82Tsuguharu Fujita (1886-1968): Japanese painter resident in Paris from 1913, painted especially female nudes and cats. Late in life converted to Catholicism and changed his forename to Léonard in honour of Da Vinci.
83Illegible name.
84For Sonia Mossé and Agnès Capri, joint owners of a cabaret in which the latter also sang, see The Prime of Life, pp.350-52.
85Probably a reference to Dullin’s production of The Marriage of Figaro, where the casting of a 12-year-old boy in the part of Cherubino aroused controversy (see The Prime of Life, p.353).
86Sylvia Beach ran a Left Bank bookshop called Shakespeare and Co., Adrienne Monnier another in Rue de POdéon called Maison des Amis des Livres.
*Letters 8 to 11 September 1939 addressed as above
87Franchise Militaire: military exemption (from postal charges).
88Gégé’s address.
89See note 1 above.
90Alphonse Bonnafé had been a teaching colleague of Sartre at Le Havre 1931-3 and 1934-6, who had initiated boxing classes for some of the pupils in which Sartre had participated enthusiastically. He and his wife Lili remained friends of Sartre and De Beauvoir after Sartre moved to Laon and subsequently Paris.
*Letters 12 September 1939 to 11 January 1940 addressed as above
91Cavalry school.
92Eugène Dabit (1898-1936), author of so-called ‘populist’ novels, whose journal was published posthumously in 1939.
93Louis Jouvet (1887-1951), actor-manager from 1934 till his death of the Théâtre de l’Athénée, was influential in introducing Jean Giraudoux to the French public.
94Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944), novelist and playwright, was one of the most eminent French men of letters in the nineteen-thirties. In August 1939 he became Minister of Information in the Daladier cabinet and in early 1940 was put in charge of all government propaganda, but he resigned when Reynaud replaced Daladier in March.
95About the Princesse des Ursins.
96Dullin and Toulouse used to decorate their houses with old theatrical props; presumably they had a room at Férolles containing props from some past production of Marcel Achard’s play Le Corsaire.
97Following the Nazi-Soviet pact, Poland was invaded by German troops on 1 September 1939; its swift collapse provoked a Soviet invasion from the east on 17 September.
98Paul Claudel (1868-1955), poet and playwright, wrote his long drama set in Spain, The Satin Slipper, in 1925-8, but it was produced in an acting version only in 1943. Charles Péguy (1873-1914), Catholic essayist and poet, wrote three dramatic poems on Joan of Arc between 1909 and 1912.
99André Gide and Henri ‘Ghéon’ (Vanglon), author of religious dramas, were both homosexual.
100Claudine Chonez was a journalist and writer, who wrote an article on the mobilization of Sartre, the new literary success, based on a recent interview with him.
101A bilingual German specialist.
102The film-maker Jacqueline Audry.
103Jean-Pierre Aumont (1911- ): pseudonym of J.-P. Salomons, actor and playwright.
104Former pupil of Sartre, and fellow-student of Jean Kanapa and Lamblin, in 1939 at Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly.
105Easter 1932 — see The Prime of Life, p.108.
106Au Vrai Castor: shop-sign for fur goods.
107Something similar to the Oddfellows.
108Play by Claudel, see note 98 above.
109In his letter of 16 September, Sartre had written: ‘This war . . . flees thought; I try bravely to catch it but. . . war is always somewhere behind, impossible to grasp . . . I’m somewhat disoriented ethically . . . like the fellow who has readied himself to lift a big dumb-bell and finds that it’s hollow . . . naturally, he finds himself on his butt.’
110French translation (1938) of Enid Starkie’s Arthur Rimbaud in Abyssinia (1937).
111A reference to the little notebook in which Sartre had begun (on 14 September) to keep a journal of his daily existence, and also to re-examine his past — the first of the fourteen which were to become his War Diaries, and of which five survived.
112More usually Poulpican, a demon in Breton legend.
113Village on the island of Santorini in the Cyclades, visited with Bost and Sartre in 1937 (see The Prime of Life, p.308) and used by Sartre as the model for Argos in The Flies.
114The memoirs of Philibert, Comte de Gramont (1621-1707) were largely written by his brother-in-law Anthony Hamilton and published in 1717, and offer a portrait of life in the courts first of Louis XIV and later of Charles II of England.
115A friend of the Morels.
116Scholarships awarded by the state in France to young musicians, sculptors, painters, architects and engravers, allowing them to complete their training in Rome.
117Daughter of Jacqueline Morel (Mops), aged six.
118M. Morel, a research physician much older than his wife, who had returned from the First World War an acute hypochondriac who kept to his room and saw almost nobody. De Beauvoir herself never set eyes on him.
119Georges Pitoeff (1886-1939), actor and theatrical producer, born in Tiflis but with his own company in Paris from 1919 on, specializing in modern classics in translation, e.g. Ibsen, Pirandello, Shaw, Chekhov.
120Léon Brunschwicg (1869-1944): dominant figure in French philosophy between the wars. The themes in question figure, for example, in his Les Étapes de la Pensée Mathématique.
121Phenomenological term used by Husserl for the given material constituting a consciousness, but here meaning consciousness itself.
122Mme Morel’s son-in-law, husband to Mops.
123Albert, Mme Morel’s son, whom Sartre had tutored in philosophy in 1930, and to whom L’Imaginaire is dedicated.
124Pierre Véry (1900-60), author of numerous detective stories of which the best known was Les Disparus de Saint-Agil (1935).
125Work published in 1930 by the American author Charles Harrison.
126Translated into English as Born of Woman (1939).
127Nickname for Guille’s wife.
128By Pierre Mac Orlan (pseudonym of Pierre Dumarchais) (1883-1970), author of humorous tales and novels of exotic adventure.
129Crapouillot (’trench-mortar’): satirical illustrated review founded as a soldiers’ broadsheet in 1915, but continued as an avant-garde literary journal after the War - regularly until 1930, occasionally thereafter.
130A fellow soldier with whom Bost had struck up a close friendship.
131Waither Rathenau (1867-1922), German statesman whose many works are mainly concerned with the outcome of the First World War and ideas for a new postwar social and economic order; Karl Kautsky (1854-1938), German social-democratic leader, also wrote prolifically on the war and its consequences; Jean de Pierrefeu, Plutarch Lied.
132James O. Curwood, The River’s End (1919); and Robert Louis Stevenson, a collection of stories including ‘The Misadventures of John Nicholson’.
133Sartre had informed her in his letter of 25 September that he had grown a round beard like Stendhal’s, with a shaven upper lip.
134Sartre had included a coded message in his letter, to inform her of his new quarters.
135Coded expression, designed to deceive the censors, employed by Sartre and De Beauvoir when organizing clandestine visits to the front.
136Directed by Cecil B. De Mille (1938).
137Sartre began his military service in 1929 with a training period at St Cyr.
138Wanda, too, had been painting in Poupette’s studio.
139Lycée Camille Sée, with which De Beauvoir’s own Lycée Moliè re had been amalgamated for the duration of the war; she remained there as a teacher until her dismissal in 1943.
140She Came to Stay, begun in 1938, on which De Beauvoir was to work until the summer of 1941. See The Prime of Life, p.387 and thereafter.
141The first outline for The Age of Reason.
142Sartre informed her of his imminent transfer to an unknown destination.
143Presumably Maheu either owed money
to Sartre, or could be tapped tor a loan.
144Where Poupette had her studio.
145He was also a partner, of course.
146In other words, before the French government began its harsh crackdown on the Communist Party, using the pretext of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
147Gerassi had spent several days under arrest (see The Prime of Life, p.395).
148Julien Green (1900- ), Journal, vol. 1, published in 1938.
149On 2 October, Sartre had written: ‘If there’d been any need to feel how united we are, this phoney war would at least have had the advantage of making that felt. But it wasn’t necessary. All the same, it does provide an answer to that question which used to torment us so: my love, you’re not “a thing in my life” — even the most important — since my life no longer belongs to me, I don’t even have any regrets for it, while you are still me. You’re far more: it’s you who allow me to envisage any future and any life.’
150Series of popular detective stories.
151Ginette Lumière was a colleague of De Beauvoir at Rouen, whom she saw as putting up an apparence or facade that had little to do with her real self. (See The Prime of Life, p. 128.) This notion of ‘appearance’ was fundamental for De Beauvoir, who applied it to ‘all those who mime convictions and feelings for which they do not have the inner resources’.
152Directed by Raoul Walsh (1939).
153Directed by Frank Lloyd (1933).
154The issue was, of course, the projected clandestine visit to Sartre at the front.
155Le Singe d’Argile (The Clay Monkey), a detective story.
156See note 151 above.
157Directed by Michael Curtiz (1938).
158Raymond Queneau was to become a friend in 1943 (see The Prime of Life, p.560).
159Europe was a left-wing journal in which Sartre published some short items of literary comment in 1938.
160The tenth anniversary of their ‘morganatic marriage’ (see The Prime of Life, pp.19-28).
161Fernando’s brother.
162Bianca Bienenfeld.
163Illegible word.
164Blondinet’ was another nickname for the Lunar Man (see note 54 above).
165Nickname for Fernande Barrey (see The Prime of Life, p.383 and 406), formerly married to Fujita (see note 82 above), now married to Robert Desnos (1900-45), the Belgian surrealist poet.
166At Juan-les-Pins, during August of this same year.
167It was at Lycée Henri IV that Sartre had been a pupil in 1915-17 and again in 1920-22.
168Novel (1891) by Georges Du Maurier, adapted for the stage.
169To avoid his letters to De Beauvoir being seen by Olga, now living in the same hotel.
170The paper was stained.
171De Beauvoir could not make arrangements for a visit to the front until it was clear whether Sartre’s unit was going to move, and if so where.
172Alain: pen-name of Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951), influential essayist and, with Brunschwicg, the dominant figure in French philosophy between the wars. He was prosecuted with others in 1939 for having signed a tract by the pacifist Louis Lecoin, entitled Paix Immediate!.
173Presumably a reference to the letter of 8 October, which Sartre complained of not having received in his letter of the 15th, but which he did in fact receive a day later.
174Name of Olga’s nanny.
1751 November (All Saints Day) is a national holiday in France.
176De Beauvoir already had Bost’s letters sent poste restante to avoid them being seen by Olga. Now she wanted Sartre to do likewise, to avoid his letters being seen by Wanda who was about to move into her hotel.
177Jean de la Lune;1931 film directed by jean Choux.
178By Arthur Koestler (1937, French translation 1939).
179Colleagues of De Beauvoir at the Lycée Jeanne d’Arc in Rouen.
180To avoid the censors, Sartre’s letter of 15 October had contained seven fictional names whose initials gave her the location of his new quarters: BRUMATH.
181Gilles et Julien were anarchist, anti-militarist singers whom De Beauvoir had long admired (see The Prime of Life, p.141-2).
182Note sent by De Beauvoir to inform Sartre of her clandestine arrival in Brumath.
183‘Emma’ here obviously means Sartre himself.
184Jean Cassou, Quarante-kuit, Paris 1939.
185First World War journal by Lucien Jacques, with a preface by Jean Giono.
186Simone Jolibois was a friend — and later the wife — of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
187All about De Beauvoir’s relationship with Bost, in other words.
188At Brumath.
189Indelicate because of Merleau-Ponty’s former passion for Colette Gibert (see note 27 above).
190Another former pupil of Sartre at the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly.
191Philosophy notes.
192Merleau-Ponty.
193Wife of Jean Pierre, one of Sartre’s fellow soldiers, portrayed in the War Diaries as ‘Paul’.
194Brumath inn where Sartre used to go and write.
195See The Prime of Life, p. 180, for De Beauvoir’s visit to Berlin.
196In Sartre’s Nausea.
197Neither Sartre nor De Beauvoir had bank accounts of their own at this time.
198Wanda’s friend Arlette Ménard appears in the Lettres au Castor as Arlette Jacquart.
199Satirical novel (1894) by Léon Daudet.
200Bost.
201By Henri Bergson (1907).
202(1939) Second in a series of Westerns starring Warner Baxter; it was directed by Herbert Leeds.
203Renée Ballon was a friend from De Beauvoir’s Rouen days, portrayed in The Prime of Life (pp.167-79) as ‘Louise Perron’.
204Not quite translatable pun: in French poule can mean ‘hen’, ‘fowl’ or ‘chick’ — in the slang sense — or ‘whore’.
205Terre des Hommes (Paris 1939), partly translated as Wind, Sand and Stars (London 1975).
206In his letter of 17 November, Sartre had written that De Beauvoir’s letters gave him: ‘a kind of Goethean wisdom, which allows me to attend the various events in my life without taking part in them. With your letters, I’m Olympian at small cost, because I rediscover a world common to you and me which (whether there’s war or peace) is good, like a turbulent novel that ends well’
207Sartre had enclosed with his letter of 19 November an outline history of the past year (which has unfortunately not survived), but had also urged De Beauvoir to go and read the newspapers of the period at the Bibliothèque Nationale: ‘I exhort you to inform yourself a bit; you can’t just be satisfied with this [i.e. his outline].’
208By Leibniz.
209Le Beau Navire: only an extremely prudish sensibility could find anything obscene in this poem.
210In his letter of 27 November, Sartre had reported that his mother had asked him — on behalf of his aunt Marie Hirsch — for the names of 20 indigent soldiers to whom parcels could be sent. Sartre had managed to comply (despite the middle-class character of the HQ personnel), and had been very amused by his mother’s subsequent request that he should write to thank his aunt.
211Sartre had been expressing growing alarm about Wanda’s relations with Atelier actor Roger Blin.
212Paul Morand (1888-1976), diplomat, poet and author of sardonic stories and novels depicting cosmopolitan life in interwar Europe, especially in its intellectual and worldly aspects.
213Jean Wahl, French philosopher, influenced by Kierkegaard.
214By William Faulkner.
215T’hierry Maulnier’, pen name of Jacques Talagrand (1905-88), in the thirties a disciple of Charles Maurras and Action Française, later to become a member of the Académie Française and columnist for Le Figaro (in which he violently attacked Sartre during the Algerian War). Louis Aragon, the surrealist poet, was of course a line-toeing Communist.
216In other words, to know Sartre’s exact address.
217Sartre for a time thought he was going to be transferred t
o the rear.
218The Chalet Ideal-Sport at Megève (Haute-Savoie).
219The village of Morsbronn where Sartre was about to be relocated had thermal springs, to which he had alluded in order to inform De Beauvoir about his new quarters without arousing the censors’ suspicions.
Letters to Sartre Page 41
