Letters to Sartre Read online

  42P.L.M. = Paris — Lyon — Mediterranée.

  43In Boulevard Raspail.

  44Nickname of Mme Morel’s daughter Jacqueline.

  45Marc Zuore (’Marco’ in De Beauvoir’s autobiography), friend whom Sartre had got to know at the Cité Universitaire in 1929. A teacher of French language, he had been a colleague of De Beauvoir at Rouen in 1932, but had now received a Paris post. For a time he hoped to become an opera singer, but never realized this ambition. His unrequited passion for Bost altered his relations with Sartre and De Beauvoir: see The Prime of Life, pp.118 and 283-4.

  46Lionel de Roulet, husband of De Beauvoir’s sister Poupette and former pupil of Sartre in 1932 (see The Prime of Life, ppl24-5).

  47Mouloudji: Algerian friend of Olga, a child film star and fellow student at the Atelier drama classes (see The Prime of Life, p.349).

  48The ‘Boubous’ = the Gerassis. De Beauvoir got to know Estepha Awdykowicz (later Gerassi, nicknamed ‘the Baba’) in 1928, while visiting her friend ZaZa Le Coin, where Stépha — a Ukrainian from Poland — was working as governess to ZaZa’s younger sisters (see Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, p.278 ff.). Stépha married Fernando Gerassi (’the Boubou’), a Spanish painter, and the two (with later their son John, or ‘Tito’, born 1935), were among the closest friends of De Beauvoir and Sartre throughout the thirties. They emigrated to the United States in 1940.

  49They were staying with Mme Morel at her villa.

  50Nathalie Sorokine (’Lisa Oblanoff in The Prime of Life, see p.347 etc.), of White Russian origin, was De Beauvoir’s pupil at the Lycée Molière in 1938 and subsequently became a close friend. In 1945 she married Ivan Moffatt, an American GI, and returned with him to Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood as an assistant to the director George Stevens.

  51For the De Beauvoir family homes near Uzerche (Corrèze) in the old province of Limousin — La Grillère, an estate some 20 kilometres away, and Meyrignac, a large house on the outskirts — see Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, pp.23-4.

  52The Lycée Pasteur at Neuilly, see note 16 above.

  53Since this would inevitably have destroyed the fiction of the trip to La Pouèze, see note 40 above.

  54The Lunar Man was Jean-Andre Ville, philologist husband of Marie (’Marie Girard’ in The Prime of Life, pp. 183-4), nicknamed the Lunar Woman, a dreamy French woman with whom Sartre had an affair during his stay in Berlin in 1934 and whom he and De Beauvoir continued to see after her return to Paris.

  55The letter in question has been lost, but for the encounter with Gerassi, see The Prime of Life, p.371.

  56Bianca Bienenfeld was at the time with Sartre in Savoy.

  57Untrue — but a fiction necessary to deceive Wanda, who was not supposed to know about Sartre’s affair with Bianca.

  LETTERS

  SEPTEMBER 1939 - MARCH 1940

  The Phoney War

  [Paris]

  Thursday 7 September [1939]

  My love

  What a joy to have your address at last and be able to feel myself in contact with you: to know where you are and that for the moment it’s somewhere pretty safe.58 I’m in a happier state than I’ve experienced since your departure — yes, truly, it’s happiness, and the best kind, this strength of love that I feel between us, this close bond uniting us amid all this gloom. I love you so. I’m not thinking about the day when I’ll see you again,59 any more than I ever evoke our past — I too am blocked against all memory. But I don’t need to see you — I’m not separated from you, I’m still in the same world as you. I’m going to write you a huge letter. I’m at the Dome, it’s 8 in the evening and I’ve three hours ahead of me. You should know first that I’m calm, involved, not at all unhappy — I have no regret, no desire, no hope for anything. I’m easy in my mind about you, and this ease of mind comes from the absolute certainty I now have that, if the worst were to happen to you, I should no longer live either. The only painful thing is my intermittent bouts of panic concerning Bost: such violent pangs of dread for him that I feel I’m almost losing my reason.60 Especially in the evenings. But it seems to me that even this is diminishing somewhat.

  Well, I left the station.61 I was scared of collapsing as soon as I got outside, but no, I walked straight ahead without crying, without thinking, simply with an exhausting sense that I couldn’t ever stop again, since the least pause would be excruciating — I basically lived for more or less two days in a state of feverish tension, which was so exhausting it made my whole head ache. The weather was marvellous that morning. I crossed Les Halles — amid vast heaps of cabbages and carrots — and the Luxembourg, then continued to the hotel. There I found a lucky distraction, in the shape of a letter from Kos. replying to my sharp letter. It was a missive of crazy bad faith, in which she waxed indignant about my having accused her in my inner thoughts of having told a lie, and offered this in explanation of her silence. This irritated me, and since I suppose it was the only living, present object upon which any action was possible, I applied myself doggedly to this business for almost the entire day. Going off at once to the Dome, I answered her in a letter that settled matters once and for all but was still full of good will and affection. She has since sent me a very nice note in reply to my nice letter, followed by a distraught (though still very nice) one in reply to my last letter (the one settling matters). And for my part I’ve sent her two very tender letters and some money for her to come here. So we’ve made up, and we’ll finish our explanations face to face. What’s more, I intend to be angelic, because she’s really pitiful I was busy writing this reply when I caught sight of the Boubou’s round head — he’d landed that very morning and the first person he saw was me. You can just imagine how pleased I was to see him! A human being to talk to struck me as something really precious (I’d vainly looked in on Zuorro, who has been called up, and on That Lady, who’s not back yet, and I’d also rung C. Audry and the Lunar Woman,62 who aren’t in Paris; Sorokine too had left Paris — she’d sent me a pneu to let me know). I had lunch at the Coupole with the Boubou, wrote a few letters, then went by Métro to Boulevard Rochechouart where I saw Trafic d’armes. It was dubbed and not much good; too short, too, since it was only 5 when I found myself back on the Boulevard de Clichy, under a stormy sky. I called on Toulouse,63 but she’s at Férolles. I wrote, but she hasn’t answered yet; neither has De Roulet, nor my family (I don’t have any news of Bienenfeld either, or — more understandably — of Bost). I began to walk in the direction of Montparnasse, but stopped in a cafe on the boulevards where I began filling my notebook. I find it easy to keep this journal up: it’s already very thick, and I’ll make you read it from beginning to end.641 don’t recopy it, but I’m using it at this moment in writing to you, so that I don’t forget anything. The weather was muggy, I was sleepy and dazed. On Boulevard Montparnasse, the Tschuntz bookshop — that one where we sometimes stop and look at surrealist pictures — has put up a splendid sign: Trench family — I son killed 1914 — I son wounded — liable for call-up on day 9.’ The Monoprix stores have also put up printed signs: Trench management — French staff — French capital’ I went up to the Boubou’s place and dozed for a while on the couch, obsessively going over in my mind the quarrel I’d had with Kosakiewitch (this amused me, as an example of psychic defence). Then he showed up, very serious: ‘Let’s see if you have a heart’, he said. And then he solemnly informed me that Ehrenburg had been so shattered by recent events he could neither eat nor drink.65 I found this staggering. He knew you’d left that morning, he knew I was on tenterhooks about Bost, yet he tested my peace of mind by telling me about the mental torments of Ehrenburg. He’s a funny guy, too. He hasn’t been called up, and he won’t be. He’s a great peace-lover, and speaks with a heroic air of shutting himself up in an ivory tower and creating a pleasant life for himself, drinking, eating and having fun. He implicates me in this heroism, moreover, as if I were losing no more than he in this war. He’s so totally selfish that when something affects him, he finds it quite
shattering — but seeks solace, self-importantly, in the very fact of being shattered. He wouldn’t enlist unless he were sure of being a major. I laughed in his face and said he’d be accepted only as a private, which made him very annoyed. Now he believes it too, and is speaking of returning to Nice where Stépha has remained.

  We went and had dinner at the Crêperie Bretonne in Rue Montpar-nasse. I recall that moment very well We’d taken a little table outside, and we couldn’t see a thing as the street was completely dark. There were whores pacing the pavement opposite, it was late, and there was no food to be had. We went for a little walk round. The cafes close at 11 now, you know, and the cinemas and theatres at 8.30 — the evenings are unutterably bleak. Gerassi suggested I sleep at his place and I accepted, as I couldn’t stand being back in my room. I looked in at home and found a letter from Little Bost, written on Thursday; he was still hopeful, yet it was a heartrending little letter. That letter, and my room which I’d not been back to since 3 in the morning — with your pipe and your little blue shirt — cast me into a storm of sobbing that lasted for quite some time. Then I met up with the Boubou again on Avenue du Maine. He chucked a sheet over the couch in his studio and took himself off to bed upstairs, while I slept well without so much as a nightmare.

  Next day was Sunday. I woke up at 8.30 and went to collect my mail, but there wasn’t any. I had a coffee at Rey’s,66 and began reading Gide’s Journal which I’d bought the evening before — and which I’ll send you as early as I can tomorrow morning. I felt wholly blocked, with a fountain of tears ready to be shed; but weeping seemed pointless, because just as many tears would still be left afterwards. Paris-Midi was bannering: ‘Final Plea to Berlin‘, but it was utterly hopeless. At noon I called in again at the hotel and learnt that Gégé had rung me. Quite overjoyed, I rang her back at once. I needed people round me, anybody, in order truly to feel immersed in a world event rather than some individual adventure — which would then have turned into a dreadful calamity. I went to her place on foot. The policemen had splendid, gleaming new helmets and, slung over their shoulders, little putty-coloured satchels holding their gasmasks. A few civilians were already making their appearance with these satchels — now almost all sport either the putty-coloured satchel or the long grey cylinder, and in the evenings even the tarts patrolling the streets carry masks. The shop windows are all embellished with strips of yellow or blue paper, you’d think they were all broken and out of service. Hardly anybody on the streets and a strange, dreary atmosphere everywhere. Lots of Métro stations are barricaded off by chains and huge notices indicating the nearest station available. The Métro’s very much reduced, there are hardly any buses any more, and on that particular day there were no taxis either — or virtually none — though there are some around again now. The cars are a splendid sight, by the way, with their fronts daubed in blue paint and their blue headlights resembling huge gemstones. I arrived at Gégé’s place — she looked charming, with her hair all over the place and in a little pleated skirt and white blouse. She told me all about her holidays — she was hanging out with a group of those wealthy homosexuals we often see at the Zanzibar, and showed me photos of them. She gave me news of my sister, whom she went to see at La Grillère; apparently she’s thriving, though sick to death of tubercular glands. Then Pardo showed up and we went to the Dome, where we met the Boubou again;67 we all ate chicken and rice, and there was a moment of relaxation. Pardo maintained there’d be no declaration of war and my neighbour, a well-informed Englishman, asserted the same thing — we even laid bets. Without restoring my hope, those few instants at least plunged me back into a vague state of uncertainty, so that when half an hour later I saw Paris-Soifs banner headline ‘War’, it gave me an appalling shock.681 broke into tears on the spot, and went home to calm down by crying my heart out. Once I was calm again, I went off to the Flore and wrote to Bost. At 6 Gégé showed up again, very wrought up and with tears in her eyes. She’s worried about her family, who are in the Calvados, and is wondering how shell support them till the war’s over. She was supposed to go off again two days later with Pardo to Corrèze, to the Jouvenels’ place, but she wasn’t keen on the idea. Pardo (who has been declared unfit because of his heart) will be overseeing the estate, as the single man among a dozen women whom Gégé can’t stand. Pardo’s sister turned up — the one we saw at Juan-les-Pins — rather nice, and shattered because her boy friend has been called up. There were still people at the Flore who were saying they didn’t believe in the war — they were the tough ones — but there were a lot of dismal faces. Ella Pardo told us how the pictures in the Louvre had all been packed up, and about the trouble they’d had with the Victory of Samothrace — it was quite entertaining. I got Gégé to point out lots of people for me. That long-haired fellow who’s often with Sonia,69 and whom we were so intrigued by, is an Italian sculptor called Giacometti.70 The place was packed and everybody was shaking hands with everybody else; I felt just the tiniest scrap of collectivity — it was very salutary. We dined in a dark room belonging to a little restaurant in Boulevard Saint-Germain: Pardo, his sister, Gégé, myself and a big shot from Hachette. At first it was unbearably gloomy, but then people started blathering away about politics, and about the USSR in particular, which helped to pass the time. After that I made my own way back with Gégé towards the Dome, and there was little Mané-Katz all dressed up as a private and very dashing. We passed Kisling in uniform too, and at Saint-Germain Breton — dressed as an officer, of course.71 There was an extraordinary sky over Paris that evening — ‘a promise of victory’, the papers called it — and with all those violet and blue headlamps in the darkness it was splendid. The Dome was packed too, and we shook countless hands. For me, it was like the first days of an illness, when you’ve got a temperature and every least thing is amplified till it fills and seduces your consciousness entirely. From time to time visions of horror would nevertheless shoot through my mind —

  I was in a strange state. We spotted P. Bost,72 and Gégé asked him for news of his brother — but he knew almost nothing. In front of the Dome, a policeman was arguing with the manager: ‘Still too much light.’ Now all the street-lamps are swathed in thick blue wrappings, so that you can barely see the Rotonde from the Dome or vice-versa. At 11 they cleared the cafe. Gégé took me off to spend the night at her place. Pardo gave me a little dose of tranquillizer, and I fell into the most beatific slumber. Next morning we all three took tea and jam together, then I went to buy A Raw Youth,73 which I wanted to send to Bost; I took the opportunity to finish it, while drinking a coffee at the Capoulade. I was beginning to relax and find solace in little pleasures — like reading Gide or A Raw Youth. I looked in as I was passing the Guilles’ place;74 but even though there was a woman on the balcony tending flowers, it was all locked up. I read and had lunch at the Dome. Terse communiques: ‘Military operations have begun on land and sea’. At the hotel, they’d told me there’d been a telephone call from your mother, so I rang back. I first got your step-father (who was extremely polite) and then your mother, who invited me to go and see her — which I did. She was very amiable, but a real pain in the neck. I actually took this as a sign my spirits were lifting, because I was starting to find some things boring again — the day before, everything had been a godsend. She talked to me about you, I said all the proper things, and she couldn’t resist a gallant: ‘It’ll do him good, it’ll teach him about life’. There were some very strange tramps prowling about Passy. I took the opportunity of dropping in at the school to collect my gas-mask.75 The head mistress took my measurements in person, and explained to me how the monstrous object was used. Apparently, there are unlikely to be any high schools kept in Paris, but it’s not yet known for certain. For the first time I felt a moment’s emotion concerning my life, when I saw the school courtyard all peaceful and in bloom — but that soon passed. I left with my cylinder slung round my shoulder and showed up at Gégé’s, where I burst in on a family quarrel They hardly exchanged two
words in my presence before Gégé rushed off to fling herself sobbing on a bed. I flung myself down beside her and have become such a piège,76 and so used to these situations, that I petted her with tender little whispers of ‘There now, dear’ and ‘There now, kid’, and came within an ace of saying ‘My darling’ — it was hilarious. She was saying ‘I’m scared, I’m scared’, and trembling all over. She was afraid for Bost, whom she still loves terribly, and for Denonain77 — who, because of some misunderstanding that was really upsetting her, had left that morning without her having managed to see him. And then there was a big fuss because she was just off to see Nogues again,78 and Pardo couldn’t contain his fury about it. Old Ma Kientz79 is probably going to transfer the whole firm to Montfort-L’Amaury, and she’ll be sending for Gégé — who thus won’t lose her job. I calmed her down and accompanied her on foot to the Gare Saint-Lazare, while she talked to me about Nogues. She doesn’t love Pardo at all. She told me:’I keep telling myself all the time that he’s intelligent, but then every so often I say to myself: What the hell do I care about his being intelligent, if I don’t love him?’ He loves her madly. When I returned to the Flore I found him virtually in tears, and he confided in me how much Gégé seeing Nogues hurt him. He was absolutely pole-axed. Then his friend from the evening before — the fellow from Hachette — turned up, and explained to us all about the Volunteers of Death. It’s Péricart — that ‘Dead Men Arise!’ fellow — who had the idea. One letter he has received reads as follows: ‘Sir, I am 32 years old, missing an arm and an eye, and had believed my life devoid of meaning; but, by restoring that word “Service” to me in its full splendour, you have given me a new existence.’ The fellow ends by asking whether not just the maimed, but the half-witted too mightn’t be put to some use. Thereupon Comtesse Montinori showed up (that erotic girl — the woman painter from the Gruber set — whom Poupette was for ever talking about) and announced that she was enlisting in the Garibaldi volunteers. And at that point the Hungarian popped up,80 sat down opposite me, and informed me: ‘I’m enlisting.’ An airman sitting beside me said: ‘Sir, allow me to buy you a drink.’ The Hungarian refused in embarrassment — ‘I’m not asking for any reward!’ — and they ended up clinking glasses of brandy-and-soda. But alas! the manager announced he was closing the café next day, which he duly did, so that everybody in Paris now believes in the war — and I’m denied that little querencia.81