (the Nazi officers had been only too pleased to give him a fine hardback edition of
Being and Time
) and was writing his own philosophical treatise,
Being and Nothingness.
He was having fun mounting a Christmas mystery play. His closest friends were two priests—a Jesuit and a Dominican. On Tuesday evenings he gave philosophy lectures to an audience made up almost entirely of priests.

“I'm not at all miserable, I even have loads of pleasant moments, but I'm hard as a pebble. To melt into water, it's you, tender little Beaver, you alone I'd need to find again. If I find you again, I find my happiness again and I find
myself.
”
⁶⁰

 

In Paris, Beauvoir got on with her life as well as she could. Most of her friends had left. René Maheu was teaching philosophy at a high school in Fez, Morocco. Stépha and Fernando, known to be communists, had fled to New York. Colette Audry was in Grenoble with her husband. Poupette was trapped in Portugal. (She had gone to visit her boyfriend, Lionel de Roulet, and the borders had closed a week later.)

Beauvoir taught in the mornings. Some afternoons, she went to the Bibliothèque Nationale and grappled with Hegel, so she could keep up with Sartre's latest thinking. Otherwise she sat in one of the booths at the back of the Dôme, revising
She Came to Stay.

She spent two evenings a week with Olga, who had a small role in Charles Dullin's production of
Plutus,
at the Atelier. Wanda was painting Beauvoir's portrait. “We have very polite relations at present,” Beauvoir told Sartre, “though she has given me a face shaped like a gourd.”
⁶¹

Two other evenings were spent with Nathalie Sorokine. The girl was wildly jealous. She could not stand being just one more person slotted into Beauvoir's inflexible schedule. “I've been working it out,” she told Beauvoir. “You give up slightly less than a hundred and fortieth part of your life to me!”
⁶²
Beauvoir explained in vain that she was writing a novel and had courses to prepare. Sorokine riposted: “You're nothing but a clock in a refrigerator!”
⁶³
She was often waiting outside Beauvoir's hotel room when Beauvoir left in the morning, at eight
A.M.
, and would loiter outside the gates when Beauvoir came out of school. There were frequent arguments, and the residents of the Hôtel du Danemark would hear the sounds of scuffles and fighting coming from Beauvoir's room. No one had any doubts as to the nature of hers and Sorokine's relationship. The women were causing something of a scandal at the hotel.
⁶⁴

 

Bost returned to Paris in September 1940. “After so many months exclusively in female company, it was wonderful to pick up a friendship with a man again,” Beauvoir writes. Bost and Olga took a room together at the Hôtel Chaplain, on the Rue Jules-Chaplain. Wanda moved there, too. They were five minutes from Beauvoir at the Hôtel du Danemark.

Bost was given a temporary teaching job. He and Beauvoir had lunch together every day except Thursdays, when she went to her parents. On Saturday nights they had a secret tryst at the Poirier, an old hotel in the Emile Goudeau Square in Montmartre. They loved this square, with its chestnut trees, cast-iron fountain, and rundown artist studios where Picasso, Braque, and Modigliani had painted at
the beginning of the century.
⁶⁵
For Beauvoir, this was the high point of her week.

 

Soldiers in gray-green uniforms strutted around the city. There were large green street signs in German. Shopping for food involved ration cards and long queues. The hotels were freezing, and Beauvoir slept in her woolen ski pants. Petrol was almost nonexistent, and the only cars on the street were taxis and emergency vehicles. In the cafés everyone was talking about the prisoners, the conditions of the prison camps, and whether any of them was likely to be released before the end of the war. There were rumors that they were starving to death.

Signs went up in shop windows:
OUT OF BOUNDS TO JEWS
. Jewish workers were fired from factories, and Jews were debarred from public office and the liberal professions. Public servants, which included teachers, were asked to sign an affidavit swearing that they were neither Jews nor Freemasons.

Beauvoir had finished another draft of her novel
She Came to Stay
and was polishing the finer details. “But what a need I have of your judgment!” she told Sartre. “Alone in front of my text, I get to feel pretty sick of it in the long run.”
⁶⁶
She was helping Bost write film scripts. He was hoping to break into journalism and screenwriting.

She was not unhappy, she wrote, but she was not leading her true life, which was so full and rich and gay. Her true life was Sartre. She was waiting for him all the time. “I have constant nightmares about you. You come back…but you don't love me anymore and I'm filled with despair. At times, not knowing when I'll see you again has me literally fighting for breath…. I scan every street corner for you. Ilive only for the moment when I set eyes on you again.”
⁶⁷