That summer Sartre and Beauvoir travelled in Italy and Greece; Beauvoir was relieved to be just the two of them. There was also good news to celebrate: after the holidays she was finally moving back to Paris! She had won a post at the Lycée Molière. But when they returned in September they found politics harder to ignore: they were consumed by the Spanish Civil War. Their friendship with Fernando Gerassi had warmed their hearts to Spain, and after their travels they were whole-hearted hispanophiles. The Popular Front prime minister Leon Blum had decided that France would not intervene in the war, which Beauvoir found disgusting: Hitler and Mussolini were providing the rebels with men and material, but France declined to provide the Spanish Republic with arms, failing to honour its trade agreement.24 Eventually Fernando couldn’t bear to spectate from Paris so travelled to Spain to fight. Sartre and Beauvoir, with Stépha and other friends, saw him off at the station.
Once back in Paris Beauvoir rented a hotel room in the Royal Bretagne on the rue de la Gaîté. Although Sartre wouldn’t be posted in Paris for another year, Bost was reading for his teacher’s diploma at the Sorbonne and Hélène was still in the capital so she was happy to be near them again. Olga moved to Paris, too, to pursue acting with the help of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s connections.
During the late 1930s Sartre went on a campaign of serial seduction, which has been fuel to the mythological fire of their pact. As the story goes, Beauvoir helped Sartre revise his novel, Melancholia (it would be published as Nausea in 1938), working for hours at the Dôme or La Rotonde annotating Sartre’s manuscripts. She refined his literature while he gratified his libido. Sartre told everyone that Nausea was only publishable because of Beauvoir’s extensive work on it. But the texts with her comments were lost: Sartre liked to neatly recopy the versions of his manuscripts that were to be preserved for posterity, and Beauvoir claimed to have thrown the annotated copies away.25
In the spring of 1937 Beauvoir had been working hard and resting little; she ran herself down and never felt she had an opportunity to replace her reserves. One evening in Montparnasse she was chatting with Bost in Le Sélect when she started to shiver.26 She generally disregarded her body when it was being inconvenient, but this was too overpowering to ignore: she went home immediately, slept a feverish night, and stayed in bed the whole of the following day. By the end of the day, however, she felt that spending an entire day in bed was excessively lazy. So when Sartre arrived from Laon that night, they concluded that she was well enough to go out. She soldiered through getting dressed and out the door, but arrived at the party desperate to find somewhere to lay down again. Her friends were worried – was it serious? She protested at their concern but eventually Sartre took her home and called a doctor. Shortly afterwards she was hospitalized with serious pulmonary edema. She couldn’t believe that this was happening to her; it was uncomfortable to realize that she, too, could be a statistic. She lay on the bed listening to the doctors talking about her body like an object, a thing; the realization that they were discussing her left her feeling alienated and insecure.
When she recovered she had more than health to be grateful for. Sartre was moving back to Paris – they would finally live in the same place again! – and he had booked them both rooms in the Hôtel Mistral, hers on the floor below his, so they could have ‘all the advantages of a shared life without any of its inconveniences’.27 The new hotel was in Montparnasse near all of their favourite cafés – La Rotonde, Le Dôme, La Coupole and Le Sélect. In May 1937 Sartre’s literary fortunes, too, started looking up: his novel about contingency had finally been accepted.
That summer Beauvoir and Sartre travelled to Greece with Bost. They slept on rooftops and set off on long walks, tortured by their underestimation of the blazing sun. Sometimes Bost and Beauvoir went off alone, swimming together, while Sartre sat in a café working or writing to Wanda.
When the new school year started Beauvoir still wanted to write but didn’t know what to write next. Sartre encouraged her to put herself in her books; it was only after he styled Roquentin after himself that Nausea had been accepted. When Things of the Spirit Come First was good, he said, but she was much more interesting than the Renées and Lisas she wrote about: why not write from her own life?
Her first reaction was that it made her feel too vulnerable to write from her own experience. Although she regularly chronicled her life for the consumption of Sartre and other correspondents in letters, it was quite another matter to publish it for all to see. But she kept returning to one of the philosophical problems she had been perplexed by since her teens: the consciousness of other people. She read a story in the news about a man who murdered his taxi driver because he was embarrassed that he didn’t have enough money to pay his fare. She wondered: How could humans be so monstrously motivated by shame? Why did they sometimes live for others – attempting to appear a certain way in another’s mind rather than living for the sake of one’s own?
She thought about writing a fictional Simone Weil character as an anti-Beauvoirian protagonist: but then Sartre suggested that Olga would make a better juxtaposition.28 Beauvoir needed no convincing: Olga was perfect. In September 1937 Beauvoir wrote to Sartre from Alsace, where she was on holiday with Olga – words which, quoted out of context, could lead to the wrong conclusions: ‘K. is charming, perfectly idyllic with me, entranced by everything, and best of all much lustier than might have been thought, quite Gallic even.’ But her celebrated lust was not sexual: Beauvoir goes on to say that Olga wasn’t put off by rain or wind, and would walk for five, six, or even seven hours a day.29
In 1938 Sartre’s Nausea was finally published – it was dedicated ‘To the Beaver’. Soon afterwards praise rained in for Sartre, who was hailed as a rising star; Les Nouvelles Littéraries called it ‘one of the distinctive works of our time’. When his collection of short stories The Wall came out soon after, André Gide wrote, ‘Who is this new Jean-Paul? It seems to me we can expect a lot from him.’30 But Beauvoir’s When Things of the Spirit Come First was rejected twice – first by Gallimard, then by Grasset.31 When Henry Müller wrote her rejection he commented that her portrayal of stifled bourgeois women was good, but that other people were writing about the same problems and she didn’t resolve them: ‘You are content to describe a disintegrating world, and then to abandon your readers on the very threshold of the new order, without giving any precise indication of what its benefits will be.’32
Beauvoir wasn’t giving up – a decade later she would write a manifesto for the ‘new order’, The Second Sex. But while Sartre won the admiration of the Paris literati, Beauvoir won more and more spite from her father. Georges de Beauvoir mocked her unpublished writing and told her that she would never amount to being more than ‘a worm’s whore’.33
At work Beauvoir was very differently received. Her pupils at the Lycée Molière, a girls’ school in the 16th arrondissement, remembered her making quite an impression. She dressed stylishly, in silk blouses and make-up, and had such good command of her subject that she always lectured without notes.34 She taught her students Descartes, Husserl and Bergson. She discussed Freud only to reject him, preferring the epicureans, stoics and Kant.35
One of her students in the 1937–38 baccalaureate year, Bianca Bienenfeld, was awestruck by her – she wrote Beauvoir a letter saying that she enjoyed her philosophy classes and wanted to study the subject further at university. Would she be willing to meet her to discuss it?
The time and date were fixed: they met in Montparnasse. Bienenfeld was 17 at the time, a Jewish girl whose parents had moved to France in the disappointed hope that they would suffer less anti-Semitism there than they had experienced in Poland. Her father had been a doctor; the family valued culture and Beauvoir appreciated Bianca’s intelligence and charm. She respected her a great deal, she told Bost; sometimes she forgot that she was talking to a young girl.36
Before long they were spending Sundays together, and Bienenfeld was running to the Metro station at Passy each
week, excited to see her. Beauvoir explained her relationship with Sartre to Bianca: that they loved each other but wanted to preserve their freedom so didn’t marry and had other lovers. Bianca was fascinated by her stories of the Kosakiewicz sisters, and felt slightly indignant that Beauvoir indulged them: from her point of view they were all laziness and caprice, and didn’t deserve her support or so much of the time that Beauvoir could have spent with Bianca.37 By the end of that June, Bianca would later write, she wanted to be Beauvoir.38
After the school year finished they were no longer student and pupil. They went on a backpacking trip in the Morvan, hiking long distances in mountainous terrain. At the end of the day they shared a room – and a bed – in a pension. It was during this trip, Bianca wrote, that their relationship consensually became physical.39 Beauvoir later denied that she had ever had sex with women:40 but her letters are explicit that she was sexually intimate with them. For a start, in a letter to Sartre dated 22 July Beauvoir wrote that she’d had letters from Bianca, ‘full of passion’.
Bianca Bienenfeld was born in Poland in April of 1921, making her 17 years old that summer.41 Her age is shocking by today’s standards, but it was above the age of consent at the time – and there is no evidence that Beauvoir had concerns, in 1938, about the age gap between them or the fact that her role as Bianca’s former teacher involved dynamics of trust and power that could be compromised in damaging ways by their relationship becoming sexual. After Beauvoir’s death, Bianca painted Beauvoir as a predator who selected ‘ripe young flesh from among her female students’ to ‘have a taste for herself before palming them off’ on Sartre.42 Bianca claimed that this ‘pattern’ explained what happened to her, and to Olga – although she seems not to have known that Olga refused Sartre’s sexual advances.
It’s impossible to piece together a complete picture of what happened – because some letters and diaries haven’t survived for posterity, because of the upheavals of wartime, and because Bianca’s account of what happened was written over fifty years after the event in the wake of a ‘liberating anger’ that followed the release of her name to the public. Throughout her life, Beauvoir kept her vow not to publish Bianca’s identity. But when Deirdre Bair released her biography of Beauvoir in English in 1990, she broke Beauvoir’s confidence, publishing both Bianca’s maiden and married names. The French ‘Law of Private Life’ prohibited the inclusion of potentially defamatory information about people’s private lives but American law did not. So eventually news of Bianca’s unwanted fame reached her from across the Atlantic, prompting her to publish her own book in 1993.43 She was frank about her mixed motives for writing, and she was also frank that it was only when Sartre entered the picture that ‘the drama’ began.44
Nevertheless Bianca also described Beauvoir as a ‘woman I had loved all my life’, and said explicitly that wounds she suffered were not caused entirely by Beauvoir’s behaviour but, as we shall see, by a series of other betrayals. For a start, ‘Before I met Sartre,’ Bianca wrote, ‘Simone de Beauvoir and I shared only a passionate friendship. As soon as he entered the emotional picture, everything became much more difficult and much more complicated.’45 Whatever Bianca’s reasons for waiting to publish her own account, it is clear that her relationship with Beauvoir was complex and left her with very strong – and very mixed – feelings.
The same July that Beauvoir and Bianca became intimate, Beauvoir went for another hiking trip, this time in the mountains of Haute-Savoie with Bost. Sartre took her to the station to say goodbye – he was staying in Paris to work on his short stories and see Wanda. Sartre had been pursuing Wanda for over a year by this point but she was still not interested. Wanda found Sartre physically repulsive, and told him he needed to improve his diet. Sartre was used to being rebuffed, and took her disgust as a challenge to overcome. He found her unintelligent – he likened her mind to a dragonfly’s – but even so he was determined to succeed.
The day after Beauvoir left, Sartre wrote that he didn’t like saying goodbye to her. He was imagining her on grey mountaintops: ‘you’d still be with me right now, full of good little smiles, if you didn’t have that strange mania for gobbling up kilometres’.46 (In writing his tone can seem condescending but ‘little’ was also one of her favourite epistolary adjectives for him too.) When Beauvoir reached Annecy, Bost was waiting for her at the station, ‘tanned and looking very nice in his yellow pullover’.47 Bost was a keen walker himself – although even he struggled to cover the vast distances Beauvoir expected. They hiked all day and enjoyed hearty meals and local wine by night. They slept in tents or inns, depending on the weather. One night, five days in to their holiday, it was raining so they slept in a barn in Tignes. Beauvoir wrote to Sartre a few days later, describing the evening in detail:
It was I who propositioned him, of course. Both of us had been wanting it: […] In the end I laughed foolishly and looked at him, so he said: ‘Why are you laughing?’ and I said: ‘I’m trying to picture your face if I suggested that you sleep with me’ and he said: ‘I was thinking that you were thinking that I wanted to kiss you but didn’t dare.’ After that we floundered on for another quarter of an hour before he made up his mind to kiss me. He was tremendously astonished when I told him I’d always felt incredible tenderness towards him, and he ended up telling me yesterday evening that he had loved me for a long time.48
Beauvoir and Sartre met in Marseille the following weekend to travel to Tangiers. Sartre asked her whether she had considered how complicated her life would be if she continued this affair; they both knew that Olga would object to her sleeping with Bost. Beauvoir and Olga were close friends – wasn’t she being ‘ignoble’?
Beauvoir wasn’t so sure. Olga wasn’t really the faithful type. And Beauvoir wanted Bost and Bost wanted her back: for now, she tried to decide not to let herself regret it. After she left to meet Sartre in July 1938 Bost completed more hikes in the Alps, but they had lost their appeal without her: he wrote that at least three times a day he had a strong desire to see her and his head incessantly replayed their final five days together.49 His letters are equally full of tenderness and anticipation:50 ‘I love you wonderfully [formidablement], I would like you to know this and to feel it strongly, and for this to give you pleasure. I so love writing to you. I can imagine your face while I’m writing, and I imagine that I must have an idiot smile covering mine.’51
Bost’s prose is not the prose of a Sartre or an Algren. But Beauvoir’s letters to him reveal a passionate side of her that was never reciprocated by Sartre. Beauvoir felt no need to hide the bodily aspect of her passion for Bost: her letters to him express her desire to kiss his cheeks, his eyelashes, his chapped lips.52 While Beauvoir toured Morocco with Sartre – taking in Tangiers, Casablanca, Marrakech, Fez, Ksar el Souk, Meknès – she heard love songs on the radio and had to fight back tears for Bost. On 22 August she wrote from Ksar el Souk just before going to bed. ‘I have a terrible need to see you,’ she wrote, ‘my love, my love, how I wish to have you against me.’53
Figure 5 Drawing by Jacques Laurent-Bost, representing Simone de Beauvoir walking him to his ruin, 1938.
Bost went into their relationship with his eyes open: he was still courting Olga, whom he eventually married, and in addition to Sartre (whom Bost admired, and to whom he sent jocular postscripts in his letters to Beauvoir) he knew about Beauvoir’s relationship with Bianca Bienenfeld. Sometimes, when Beauvoir was travelling and letters were more sure to reach Sartre, she asked Bost to write to Sartre to arrange his next meeting with her.54
In her memoirs Beauvoir deliberately redacted Bost, hiding her love for him and downplaying her appreciation of and respect for his friendship. According to Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, this erasure represents the most significant thing Beauvoir left unsaid (although later there would be other contenders for this honour). Bost was a close and faithful friend from 1936 until her death in 1986, and for a long time he was much more.55 But they decided not to tell Olga, and the secret
was concealed until she died in 1983.
As early as 1939 Beauvoir’s diaries show that her conscience was uneasy about this, and she recorded its weight more heavily there than in her letters to Sartre: a year into the affair with Bost, after a conversation with Olga, she wrote to Sartre: ‘I don’t feel any remorse as far as she’s concerned, I do have a sense of superficiality and guile.’56 At the end of August 1938 she and Bost arranged the next rendez vous: she wanted to be with him day and night. But should they meet in Le Havre, where his family was, or would Rouen be better? Paris was lovely, Simone said, but she was afraid they would run into Olga.
Even in 1938 Beauvoir felt ill at ease: she had arranged to spend ten days with Olga in September. She found it extremely unsettling to see Bost described from Olga’s point of view, and suffered when she imagined them together.
I know that you don’t forget me, but I feel separated from you, my love, and there are moments where I don’t cope with it well. […] Write me, quickly, quickly, write long letters – tell me that we will pass long days together alone, that we will be happy like we were at Annecy. Tell me that your love for me is strong, my love – because I love you passionately.57
Bost’s letters reassured her in no uncertain terms. He too sometimes felt weighed down when he thought of Olga, but he told Beauvoir that his feelings didn’t last because ‘I love you too much.’ Before they were lovers they were friends, and he felt their love was built on such a solid foundation that they could not easily be separated.58 It was all well and good that Bost loved her, but Beauvoir found her time with Olga difficult: Olga wrote to Bost daily and spoke of him frequently; Beauvoir tried not to write at first but then couldn’t resist putting pen to paper, writing in quiet moments when Olga was not with her. She couldn’t sleep for thinking about him, and sometimes tears filled her eyes when she imagined their reunion.59
Becoming Beauvoir Page 15
