Tete-a-Tete (8 page)

Suzanne Tuffreau introduced Beauvoir to her friends. They often ate together, went to concerts and films, and, one weekend, made an excursion to Arles. Thanks to her new friend, Beauvoir moved into the room above Tuffreau's apartment—charming digs on the elegant Avenue du Prado, with a balcony overlooking the rooftops and plane trees. Tuffreau kept badgering Beauvoir to let her come hiking. Finally Beauvoir consented.

Beauvoir's plucky colleague was not deterred. One evening, she invited Beauvoir to dinner at a famous fish restaurant. They ate grilled perch, drank copious quantities of local wine, talked in English; Tuffreau affectionately mocked Beauvoir's bad accent. Afterward, they weaved their way back to the Prado. No sooner had they stepped inside the older woman's apartment than she pulled Beauvoir to her in a tight embrace.

Beauvoir
did
share Tuffreau's passion for Katherine Mansfield. That year, she read and reread Mansfield's journals, correspondence,
and short stories, and found great romantic appeal in Mansfield's cult of the “solitary woman.”

Shortly before she died, Beauvoir, in conversation with her biographer Deirdre Bair, described her time in Marseille as “the unhappiest year of my life.” She admitted she felt very unsure about Sartre:

It seems that while Simone de Beauvoir was dashing around mountain paths, Sartre was practicing the art of seduction. Beauvoir did not do much reading that year in Marseille, and in the end she discarded the novel she was writing, but by the time she left there, she felt better about herself. “Separation and loneliness had not destroyed my peace of mind,” she writes in her memoirs. “I knew that I could now rely on myself.”
³⁹

October 1932–April 1937

Sartre had been living in Le Havre for eighteen months, and he made it very clear, to himself and others, that he was passing through, not settling in. He did not dislike the place. It was a handsome old town in those days (before large sections were destroyed in the war), and he liked to go for long walks around the docks, observing the sailors' cafés, bars, and whorehouses. But if he chose to live in the seedy Hotel Printania it was because of its proximity to the railway station. And when Simone de Beauvoir took up a teaching job in Rouen, in October 1932, she, too, found herself a hotel (equally squalid) within earshot of the “reassuring whistle of trains.”
¹

The railway station was once again the focal point of their lives. On Thursdays there was no school, and as soon as classes were over at midday on Wednesdays, one of them would make the hour-long trip either to Rouen or Le Havre. At midday on Saturdays, when school was out, they headed to Paris (either staying at Madame Morel's or sharing a hotel room for the night.) On Sunday evenings they were back at the Gare Saint-Lazare. Feeling slightly dejected, they'd settle into their separate blue upholstered compartments on their separate trains and bury their noses in detective novels. By the time they inserted their keys in their respective hotel room doors, their provincial towns were asleep.

 

His students at the Lycée François I in Le Havre had never met anyone like Sartre. They were fascinated by this small, round man who turned up to school in an old tweed jacket—no tie—sat on the front desk, his legs swinging in the air, and threw ideas around, without ever looking at any notes, as if he were talking to friends. He was not like other adults. He took ideas very seriously, but did not take his position of authority seriously at all. He never failed the students and almost never gave them below-average grades. He even let them smoke in class.

There was nothing of the snob about him, and there did not seem to be a subject that did not interest him. He took the view that everything told you something about contemporary civilization. “Go to the movies often,” he told them.
²
His voice was metallic but clear, with wonderful projection, and somehow quite mesmerizing. He was a brilliant imitator, and so funny and inventive that he managed to bring laughter even into a philosophy class.

Sartre did not seem to care about the things other adults cared about. Those students who got to see his hotel room were shocked by its Spartan austerity. He told them he had few possessions and no interest in material acquisitions. He had very regular work habits, but prided himself on being able to work anywhere—on a train, under a tree, in noisy cafés.

He did not seem to like working in his room. At lunchtime, he could nearly always be found at Le Havre's famous old café, the Guillaume Tell, with its plush red banquettes and stained-glass windows. In the evenings, he was generally at the Café de la Grande Poste. He would eat a simple dinner—usually a sausage, sauerkraut, and fried egg with a beer—then get out his pipe and start writing. His students knew he was working on a novel that contained his ideas about contingency and freedom. Some evenings, he would meet two or three of them in his café. He'd ask questions, and they'd find themselves chatting about all sorts of things. He was encouraging, and made them realize they had choices. Sometimes they played poker, or Sartre taught them bawdy songs.

One of his teaching colleagues had gotten Sartre keen on boxing, and Sartre encouraged his students to become his sparring partners. As he liked to tell people: “The fact that I was their teacher didn't stop them punching me in the face as hard as they could.”
³

 

Colette Audry was a colleague of Beauvoir's at the Lycée Jeanne d'Arc in Rouen. Nizan knew her from communist circles, and had talked about her warmly to Beauvoir. At first Audry did not warm to the brisk Parisian who came up to her in the staff room and introduced herself. She thought Beauvoir very bourgeois, except for her rapid-fire voice, which wasn't bourgeois at all.
⁴
For weeks, Beauvoir felt intimidated by this assured young woman who went around in a felt hat, tailored trousers, and a leather jacket, and who seemed always to be on her way to a political meeting. Audry was a committed Trotskyite; Beauvoir knew nothing about politics. Audry had decorated her studio apartment with loving care; Beauvoir basically camped out in her room at the Hôtel La Rochefoucauld. But before long, the women were regularly having lunch together at the Brasserie Paul, and finishing it off with a game of Russian billiards at the far end, among the men, before they left to prepare their classes for the next day.

As Audry said later, she enjoyed Beauvoir's company, her laughter, and the ferocity with which she loved or despised people. It seemed to Audry that there were no limits to Beauvoir's courage and determination. Beauvoir had discarded one novel and bravely embarked on another. Audry had no doubt that her friend would be a published writer one day.

When Sartre came to Rouen, they sometimes went out as a threesome. “Soon the three of us were exchanging ideas so fast it sometimes made my head spin,” Audry recalls. Beauvoir had explained that she and Sartre had a contract based “on truth, not on passion,” but Audry could see the tenderness between them, as well as the intellectual sparks. “Theirs was a new kind of relationship, and I had never seen anything like it. I can't describe what it was like to be present when those two were together. It was so intense that sometimes it made others who saw it sad not to have it.”
⁵

In her memoirs, Beauvoir writes that Sartre was fascinated by Audry, and they often discussed her. She does not say that Sartre and Audry had a brief affair, and that for a while, she and Audry were quite jealous of each other.
⁶

 

Sartre's philosopher friend Raymond Aron (who had encouraged him to go into meteorology) was on a brief visit back to Paris when he pointed to Sartre's apricot cocktail and said: “You see, my dear fellow, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” Aron had a fellowship at the French Institute in Berlin, where he was studying “phenomenology.” This school of thought, associated with the German philosophers Husserl and Heidegger, maintained that one could talk in a concrete way about any subject whatsoever. Sartre, who wanted nothing more than to apply philosophy to everyday life, was pale with excitement.

Sartre wasted no time in applying for a fellowship to the French Institute, and he was successful. By the time he arrived in Berlin, in September 1933, Hitler was chancellor, swastikas were flying from government buildings, and Nazis were marching in the streets. In May, there had been a vast bonfire of Jewish and communist books in front of the opera house. Sartre was appalled by Nazism, but convinced it could not possibly last long. He had little interest in politics.

That year, he once again lived the collective life he had so enjoyed at the Ecole Normale. “I re-found the irresponsibility of my youth,” he said later of his stay in Berlin.
⁷
But he also worked hard. His schedule rarely varied, seven days a week. In the mornings, from 9
A.M.
to 1:30
P.M.
, he studied phenomenology. In the middle of the day he took a few hours off, walked by the River Spree or explored the city, and wrote letters. From five to nine in the evening, he worked on his novel. He was writing a second draft.

The French scholars were housed in a charming villa. In the evenings, Sartre and his friends threw themselves into Berlin nightlife. Brought up by Alsatian grandparents, Sartre had always loved heavy German cooking—pork, sausages, sauerkraut, and rich chocolate cakes. And he was extremely fond of German beer.

He had been keen to get himself a German girlfriend but found that he lacked the language skills. He had learned German at school and could read it, but he spoke it badly. “Stripped of my weapon, I was left feeling quite idiotic and did not dare attempt anything. I had to fall back on a French woman,” he wrote later. “What sympathy I
felt for the naïve remark a frustrated Hungarian once made to the Beaver: ‘If you only knew how witty I am in Hungarian!'”
⁸

The French woman, Marie Ville, was the wife of one of his colleagues at the institute. She was a dreamy, waiflike creature, so disconnected from the real world that Sartre called her “the moon woman.” He liked her amorphousness. For him, “drowning women,” as he called them, had an almost “magical attraction.”
⁹

Whatever Jean-André Ville, a mathematician, thought of his wife's affair with Sartre, it was not easy for Beauvoir.
¹⁰
In February 1934, she wangled herself a medical certificate and spent two weeks in a frozen Berlin. She had been there only a few days when Colette Audry sent word that the school authorities were asking about her. If they found out that she was not at home in bed after all, she'd risk being fired. Audry urged Beauvoir to return. So did Sartre. Beauvoir refused. “I shook with rage at the idea of being forced to make any concessions to prudence, and stayed where I was.”
¹¹

Sartre introduced his two girlfriends to each other. He assured Beauvoir that though he and Marie Ville felt very close, they knew the relationship had no future. Beauvoir returned to Paris, and there were no repercussions at her school.

 

Rouen is the town where Flaubert has Madame Bovary go almost demented with ennui. Simone de Beauvoir, too, was suffering from provincial boredom. As she writes in her memoirs, she was twenty-six and had nothing to distract her—“no husband, no children, no home, no social polish.”
¹²
Meanwhile, Sartre was happily ensconced in Berlin, involved with another woman.

On free days, Beauvoir sometimes spent eight hours cloistered in her room, reading and writing in a fug of smoke. With Sartre's guidance, she was reading Husserl and phenomenology. She was taking German lessons from a German refugee she had met through Colette Audry. And she was writing a novel (once again, it did not seem to be coming together) that explored the conflict between love and independence.

At weekends she sometimes went to Paris to see Pierre Guille, with whom she was once again intimate. “I used to tell him every
thing that had happened to me,” Beauvoir writes in her memoirs, “and if I needed advice, it was to him that I turned. I placed great trust in his judgment, and he occupied a most important place in my life.” He would come to the Gare Saint-Lazare to meet her. Beauvoir surmises that if rumors began to circulate in Rouen about her being the mistress of a wealthy senator, it was because she was often seen with Guille, who had a “very fine presence.”
¹³

That year, Beauvoir befriended one of her students, a boarder. “The little Russian,” as the other teachers called her, sat at the back of Beauvoir's baccalaureate philosophy class—pale, ethereal, and sullen looking, her long blond hair hanging over her face. At first Beauvoir thought her listless and uninteresting. The girl rarely opened her mouth in class, and the work she passed in was so scant that Beauvoir had trouble assessing it. No one was more surprised than Beauvoir when Olga Kosakiewicz handed in an essay on Kant that was the best in the class.

Olga was enchanted by their new philosophy teacher, who was young and beautiful, and came to class—unlike the other teachers—wearing makeup and elegant suits. Sparkling with vitality, Mademoiselle de Beauvoir seemed to know everything; she seemed to have read everything. And she dropped intriguing hints about her life—her year in Marseille, long solitary walks by the sea, her habit of writing in cafés. To seventeen-year-old Olga, who was feeling atrociously trapped in her Rouen boarding school, Beauvoir represented a world beyond the stifling horizons of Rouen. She seemed exuberantly free.

 

One day, after a class test, Olga burst into tears. It was becoming clear to Beauvoir that the girl was very timid, with no confidence in her own abilities. Beauvoir suggested that they meet in the Brasserie Victor the following Sunday. They talked at length. Olga was intelligent and articulate, but seemed quite bewildered and lost in life. Beauvoir felt sure she could help her.

She did, and Olga ended up doing well in her baccalaureate, particularly in philosophy. Before they parted for the summer, the two women spent several evenings in each other's company, playing chess and table tennis, going for long walks, sitting in bars and listening to
music. Olga had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. She loved reading, and used language with ease. Beauvoir lent her books (Stendhal, Proust, and Baudelaire) and encouraged her to write. Olga began some prose poems.

In the summer of 1934, Olga returned to her family home in Laigle, a small town in Normandy, while Beauvoir spent her vacation in Germany, then Crete, with Sartre.
¹⁴
In her first letter to her, Beauvoir asked Olga not to call her “Mademoiselle” anymore. “You are much too close to me for this formal word to be suitable any longer.” She added: “I'm deeply attached to you, but did not know to what extent until you left. I miss you, almost painfully. Not only are you one of the most admirable people I know but you are one of those people who enrich the existence of those around them, and who leave a big emptiness behind them.”
¹⁵
Beauvoir wrote to Olga several times that summer, encouraging her to enjoy her new independence. (“It can be marvelous, some evenings, to be in a provincial café, a woman alone, eating fried eggs and listening to bad music. One day, you will know these pleasures, I'm impatient for you to experience them.”
¹⁶
) Olga started letters to Beauvoir, then tore them up.

“Why tear up letters?” Beauvoir asked, in August. “I want you to know that there is not one of your facial expressions, not one of your feelings, and not one incident in your life that I do not care about. You can be certain that when you sit down to eat, there is someone who would be extremely interested in knowing what kind of soup you are eating. Naturally this someone would love to get long and detailed letters.”