Tete-a-Tete (19 page)

After dinner, the entire clan could mostly be found at the Flore. They never sat together as a group. They met in pairs, out of earshot from one another. Sartre might be at a table with Wanda, Beauvoir at another with Sorokine, Olga at another with Bost. They greeted one another when they came and went, but otherwise left one another alone. “We had always possessed—and were always to keep—the taste for conversation
à deux,
” Beauvoir writes. “We would enjoy ourselves over the most idiotic topics—always provided that the two of us remained uninterrupted by any third party…. When you have to discuss things with several people at once, conversation, except in very special circumstances, tends to become mundane.”
¹⁴

There was another reason to talk in pairs: the group was beset with tensions and jealousies. The Kosakiewicz sisters got on less well since
Wanda had become Sartre's girlfriend. “Wanda always suffered from being the younger sister,” Olga told a friend.
¹⁵
As Wanda herself said, her position in the Sartre clique was tenuous at best. “I arrived in a world where everything was already set up, where everyone had his or her relationship with everyone else. I was just the ‘littlest Kosakiewicz.' I felt very awkward and very isolated. My only bond with all these people was through Sartre.”
¹⁶

Nathalie Sorokine was a divisive figure. She had not been pleased when Sartre came back from the war. Before she met him, having heard so many stories about him from the family, she was disdainful. “Fancies himself as a phony genius,” she said scornfully.
¹⁷
When she finally met him, in 1941, she played all sorts of games to seduce him. It did not take long. She had already seduced Bost.
¹⁸

As well as her relationship with Beauvoir, Sorokine had a boyfriend these days, a wealthy young man whom her mother hoped she would marry. But already they were arguing. Sorokine continued to seduce everyone in sight (including Wanda's admirer, the young Mouloudji).
¹⁹
At the same time, she remained obsessively jealous of Beauvoir.

Beauvoir would dedicate her second novel,
The Blood of Others,
to Nathalie Sorokine. Hélène, the young protagonist, is willful, egocentric, and an incurable bicycle thief. She first sees Jean Blomart (who resembles Sartre) sitting in a café with a book in front of him. She asks him if he would mind fetching her pale blue bicycle from a nearby courtyard. She is late for dinner with her parents, she says. He believes her. Soon she has him in her bed.

It is not until Beauvoir moved into the realm of invention that Hélène becomes a positive character—heroic, even. Blomart is active in the Resistance. It's at first to impress him that Hélène becomes politically active. In the course of the struggle, she learns the meaning of solidarity and fraternity. One night, she insists on going out on a mission, despite the unusual risk, and is mortally wounded by the Germans. Sitting beside her bed while she is dying, Blomart agonizes about the part he played in this tragedy. “It was my fault,” he tells her. “I could have stopped you going.” But Hélène is a transformed woman. “You did not have the right to decide for me,” she tells him, smiling. “I would make the same choice again.”

 

In March 1942, Nathalie Sorokine's mother lodged an official complaint to the Vichy Ministry of Education, accusing Beauvoir of corrupting her daughter, a minor. She claimed that Beauvoir had seduced her daughter and then acted as a procurer, passing Sorokine to her men friends—Sartre and Bost. Moreover, she claimed, her daughter was not the first young women to be subjected to this treatment.
²⁰

It had taken Madame Sorokine two years to discover the exact nature of the goings-on in the Sartre-Beauvoir circle, but one thing she had always known: “Since the day my daughter first set eyes on Mlle de Beauvoir, she became a stranger to her family.”
²¹

It turned out that Sorokine's boyfriend, whom Sorokine had just ditched, had divulged the details to her mother. Over the time they had been together, Nathalie had told him plenty of wild stories. Yes, he assured Madame Sorokine, Beauvoir and Nathalie had been lovers. Before Nathalie, there had been Olga Kosakiewicz and Bianca Bienenfeld.
²²
In each case, Beauvoir had seduced the girl, then introduced her to Sartre, who also slept with her—or tried to. Sorokine had gone to bed with both Sartre and Bost. Now Sartre was sleeping with Olga's younger sister, Wanda.

Madame Sorokine's complaint took the form of a lengthy and detailed report. The Ministry of Education took it seriously, and brought in the police, who interrogated all the members of the “family”—Beauvoir, Sartre, Sorokine, Bost, Olga, and Wanda—as well as the Kosakiewicz parents and the principals of Beauvoir's schools. They even went around to the various hotels Beauvoir had inhabited over the years and questioned some residents.

Sartre and Beauvoir discussed their best strategy. The members of their clique were carefully primed. Each in turn duly denied everything, telling the police well-honed lies.

Beauvoir said that Sorokine was an excellent student, and they had become friends. Like some other of her pupils, Nathalie had developed an “exalted admiration” toward her, but Beauvoir had never responded to the girl's appeals. On the contrary, she had directed her toward “normal sexual relations.” Yes, Beauvoir knew Sartre and
Bost. Sartre had been her lover for six years, and was now a good friend. Bost had never been her lover. Yes, Nathalie also knew these men, but they were just friends.

Nathalie Sorokine endorsed this story. She was deeply indebted to her former teacher, she said. If Mademoiselle de Beauvoir often came to her hotel room in the winter of 1940, it was because Beauvoir's own room was freezing. Sorokine said yes, she had told her former boyfriend that she and Beauvoir had been lovers. That was because he wanted to marry her, and she wanted to get rid of him. Mademoiselle de Beauvoir had advised her to invent that story so he would be disgusted and leave her alone.

Sartre said he could state for a fact that Mademoiselle de Beauvoir had never had unusual tendencies toward women. Bost said he had known Beauvoir since 1935, and they had an excellent friendship. He was a former student of Sartre's and saw a lot of him. No, he had never received money from Mademoiselle de Beauvoir. He had never been her lover. And he could not imagine that Beauvoir and Sorokine had ever had sexual relations.

Olga assured the police that Beauvoir had never made advances to her of an unusual type and had never introduced her to any man with the aim of procuring. Wanda said she had been Sartre's girlfriend for the last three years, and she could not believe that Simone de Beauvoir had “peculiar habits.” It seemed to her that Mademoiselle de Beauvoir was the victim of calumny.

Monsieur Kosakiewicz was outraged that Madame Sorokine should implicate his daughters in this business. He and his wife felt nothing but gratitude and deep respect toward Mademoiselle de Beauvoir.

Nothing could be proved, and the case was dismissed. Moreover, Beauvoir's teaching credentials were impeccable. Nevertheless, the rector of the University of Paris, a supporter of Marshal Pétain, decreed that it was inadmissible to keep Beauvoir in the teaching corps. She was unmarried and had lived for years in a relationship of concubinage with Sartre. She did not have a permanent home, she lived in hotels, corrected her students' work in cafés, and at a time when France was urgently trying to restore moral values, she taught the homosexual writers Proust and Gide.

In June 1943, after twelve years of service, Simone de Beauvoir was dismissed from the Vichy government teaching corps.
²³
In progressive circles, this gave her a certain cachet. Her position would be restored in 1945, after the war, but Beauvoir never went back to teaching.

 

Nathalie Sorokine soon had a new boyfriend. It was Sartre who introduced her to Jean-Pierre Bourla, a Spanish Jew who had been his student at the Lycée Pasteur. They made a striking pair. Sorokine was tall, blond, and Slavic; Bourla was short, dark, and Latin. The “kids,” as Sartre and Beauvoir called them, quarreled often—it was impossible not to quarrel with Sorokine—but Bourla's gentleness and generosity were having a visible softening effect on her. The family had never seen her so happy.

Bourla had an almost manic energy. He wanted to study philosophy. To Sartre's and Beauvoir's amusement, he devoured Hegel and Kant as if they were detective novels, and still managed to understand them. He wrote poetry, encouraged by his friend, the Jewish poet Max Jacob. Bourla was “tumultuous, irritating, passionate, childish, clumsy, frantic,” writes Beauvoir. “He liked to be alive.”
²⁴

In June 1942, a new Vichy law decreed that all Jews in Occupied France had to wear the Star of David. They no longer had the right to own a residence or maintain a bank account, and were forbidden to enter public places—including restaurants and cafés. For Jews, there was a curfew at eight in the evening. The following month, in Paris's worst dawn raid during the Occupation, the Gestapo and French police rounded up some twenty thousand Jews and transported them to Nazi death camps.

Bourla looked more Spanish than Jewish, and he continued much as before. He did not wear a yellow star, he ignored the Jewish curfew, and he spent hours each day at the Flore. His father, a wealthy businessman, was convinced that they were protected by influential friends in the Spanish embassy. One day Jean-Pierre Bourla was outlining his plans for the future. “What if the Nazis win the war?” Sartre asked him. Bourla replied: “A Nazi victory does not enter into my plans.”

 

It was illegal to cross the border between the Occupied Zone and the Free Zone without special permission, but in the summer of 1942, Beauvoir and Sartre sneaked through again, this time with Bost. They went cycling in the Pyrenees, sleeping in barns. Just as before, food was in short supply, and it was difficult for them to scrounge up enough to eat. Sartre was plunged in
Being and Nothingness,
and he often stayed behind to work in a café while Beauvoir and Bost went off by themselves.

One day Sartre wrote in a meadow while the other two, battling a strong wind, climbed to the summit of the Midi de Bigorre. They came back to find him still writing. “He had knocked off heaven knows how many pages, wind or no wind,” writes Beauvoir, “and felt very pleased with himself.”
²⁵

She and Sartre returned to Paris, leaving Bost to see friends in Lyon. A few days later, he was caught trying to slip across the border and spent two weeks fretting, half-starving, in a local prison.

Back in Paris, Beauvoir was dismayed to learn that the manager of the Hôtel Mistral had rented her room to someone else. She spent days scouring Montparnasse for a similar arrangement. There was nothing. In the end she found a room with a tiny kitchen that doubled as a bathroom in a squalid hotel, the Aubusson, on the Rue Dauphine. The walls were peeling, there was a dim yellow bulb in the ceiling, and at night she heard mice scampering around.
²⁶

The “kids”—Sorokine and Bourla—loyally moved with her, taking a room on the floor below. Sorokine insisted that Beauvoir come downstairs, tuck her in, and kiss her goodnight. Bourla would say: “And me? Don't I get a kiss?” And Beauvoir would kiss him, too.

 

In an essay called “Paris Under the Occupation,” which he would write at the end of the war for British readers, Sartre tried to describe what it felt like to live in a city occupied by the Nazis. He was aware that many English people, who after all suffered atrocious bombardments, thought that the French had not had too hard a time of it. “I
would like to explain to them that they are wrong, that the Occupation was a terrible ordeal, that it is not certain that France can get over it and that there is not one Frenchman who has not often envied the fate of his English allies.”
²⁷

He was not asking the English to pity the French. Of course not. But he wanted to explain what it meant to live in humiliation, to have to look on passively while the fate of one's country was in the hands of others. In prison camp, he had seen the shame at firsthand. The French military prisoners felt they had let down France. The Polish and Czech prisoners openly called them cowards. And yet, Sartre pointed out: “The three biggest powers in the world took four years to defeat Germany; wasn't it natural that we gave way at the first onslaught, we who faced it on our own?”

The Vichy collaborators tried to rub French noses in their inferiority, he wrote. Worse, under the Occupation it was almost impossible for the French to avoid a degree of complicity with their occupiers. Even the peasants who worked the fields to feed the French were inevitably providing food for the enemy at the same time. It meant that the French lost their pride. “Those who congratulate us ironically for having escaped the war cannot imagine with what ardor the French would have liked to take up combat again.”

Sartre had enjoyed writing and producing a play when he was in his prison camp. The French prisoners understood and appreciated his covert resistance message. Now he was keen to get a similar message past the German censors and onto the Paris stage. He wanted the French people to throw off their paralyzing guilt. They should stop seeing themselves through the eyes of the occupiers and realize that they were free to shake off their shackles.

In the spring of 1942, Olga Kosakiewicz played a small role in a play directed by the talented young director Jean-Louis Barrault. He was encouraging, and one day she asked him how she might go about obtaining more significant roles. “The best way,” Barrault said, “would be to get someone to write a play for you.” When Olga told this to Sartre, he immediately said: “Why not me?” He and Olga no longer spent time together alone, but she was part of the family, and he liked the idea of giving her a lucky break.