Tete-a-Tete (48 page)

But he would not give up alcohol, and this became an aspect of the power struggle among the women. He told Beauvoir he was restricting himself to one glass of whiskey a night. Meanwhile, Michelle smuggled in whiskey bottles, which Sartre hid at the back of his bookcase. He would put on a soft voice, Michelle Vian says, like a naughty boy defying his mother: “You know, I don't tell the Beaver everything.”

When Beauvoir saw him with an obvious hangover, there were scenes. “It infuriated Beauvoir,” says Michelle Vian. “She was his mama. She was the only one allowed to give him his bottle.”
²⁹

For a time Michelle spent Saturday nights at Sartre's place. When
his doctor made a home visit and found Sartre's blood pressure way up again, he took Liliane Siegel aside—it was her turn with Sartre—and asked whether he had been drinking. Siegel told him that Sartre regularly drank half a bottle of whiskey on his Saturday nights with Michelle. The news reached Beauvoir's ears. “I telephoned Michelle,” she writes, “telling her why she was no longer to come to Sartre's on Saturdays.”
³⁰

There was another incident, which Beauvoir does not mention in
Adieux.
Liliane Siegel's cleaning woman used to go around to Sartre's apartment once a week. It was not a pleasant job. Sartre had never been fussy about cleanliness, and now he could not see. One day the young woman, who was Portuguese and devoutly Catholic, announced that she would not be going back. On questioning it came out that she had heard a woman having an orgasm in Sartre's bedroom. She was terribly embarrassed, and had left in a hurry.

Siegel knew Sartre's schedule. She rang Beauvoir, and told her. Beauvoir made another phone call to Michelle Vian. The conversation, Michelle recalls, was awkward:

The next time they saw each other, Sartre explained to Michelle, “It's not so bad…. My prostate isn't in good condition. If I want to…” He added: “I don't tell everything to the Beaver, you know.”
³¹
According to Michelle Vian, they continued to make love (not intercourse) until near the end of Sartre's life.

Sartre was furious with Siegel. “You make me sick. You're a filthy sneak,” he shouted. “I never want to see you again.”
³²

 

Olivier Todd once asked Sartre how he coped with all his women, some of whom were notoriously jealous.

Sartre might have meant this as a lighthearted retort, but it was another betrayal. When Todd's book was published, a year after Sartre's death, Beauvoir was hurt and angry—with Todd, rather than Sartre.
³⁴
In
Adieux,
published a few months later, she retaliated. “Sartre…did not like [Todd] at all and had only a very superficial relationship with him, which is the contrary of what Todd tries to insinuate in his book.”
³⁵

 

Arlette Elkaïm disliked Beauvoir, but most of all she resented Michelle. “The Beaver does not disturb anything—though I'm sure she'd be disturbed if I upset her vacation with Sartre—but Michelle is in the way,” Elkaïm grumbled to John Gerassi in 1973.

Elkaïm admitted she was “rather exclusive,” and that she had been “very very jealous” of Sartre at times. What was strange, she said, was that she had the distinct impression that he
liked
her jealousy. (“He is a bit sadistic. It amuses him.”) But Sartre hid many things, Elkaïm said, and it was impossible to know what he was feeling. She thought he was probably anxious about dying, but whenever she chided him about drinking too much, he would drink more, to show he didn't give a damn. Sartre did not like being told what to do.
³⁶

Elkaïm spent most mornings at Sartre's apartment, along with Sartre's secretary, André Puig, and Pierre Victor. Sartre and Victor would work, and Elkaïm occasionally interrupted with tea or medicine. She had dropped her wariness about Pierre Victor. They had a lot in common: they both came from North Africa, they were both Jewish, and both of them cared a great deal about Sartre. She and Victor were even learning Hebrew together.

 

Pierre Victor had discovered Jewish theology. He would turn up in the mornings keen to discuss Emmanuel Levinas and messianism. “What next? Maybe he'll decided to become a rabbi!” Sartre joked to Elkaïm.
³⁷

In February 1978, Sartre went with Victor and Elkaïm on a four-day trip to Jerusalem. (It was Victor's first time there.) Beauvoir was worried about Sartre traveling, but she heard later that they had taken Sartre to the plane in a wheelchair, and stayed in a luxury hotel, and that their friend Eli Ben Gal drove them everywhere. Sartre enjoyed himself.

But when they got back, there was an ugly episode, a foreshadowing of what was to come. Pierre Victor penned a hasty article on the peace movement in Israel, and asked Sartre to co-sign it. Victor sent it to the
Nouvel Observateur.
Shortly afterward, Beauvoir received an urgent phone call from Bost: “It's horribly bad. Here at the paper everyone is appalled. Do persuade Sartre to withdraw it.” Beauvoir read the article, found it very weak, and managed to persuade Sartre to drop it. He did not appear to have much invested in it.

Sartre did not mention the incident to Victor, who did not find out about the article's being withdrawn till the next
Temps modernes
meeting. Victor had started to attend meetings, usually in place of Sartre. Beauvoir, assuming he knew, said something about it. Victor stormed out, shouting about censorship and calling his older colleagues “putrefied corpses.”
³⁸
It was the last they saw of him at the
Temps modernes.

Victor had declared open war on those he referred to disdainfully as “the Sartreans.” Elkaïm was on his side. Throughout her life, whatever the difficulties, Beauvoir had always made a great effort to be on good terms with the people Sartre loved. For her, this new turn of events was devastating. She could only wonder about Sartre's own loyalties. What did he say to his two young friends about
her
? Did he defend her to them? Or did he indulge their complaints, and even abet them?

 

In March 1979, Pierre Victor organized an Israeli-Palestinian conference in Paris, under the aegis of
Les Temps modernes.
Sartre went along with the idea. From the beginning, the “Sartreans” were skeptical.

The most prominent participant was Edward Said, the Palestinian intellectual and activist, who came from New York for the occasion. For Said, Sartre was “one of the great intellectual heroes of the twentieth century.” Said had accepted his invitation eagerly, and looked forward to the meeting of minds.

Years later, Said would write about those extraordinary few days. He was shocked to see that Sartre hardly seemed to know what was going on, and was completely dependent on the little entourage that fluttered around him:

The discussion was dominated by Pierre Victor, whom Said observed to be a “deeply religious Jew” and “part-thinker, part-hustler.”

After a second day of “turgid and unrewarding discussions,” Said interrupted, saying he had come from New York to hear Sartre. Victor looked irritated. There were whisperings. Finally Victor announced, “Sartre will speak tomorrow.”

The next day, the group was handed two pages of text allegedly written by Sartre, which were full of “banal platitudes,” and were totally uncritical of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians. Said knew the pages could only have been written by Victor.

Edward Said returned to the United States bewildered and disillusioned. “I was quite shattered to discover that this intellectual hero had succumbed in his late years to such a reactionary mentor.”
³⁹

 

On Sartre's seventy-fourth birthday, on June 21, 1979, the romance novelist Françoise Sagan sent Sartre a love letter, which she asked his permission to publish. She admired him both as a writer and a man, she wrote. He had written the best books of his generation; he had defended the weak and the oppressed; he was the soul of generosity. “Making love and offering love, a seducer always ready to be seduced, you have far outstripped all your friends with your vitality, intelligence and brilliance.”
⁴⁰
Sartre was pleased, of course, and after that, he and Sagan saw each other regularly. He took her to gourmet restaurants, and she cut up his meat and held his hand. She became another of his whiskey smugglers, another woman who intensely resented Beauvoir.
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Sartre called Sagan “naughty Lili.”

“Do you realize, child, that not counting the Beaver and Sylvie, there are nine women in my life at the moment!” Sartre boasted to his friend Liliane Siegel.
⁴²
Realizing his bottomless need for female attention, Siegel introduced him to others. He would ask her whether they were beautiful, then take them out to lunch and grope them outrageously. Siegel was once invited along on one of these occasions. She was shocked when the other woman started “pawing” Sartre and telling him the “smutty details” of her sex life, in language Siegel found pornographic.
⁴³
Sartre, she had to admit, was enjoying himself.

 

“The last five years of Sartre's life were terrible for Beauvoir,” says Sylvie Le Bon. “She couldn't stand Sartre being blind. She could be stoic for herself, but not for him. She
acted
stoic in front of him.” The worst moments were when Sartre was on vacation with Arlette or Wanda. Beauvoir went away with Le Bon, who had to look on while Beauvoir took extravagant doses of Valium and drank far too much whiskey. In the evenings, she would often fall to pieces and weep. On occasion her legs gave way and she collapsed.
⁴⁴

Le Bon watched over Beauvoir, trying surreptitiously to water down her whiskey. Le Bon had become a devoted nurse. After school,
she drove Beauvoir and Sartre to doctors and ran errands for them both.

Claude Lanzmann lived five minutes away from Beauvoir, on the Rue Boulard. Whenever he was in Paris, he saw her twice a week, but he was often away, working on his nine-and-a-half-hour documentary film,
Shoah.
Beauvoir had lent him a considerable sum to help get it off the ground. (The film would be launched in 1985. Beauvoir wrote a moving preface to the published text.)

Bost and Olga lived on the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, across the road from Sartre, but Olga spent most of her time in Laigle. In separate interviews, Sartre and Beauvoir both told John Gerassi that Bost had become something of a bore these days, and that when they spent the evening with him, Bost usually got drunk. He was depressed, they said, and painfully aware that he had not lived up to his talent. (Everyone in Paris intellectual circles thought this of Bost, and surmised that he had been crushed by Sartre.) Beauvoir added that Bost found Sartre's decline hard to bear and was dreading the thought of Sartre's death.

 

At the beginning of March 1980, Beauvoir heard that extracts from Sartre's discussions with Pierre Victor were about to appear in the
Nouvel Observateur,
in three successive issues. It was an important moment for Sartre. After years of silence, he would be back in the public arena.

Over the years Beauvoir had occasionally asked to see the transcript of their dialogue (it had grown to some eight hundred pages), but Sartre and Elkaïm had both been evasive. Now Sartre let Beauvoir read the forthcoming extracts. She read them in Sartre's apartment, while Sartre sat in his armchair gazing blankly ahead of him. She was appalled.

For the first time in print, Pierre Victor had used his real name. The “Benny Lévy” Beauvoir encountered in these discussions was aggressive and sarcastic, more an interrogator than an interviewer. It was as if he had deliberately set out to trip Sartre up. He interrupted Sartre, corrected him, trotted out things Sartre had said to him in private, posed leading questions, and mocked him. Sometimes Sartre appeared to agree, simply because Lévy did not give him time to explain:

Lévy, who now looked upon his militant past as “militant stupidity,” seemed determined to make Sartre see his lifetime of political engagement in the same way. Throughout their discussions, Lévy constantly used the word
failure.
Did Sartre now look upon his decision to write as a failure? What about his fellow traveling with the communists? Did Sartre, looking back, see himself as a “sinister scoundrel, a dimwit, a sucker, or a basically good person?”