Tete-a-Tete (49 page)

In the last of the three interviews, Benny Lévy dragged Sartre through the mud for declaring in
Portrait of the Anti-Semite
that there was no such thing as Jewish history. Somehow he got Sartre, a lifelong friend to secular Jews, to accept Lévy's premise that the “real Jew” was a religious Jew. There followed a long discussion of messianism.

Overall, Sartre defended himself better than Beauvoir seemed to think. As she saw it, Lévy had manipulated a tired old man. He had trivialized Sartre's entire thinking, his entire past. Beauvoir read the text through tears, and when she finished, she threw it across the room. She pleaded with Sartre to stop the interviews' publication.

Sartre was surprised. He had expected some criticism, but not this. He was blind; he depended on Benny Lévy, and he knew about Lévy's hot temper. He was caught between two powerful forces, and he was going to have to betray one of them. “You know, Beaver, I am still alive and thinking,” he told her. “You must allow me to continue to do so.”
⁴⁵

To Beauvoir, it was a double betrayal—of Sartre, and by Sartre. “She cried,” Denise Pouillon recalls. “She could not stop crying. Floods of tears. We cried inside ourselves. Her suffering was terrible.”
⁴⁶

Claude Lanzmann and Bost rang Jean Daniel, the editor of the
Nouvel Observateur,
trying to persuade him to stop publication of the Lévy interviews. Jean Daniel hesitated. But then came a phone call from Sartre himself. His voice was loud and clear. He wanted the interview to be published in its entirety, he said. If Jean Daniel did not go ahead and publish it, Sartre would send it elsewhere. He knew his friends had phoned Daniel, but they were wrong to have done that. “The itinerary of my thought eludes them all,” he said, “including Simone de Beauvoir.”
⁴⁷
(In fact, there was one exception among the Sartreans: André Gorz was not against the publication, and believed it represented a genuine evolution in Sartre's thinking.)

The interviews were published over three weeks, on March 10, 17, and 24, 1980. The public did not know what to make of them. Could this really be Jean-Paul Sartre talking about messianism? Was he in
full possession of his faculties? And who was this imperious young man, Benny Lévy?

 

The second of the three issues had appeared, and relations between Sartre and Beauvoir remained strained. On Wednesday, March 19, they spent the evening with Bost, in Sartre's apartment. After Bost left, Beauvoir stayed there, sleeping in the second bedroom. The following morning, when she went to wake Sartre at nine
A.M
., she found him sitting on the edge of his bed gasping for breath. He'd been there since five
A.M
., unable to speak, let alone call out. Beauvoir rushed to the phone to call his doctor. There was no dial tone. It turned out that Puig had not paid the bill. There was no money in the coffers. The service had been cut off.

Beauvoir scrambled into her clothes and rushed down to the concierge's ground-floor apartment to phone. The doctor came quickly, took one look at Sartre, and came back downstairs and phoned for an ambulance. The ambulance arrived, and Beauvoir stood by while Sartre was given emergency treatment that lasted almost an hour. Then holding an oxygen mask over his head, they took him down in the elevator on a stretcher, and put him in the ambulance.

Beauvoir went back up to the apartment. She showered, dressed, and went to lunch, as scheduled, with Jean and Denise Pouillon. Little did she know that she would never enter Sartre's apartment again.

After lunch, she asked Jean Pouillon to accompany her to the hospital. “I'm rather frightened,” she told him. Sartre had been taken to the Broussais Hospital, nearby. She found him in the intensive care unit. He was breathing normally now, and told her he felt fine.

After a few days, there appeared to be a ray of hope. Sartre was transported to the cardiology ward. The doctors said he had a pulmonary edema, caused by hypertension or cardiac insufficiency.

The group settled into a new routine. Elkaïm spent mornings and evenings at the hospital; Beauvoir was there in the afternoons. The others arranged their visits accordingly. Bost and Claude Lanzmann came to see Sartre in the afternoon, during Beauvoir's shift. Michelle
Vian, Wanda, and Benny Lévy came while Elkaïm was there. Sartre's women read to him in relays. Detective novels.

Sartre was tired, and hardly spoke. He had nasty-looking bedsores. His kidneys were no longer functional. But he was still lucid. One afternoon, he asked Beauvoir anxiously, “How are we going to manage the funeral expenses?”
⁴⁸

He was soon back in the intensive care ward. On April 13, when Beauvoir hovered near his bed, Sartre took her by the wrist. His eyes were closed. “I love you very much, my dear Beaver,” he said. The next day, his eyes still closed, he made a little pout and offered her his lips. Beauvoir kissed him on the mouth and cheeks. These were not words Sartre usually said. This was not a gesture he usually made. She understood.

On Tuesday, April 15, Beauvoir rang the hospital at ten
A
.
M
., as usual. The nurse sounded hesitant. Beauvoir hurried over. Sartre was in a coma, but he was breathing quite strongly. She spent the day by his bedside. At six
P
.
M
., Elkaïm took over. Three hours later the phone rang in the Rue Schoelcher. “It's over,” Elkaïm said.

Beauvoir returned to the hospital with Le Bon. She found Sartre looking much the same, except that he was no longer breathing. From his bedside, she rang Bost, Claude Lanzmann, Jean Pouillon, and André Gorz. They came straight away. The authorities said they could stay with the body for several hours—until five in the morning, if they were quiet and did not disturb the other patients.

Beauvoir, already heavily sedated with Valium, asked Sylvie to go out and buy some whiskey. Pouillon did not want Le Bon to leave Beauvoir, and he went instead. Elkaïm went home. For the next few hours, the group drank, reminisced, and sobbed. Sartre had left no instructions. They knew he wanted to be cremated, and he had once stipulated that he did not want to be beside his mother and stepfather, at the Père Lachaise Cemetery. It was obvious to his friends that Sartre's final resting place had to be the Montparnasse Cemetery. He had lived within the shadows of its walls for most of his life.

In the early hours of the morning, Beauvoir wanted to be left alone with Sartre, and the others left. She pulled back the sheet and went to lie down beside him. “No, don't do that!” an orderly shouted at her. A nurse explained: “It's the gangrene, Madame.” Beauvoir had not real
ized that Sartre's bedsores were gangrenous. The nurse let Beauvoir lie on top of the sheet, beside Sartre. She was so drugged she even fell asleep for a short time. At five in the morning, the orderlies came and took Sartre away.

Sartre's death made front-page news around the world. The tributes mourned the passing of a great man. “Sartre inhabited his century like Voltaire and Hugo inhabited theirs,” said
Libération.
“The world is a poorer place than it was yesterday,” said
Le Figaro.
“What we will keep is the example of an indefatigible combat for the dignity of man, for freedom, justice and peace,” said
Le Matin de Paris.
Beauvoir was flooded with letters and telegrams.

For the next few days, she retreated to Le Bon's apartment. In her own, she could not face the phone, which never stopped ringing. She left it to Claude Lanzmann, Bost, and Le Bon to make the funeral arrangements.

President Giscard d'Estaing came in person to the hospital and spent an hour beside Sartre's coffin. He understood that Sartre, a man who had always rejected official honors, would not want a national burial, he told Sartre's friends, but the government would like to pay the costs of his funeral. The Sartreans thanked him, but refused.

 

The Paris sky was leaden on Saturday, April 19, 1980. It looked as if there would be rain. In the late morning, Beauvoir went to the hospital with Le Bon and Poupette, to see Sartre for the last time. His coffin in the hospital morgue was still open. He was dressed in a suit and tie. They were the only clothes of his Beauvoir kept in her apartment, for those occasions when they went with Le Bon to the opera. To the mourners who filed past the coffin Beauvoir kept saying softly, “He didn't suffer.” She asked Bernard Pingaud, from the
Temps modernes,
to take some photos. Just before two
P.M
., the undertakers closed the casket. Beauvoir kissed Sartre good-bye, on the lips.

An immense crowd had gathered in front of the hospital. At 2:15
P.M
., the heavy gates swung open. People craned forward. The first vehicle through the gates was a minibus—covered in a mountain of red roses, white arum lilies, and wreaths—transporting those friends
who were unable to walk the three-kilometer route. Next came the hearse, with the coffin in the back, draped in black. Claude Lanzmann sat next to the driver. Simone de Beauvoir, Poupette, Le Bon, and Elkaïm sat behind.

The streets of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain were packed. The crowd, estimated to be fifty thousand, was mostly young people. Many carried flowers—a carnation, jonquils, a branch of lilac—which they waved as the hearse passed. Journalists knocked on the hearse windows, with their lenses pressed to the glass. “This is the last of the 1968 demonstrations,” Claude Lanzmann said.

Beauvoir had Valium tablets in her handbag, and she was chewing them as if they were throat lozenges. She was barely aware of what was going on around her. She told herself this was exactly the funeral Sartre had wanted, and he would never know about it.

The procession reached Denfert-Rochereau. People had climbed onto the famous lion statue. A young man was sitting on the lion's head. The hearse turned down the Boulevard Raspail, past the Rue Schoelcher on the left, past Sartre's old apartment at number 222, past the Dôme, the Coupole, and Rotonde at the Vavin intersection. It turned up the Rue du Départ, then left onto the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, past number 29, where Sartre had spent his final years. They traveled extremely slowly, because of the crowd. At four-thirty
P
.
M
., they entered the main entrance of the cemetery.

Once inside the gates, the cars could hardly move forward. There were people everywhere. Sartre's friends had refused a police presence—Sartre would not have wanted that—but it meant that no one was holding back the crowd.

The hearse pulled up by the grave. The men carried the coffin through the crowd and lowered it, without ceremony, into the hole. When a frail little figure in black trousers, a raincoat, and a sunset-colored turban climbed out of the back seat, there was a burst of applause. People pressed forward. Lanzmann and Bost went ahead, clearing a path through the crowd. Le Bon and Poupette helped Beauvoir to the side of the grave.

The jostling was such that a man fell in the hole, on top of the coffin. One of the men from the funeral parlor had to climb in and help
him out. Some younger people tried to hold back the crowd to protect Beauvoir. Clothes were torn. People wept. Beauvoir looked as if she were about to faint. Someone hurried off to fetch something for her to sit on. The guard at the gate supplied an office chair. For ten minutes—it seemed like an eternity—Beauvoir sat beside the grave staring down at the coffin—indifferent to the cold drizzle, the clamor, and the clicking cameras—clutching a rose, weeping her heart out. No one who saw it would forget the sight. It was on the evening news.

One of the funeral men made a sign, and there was a flurry of activity. The crowd was too dense for people to walk up to the grave, and so their flowers and bouquets were passed overhead, from hand to hand, and those standing close tossed them onto the coffin.

The men picked up their shovels. Beauvoir was helped to her feet. This was it, the final separation, after fifty-one years. She dropped her rose onto the coffin and staggered toward the exit, supported by friends. On the way she collapsed onto a tombstone. She would scarcely remember the short car ride to Lanzmann's place. She would scarcely remember the next month of her life.

 

Sartre's official plot was not ready, and he had been buried in a temporary grave. Five days later, his remains were disinterred and taken to the Père Lachaise Cemetery to be cremated. Then the ashes were returned to the Montparnasse Cemetery. Sartre's permanent resting place was beneath a simple sand-colored tombstone, separated by a tall, ivy-covered wall from the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, where he had last lived.

A small group of friends attended the cremation; Beauvoir was too weak. She was at Le Bon's, and that morning she had been unable to get out of bed. When Lanzmann and Le Bon came back after the ceremony, they found her sitting on the floor beside her bed, delirious. They rushed her to the Cochin Hospital. For a week she was mostly unconscious. For the second time in her life she had reacted to a crisis by developing pneumonia. It was as if her lungs could not work without Sartre being there. She could no longer breathe.

Her condition was so bad that the doctors predicted she would never fully recover. When she went home, a month later, she still could not walk.

 

“‘The doe'…transformed herself into a vulture,” Sartre's friend Georges Michel would write in disgust.
⁴⁹
The day after Sartre's cremation, Elkaïm, helped by Benny Lévy, emptied Sartre's apartment. They took his papers, books, and few possessions to Elkaïm's place. As for Sartre's furniture, Benny Lévy took it to his communal house on the outskirts of Paris.

Elkaïm would find herself paying a fine to the taxation department for removing Sartre's affairs before they could be officially assessed, but as Sartre's adopted daughter, all the legal rights were hers. Beauvoir had none.