Tete-a-Tete (6 page)

Soon afterward, he and Beauvoir met over a drink, and—thirty years after those tragic events—Merleau-Ponty recounted the full story. In the autumn of 1929, the Lacoin parents did what many bourgeois families did before a marriage: they hired a private detective to investigate Merleau-Ponty's family.
¹⁰
The skeleton that emerged from the closet was deeply shocking to devout Catholics, who considered adultery a mortal sin. Madame Lacoin told Zaza, whereupon Zaza wrote Beauvoir those mysterious letters. Merleau-Ponty was told nothing until it was too late, and Zaza was dead.

Monsieur Merleau-Ponty was indeed a navy officer, and he and his wife lived in La Rochelle. They had one son. During her husband's long absences, Madame Merleau-Ponty fell in love with a university professor. He, too, was married, but it was a serious liaison, and conducted fairly openly. Madame Merleau-Ponty bore two children by
him—first Maurice, then his sister Monique. The professor assumed financial responsibility for his children, but he could not give them his name.
¹¹

Back in November 1929, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty were both devastated by Zaza's death. At the time, Merleau-Ponty had no idea that Beauvoir held the loss partly against
him.
And Beauvoir had no idea what Merleau-Ponty was going through.

Beauvoir always felt that Zaza's fate could easily have been her own. Zaza was her shadow self, the self she might have been if Georges de Beauvoir had not lost his fortune.
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
ends with the haunting words: “For a long time I believed that I had paid for my own freedom with her death.”

 

It was Raymond Aron who suggested that Sartre and another friend of Sartre's, Pierre Guille, apply to do their military service in the meteorological division. Aron had completed a year of his military service as a meteorologist. It was not too bad, he told them.

For the first three months, Sartre and Guille were sent to train at the meteorological station at Fort Saint-Cyr. Aron was one of their instructors, and they annoyed him by throwing darts at him during lectures. Sartre chafed at being sequestered in his barracks, but he had to admit that wind velocity readings were easy, if tedious, and he had far more spare time than he had anticipated.

Saint-Cyr was so close to Paris that Sartre and Beauvoir managed to see each other most days. Three or four evenings a week, Beauvoir caught a train to Versailles, then a bus to Saint-Cyr, and she and Sartre had dinner together, sometimes with Guille and Aron, mostly at the Soleil d'Or, the large brasserie near the bus terminal. On Sundays, Sartre went to Paris.

After their training period, Guille was sent to Paris and Sartre to the meteorological station at Saint-Symphorien, near Tours. He shared a small house with two other conscripts, neither of whom he liked. But their supervisor, a civilian, gave them an entire week off every month, in addition to Sundays. Sartre spent all his spare time in Paris. And once a week, Beauvoir would catch the train to Tours.

When they were apart, they wrote to each other most days. Sartre
called her “my little wife” and “darling little Beaver.” She called him “my sweet little husband” and “most dear little being.”

“My dearest, it is thundering, and I look constantly to the past, all those beautiful days with you,” Sartre wrote after one of his weeks in Paris. He was feeling bored and restless, he told her, “like a swimmer who realizes he is caught in seaweed.”

“If one has to be ill, it's nice to do so just after you've left, my dearest love,” Beauvoir wrote from her bed at Denfert-Rochereau, where she was recovering from a sore throat and fever. She was thinking about the “miraculous week” they had just spent together. “We'll be seeing each other soon, won't we, my love? You promised, so I'm taking good care of myself. I love you. I love you.”
¹²

They wrote as though speaking to each other, and joked and cavorted with prose. Sartre, about to turn up in Paris, sent a frivolous note:

By the summer of 1930, Beauvoir was making troubled remarks in her journal. “I cannot reconcile myself to living if there is no purpose in my life…. Sartre talks to me as though to a very little girl…. I have lost my pride—and that means I have lost everything.”
¹⁴

At first she had been overjoyed to fall in love with a man she regarded as her superior. Now she was beginning to realize the dangers. The man who was considered the brightest of his year's crop of bright young men at the Ecole Normale had a firm sense of his genius. It was a word he used without embarrassment. “I looked upon myself—though in all modesty, if I may say so—as a genius,” he said later. “I talked to my friends as a genius talks to his friends.”
¹⁵
Sartre
had a strong personality, and his friends all too easily became what he called his “acolytes.”

Sartre's sociability and generosity were legendary. Funny, playful, inventive, and a brilliant imitator, he would make people laugh till they cried. He loved to help and encourage people, and to give them things. But despite his warmth and gregariousness, he was disconcertingly self-sufficient. He didn't seem to need anyone. At least, not one particular person. He liked people around him, the hubbub of voices in the background. He needed to have a woman in love with him, and he also liked for her—even if he complained about it—to
need
him. But provided he was able to feel that he was loved, he was happiest when alone with his fountain pen, paper, and books.

His friends regularly accused him of indifference. His girlfriends at first basked in his attentions, then complained that he did not give them enough of his precious time. They would become possessive and jealous, and Sartre would grumble that they were too demanding. It was the pattern of his life.

Beauvoir did not like to complain. From the beginning of their relationship she made a supreme effort to see things from Sartre's perspective. It was partly because she felt she owed him everything. It was also because she was convinced that she loved him more than he loved her. She rationalized that she would not make a grievance out of an objective fact. After all, if she loved Sartre, it was partly because he taught her to look things squarely in the face.

It did not help that the first eighteen months of their relationship were a blur of arrivals and farewells on railway platforms. They had a short time to enjoy each other's company, then Sartre would have to return to his barracks. For Beauvoir, the only moments that counted were those she spent with Sartre. The rest felt as if she were killing time.

There was also a physical problem, one that filled Beauvoir with shame at the time, but which she would discuss with astounding openness thirty years later, in her memoirs. Sartre had awakened her physical appetites, and unless he was in Paris, they lacked opportunities to make love. On those days when she visited him in Tours, they were too shy to get themselves a hotel room in broad daylight. She suffered “tyrannical desires” and “burning obsessions,” and was dis
mayed not to feel in control of her body. The fact that Sartre did not seem to suffer from the same problem made her more ashamed. “I was forced to admit a truth that I had been doing my best to conceal ever since adolescence: my physical appetites were greater than I wanted them to be.”
¹⁶
Beauvoir, despite their pact, did not talk to Sartre about this.

Everything conspired to make her fall into a trap she would describe twenty years later in
The Second Sex.
There is a chapter on “the woman in love,” a woman for whom love is a faith, who spends her life waiting, who abandons her life, even her
judgment,
to her man.

In her memoirs—written at a time when she was seen by the whole world as a famously independent, intellectual woman—she describes her earlier self, in scathing terms, as an “ancillary being,” and “intellectual parasite.”
¹⁸

The underlying existentialist philosophy of Beauvoir's memoirs—it was also the underlying philosophy of her relationship with Sartre—is that it is “bad faith” to look to another, whether a human being or a god, for a sense of salvation. As individuals we are free, and we act in “bad faith” when we try to avoid our freedom. It is not easy, freedom. It brings with it the anguish of choice. It comes with the burden of responsibility.

Looking back on the first eighteen months of their relationship, Beauvoir writes that Sartre had become her whole world. So fascinated was she by him that she forgot herself. She had ceased to exist on her own account.

 

The moment they met on the railway platform, in Tours or Paris, Sartre would grasp Beauvoir's hand and say: “I've got a new theory.” Beauvoir would listen carefully, then point out the flaws she saw in his argument. This would be her lifelong role, and Sartre would come to rely on it heavily. Back then, he pointed out her lack of originality. “When you think in terms of
problems,
you aren't thinking at all,” he told her.
¹⁹

He had volunteered to “take her in hand,” but now her dependence alarmed him. “You used to be full of ideas, Beaver,” he said. He compared her to the heroines in George Meredith's novels, who, after struggling hard for their independence, finished up surrendering themselves to love. Beauvoir was mortified.

On the anniversary of Zaza's death, Beauvoir's journal was tear-stained. “If you were only here, Zaza. I can't bear it that you're dead.” Simone's parents disliked Sartre, and fervently hoped she would wean herself from the strange-looking fellow and his bad influence. Her friends had dispersed. René Maheu had a teaching job in Coutances, Normandy. Stépha had married her Spanish boyfriend, Fernando Gerassi, and they had moved to Madrid. Her cousin Jacques had married. Poupette was something of a comfort. She was studying painting, and was working hard at it. Meanwhile, she and her girlfriend, Gégé, another artist, were sleeping around, trying to discover themselves.

Sartre's stepfather, Joseph Mancy, refused to have Simone de Beauvoir in the house. His stepson was not proposing to marry her; therefore she was quite simply a slut. Sartre did not take a stand, and continued to make weekly visits to his parents. His mother met him and Beauvoir from time to time, usually in the cafeteria of a Paris department store, but she was terrified that her husband might find out. After half an hour with them, she would scurry off.

The worst was that Beauvoir did not feel quite accepted by Sartre's friends. She could not be sure of this, but she always had the impression that Paul Nizan seemed to be slightly mocking her. And she had nothing in common with Nizan's wife, Henriette. Sartre's closest friend at the time was Pierre Guille, a fellow
Normalien,
with an
agréga
tion
in French literature. He was handsome, like all Sartre's friends, male or female. (Sartre considered this a necessary condition for friendship.) Guille distrusted Sartre's philosophical theories, and laughed long and loud at some of the stilted passages in the novel Sartre was writing. Sartre took it well. The two men had a deep affection for each other.

Guille was twenty-four, the same age as Sartre, and in love with a forty-year-old married woman, Madame Morel. Sartre was attracted to her himself. Small and plump, with thick black hair and sparkling brown eyes, Madame Morel had grown up in Argentina—a lonely rich girl who used to ride her horse across the pampas. She was wealthy, hospitable, and full of life.

In her apartment on the Boulevard Raspail, she had put a room permanently aside for Guille. Sartre and Beauvoir often speculated as to whether she and Guille were actually lovers. They never knew. No one, not even Madame Morel's invalid husband and her two grown children, seemed to mind her closeness to Guille. Beauvoir and Sartre were frankly fascinated. What hurt Beauvoir was that she sensed Guille and Madame Morel's reservations toward her:

If Sartre's friends made Beauvoir feel naïve and awkward, it was Sartre's former lover, Simone Jollivet, the former courtesan, who shook her self-confidence most painfully. There seemed to be nothing Jollivet could not do. After seeing Charles Dullin give one of the best film performances of the decade as Louis XI in
The Miracle of the Wolves,
Jollivet harbored the wild dream of seducing him. Sartre dismissed this as a crazy fantasy. Dullin, a much older married man, was a famous actor and theater director. Still, a year later, by the end of 1928, Jollivet had become his mistress. Dullin doted on her. He
bought her an apartment. Jollivet moved to Paris. She was now taking acting lessons at Dullin's famous drama school, L'Atelier, in Montmartre, and writing a play.