Hearts and Minds

The Common Journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

Axel Madsen

• Publisher: Open Road Distribution
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781504008594
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A dual biography of the two most influential socio-political moralists of the twentieth century, whose lives were intertwined personally and intellectually for more than forty-six years. Madsen provides an engrossing view of the luminously transparent relationship that was unconventional yet faithful to its ideals.

Chapter 1

Summer of 1929

No books, Jean-Paul Sartre had decreed, just long walks and longer talks, even if the boggy hollows of the Limousin uplands were too much chlorophyll, as he joked. Simone de Beauvoir joined him every morning as soon as she could get away from her family, running across still dewy meadows to reach their secret rendezvous. There was so much to talk about—the friends, books, life and, of course, their future. They took long walks, two figures in an August landscape; she tall and gangly; he short and square and with a crossed right eye behind the schoolmaster glasses. He laughed a lot. They were brand-new teachers, the two top graduates of their class. They had worked terribly hard, but still, she said, she was sure her first paycheck would be a practical joke.

All too soon it was time for her return to Meyrignac for lunch while he sat under a hedgerow eating the cheese or gingerbread smuggled out of the Beauvoir kitchen by Simone’s cousin Madeleine who adored anything romantic. In the afternoon they were together again, picking up the discussions started in Paris before the holidays or in a chestnut grove before lunch. She had told her parents they were working on a book, a critical study of Marxism. Her idea had been to butter them up by pandering to their hatred of communism. All too soon the sun plunged into the hills beyond the Auvezère River, sending her back to Meyrignac and him to the Hotel de la Boule d’Or and dinner among the traveling salesmen.

Like him, she was born in Paris—they might have played together in the Luxembourg Gardens, they discovered. Both had spent precocious childhoods in coddled surroundings and both thought a lot of themselves. The difference was the country. Every summer since she had been a little girl she had scratched at earth, played with lumps of clay, polished chestnuts and learned to recognize buttercups, ladybirds, and glowworms at her grandfather’s five-hundred-acre estate. Meyrignac, which had been in the family since the 1830s, had a dammed-up stream with waterlilies and goldfish and a tiny island that could be reached via stepping stones. It had fields, cedars, willows, magnolias, shrubberies and thickets. At Meyrignac and at La Grillière, her uncle’s estate twenty kilometers away, she had always been allowed to run free and to touch everything. Uncle Maurice’s park was bigger and wilder but also monotonous and it surrounded a sinister turreted château that looked much older than it really was. Uncle Maurice, a member of the local gentry, had married Papa’s sister, Helene.

Jean-Paul had an eccentric grandfather. Charles Schweitzer was a handsome language teacher with a passion for the sublime, who in old age looked so much like God Almighty that repentant parishioners in a dimly lit church once took him for an apparition. Charles spent his life turning little events into great circumstances that his pudgy and cynical wife reduced to insignificance with a raising of her eyebrows. The Schweitzers were Alsatians and Protestants. Charles’ brother had become a Lutheran minister who in turn had begotten a minister, Albert, who was now a doctor-missionary in darkest Africa. Charles had become a teacher and coauthor of a Deutsches Lesebuch, used in German classes in all schools in France, and the father of two sons and a daughter. The elder son had settled into civil service and the younger had been a teacher of German until he died, still a bachelor, with a revolver under his pillow and twenty pairs of worn-out shoes in his trunks. Anne-Marie Schweitzer was gifted and pretty, but the family thought it distinguished to leave her gifts undeveloped. She had met Jean-Baptiste Sartre at Cherbourg, a young naval officer already wasting away with tropical fever. They had been married two years when he died and Anne-Marie had returned to her parents with her baby. Charles Schweitzer had found his son-in-law’s untimely death insolent and blamed his daughter for not having foreseen or forestalled it. He had applied for retirement but without a word of reproach went back to teaching to support Anne-Marie and her infant son. Chilled with gratitude she had given herself unstintingly, keeping house for her parents and becoming an adolescent again, asking for permission to go out.

There was so much to talk about. The friends were René Maheu, who had introduced Simone to Sartre, and Paul Nizan, Sartre’s best friend, who was already married and, with his wife, Henriette, believed in sexual freedom. It was Maheu who had nicknamed Simone Le Castor (Beaver) because, he said, beavers like company and have a constructive bent.¹ Maheu was also married. He never brought his wife to the Sorbonne and disappeared into a suburban train every evening. To Beaver, he liked to underline the difference between himself and Sartre and Nizan. He was a sensualist, he said, enjoying works of art, nature and women; they heaped scorn on exalted principles and had to find the reason behind everything. Weren’t they the ones who had thrown water bombs at the mundane and vaguely Nietzschean elitist students with shouts of “Thus pissed Zarathustra!”? Nizan, who was always biting his nails and wore steel-rimmed glasses, was up on artistic fashion and introduced the others to James Joyce and the new American novel. He belonged to various literary circles, had joined the Communist Party and lived with his in-laws in a smart apartment where his and Henriette’s studio was decorated with a portrait of Lenin, cubist posters and a reproduction of Botticelli’s Venus. Most important, Nizan had had a book published.

Sartre had been writing since he was ten—stories, poems, essays, epigrams, puns, ballads and a novel—and he never stopped telling girls he met that they should also write. Only by creating works of the imagination could anyone escape from contingent life, he said. Art and literature were absolutes, which didn’t mean he had any intention of becoming a professional man of letters. He detested literary movements and hierarchies and couldn’t really reconcile himself to become a career person with faculty colleagues and college presidents.

There were many things Sartre didn’t want to become. He would never be a family man, he would never marry, never settle down and never clutter up his life with possessions. He would travel instead and accumulate experiences that would benefit his writing. In theory, Simone admired dangerous living, lost souls and all excesses, but for her graduation had meant liberation, moving away from home. For her, life would begin in October.

She had never felt she was a “born” writer, but at fifteen, when writing in a girl friend’s scrapbook about the future, she had scribbled that she wished to become a famous author. At eighteen she had written the first pages of a novel—about an eighteen-year-old girl whose obsessive concern was to defend herself against other people’s inquisitiveness. When they had all crammed together in the Nizans’ studio, Sartre had made fun of her parochial-school vocabulary, although he, too, admitted he was really seeking “salvation” in literature.

What Simone liked about Sartre was that he never stopped thinking, never took anything for granted and that on the subject that interested her above all others—herself—he tried to understand her in the light of her own set of values and attitudes. He told her she should hold on to her personal freedom, should remain curious and open and really do something about wanting to write. Only two and a half years older than she, Sartre impressed her by his maturity. Her cousin Jacques had been her first adolescent crush, Maheu had been the first man to make compliments on her figure. Sartre was the first man who was like her, only much more so, someone who wanted the same things as she, but who had more self-assurance than she could muster.

There were differences of course. Simone thought it was a miracle that she had managed to break free from her narrow upbringing and looked toward the future with excitement; Sartre detested adult life. At twenty-four, he didn’t particularly look forward to military service and the necessity of teaching for a living, but all this didn’t prevent him from saying that people should create their own lives and that freedom had to be the essence of his future. As a tolerable solution to the question of earning a living, he was applying for a French lectureship in Tokyo for the fall of 1931 when he would be through with the army. If accepted, he would have to spend two years in Japan, but the payoff would be that he could get similar appointments in other exotic capitals.

And he liked women. He found them less comical than men and had no intention of depriving himself of their company. The first time Simone had seen him at the Sorbonne, he had been talking with a great gawk of a student. Before that he had been engaged to and was still the admirer of Simone-Camille Sans, a sensuous would-be actress everybody at the teachers’ college had talked about. Together with Pierre Guille and Maheu he was also the platonic admirer of Madame Morel, a storied Argentinian lady of the exotic age of forty, whose son Guille and Sartre had tutored for his baccalauréat. While Simone realized that for a girl with her upbringing marriage was perhaps unavoidable, Sartre positively hated matrimony. What we have, he liked to tell her, was an essential love, which meant they could both experiment with contingent love affairs. They were two of a kind, he told her, their relationship would endure, something she had also felt. But it could not make up entirely for the fleeting riches of encounters with others. The question was of course how to avoid such emotions as regret and jealousy.

Maheu had been jealous of her friendship with Sartre and Nizan and had demanded preferential treatment. When they had all crammed together, they had often piled into Nizan’s little car and spent the afternoon at the Porte d’Orléans amusement park playing pinball machines and mini-football, and stopping for beer at a sidewalk café on the way back. When the question of their all going out together had come up one evening, Maheu had insisted on taking her to the movies alone. But Maheu had agreed that Sartre could spend the evening of the Fourteenth of July with them. After watching the fireworks on the lawn of the Cité Universitaire, Sartre had invited them all to a night of bar crawling on Montparnasse. Out in the streets at 2 A.M., Maheu had ostentatiously taken her arm. Maheu had said that if he flunked, he would take a grade-school teaching job in the provinces. Maheu did fail and left Paris without saying goodbye to anyone. In a short note to Sartre, he added, “Give Beaver my best wishes for her happiness.”

There was so much to talk about. On the fourth day, however, as they sat on the edge of a meadow, Simone suddenly saw her parents trooping toward them. As they came closer, she could see her father wearing a resolute but somewhat embarrassed expression under his straw boater. Sartre sprang to his feet and Simone introduced her friend to her parents. Monsieur de Beauvoir was brief and to the point. Politely, he asked Sartre to leave the area. People were gossiping, he said; besides, it was hoped to get Simone’s cousin married and the way Simone kept seeing a strange young man all day and every day could only harm Madeleine’s reputation.

Sartre, who happened to be wearing an aggressive red shirt, replied that he would certainly not leave the area a minute sooner than he intended. Georges de Beauvoir was a small man who hated arguments and bad manners and the standoff at the edge of the meadow remained civilized. Mortified, Simone followed her parents back to Meyrignac, but her father didn’t return to the attack and Sartre stayed another week at the Boule d’Or. He and Simone merely arranged more secret meeting places in a chestnut grove. After he left they wrote each other every day. In October they would begin their future.

Simone was born on January 8, 1908, on Boulevard Raspail in an apartment above the Rotonde café. Georges and Françoise de Beauvoir—he thirty, she twenty-one—were happy with their firstborn. They were a genteel couple, far from wealthy but trying to keep up the appearances of a noble, if obscure name. Blue-eyed Georges de Beauvoir was the grandson of a tax inspector who had amassed sufficient wealth to allow even his youngest son to live on a private income, although Georges’ father took up a civil service career in Paris and eventually retired as the head of his department. Brought up in moderate opulence, Georges was the youngest of three children. He was his mother’s favorite and his teachers’ pet. He disliked sports and violence of any kind and won academic prizes year after year at the Collège Stanislas. His mother’s death when he was thirteen touched him deeply and, Simone de Beauvoir was to write in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, from then on “he stopped trying.”²

The Beauvoirs were halfway between aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie and could not bring themselves to allow young Georges to take up the career he loved most passionately—acting. Instead, he studied law, for its dramatic possibilities. His name, family connections, certain childhood friends and those he associated with as a young man convinced him he belonged to the aristocracy. He appreciated social graces, style, wit and the free-and-easy self-assurance of the rich. He dressed to the teeth, took elocution lessons and, to imitate actors, sported neither beard nor mustache. He passed his exams but didn’t bother to present himself to the bar. Instead he registered at the Court of Appeals and became the secretary to a well-established lawyer.

Suspended somewhere between aristocratic loftiness and bourgeois earnestness, Georges de Beauvoir attached little importance to the careers that were open to him. Clerking for the lawyer during the daytime, he became at night and during vacations an amateur actor, performing at charities in fashionable drawing rooms and resort hotels while slowly eating his way through his legacy and through a substantial cash payment that his brother Gaston gave him in return for renouncing all claims to Meyrignac. He devoted all his leisure to comedy and mime, took a special delight in makeup, kept up with stage gossip, idolized great actors, had actors as intimate friends, read prodigiously about the theater and on the very eve of his marriage acted in a play.

His wife came from a rich and devout provincial family. Born in Verdun, Françoise was the eldest of three children. Her father was a banker; her mother had been brought up by nuns and she herself attended a convent school. Her parents were reserved and she spent a pallid childhood and adolescence devoted to school and religious duties. At twenty, she was a brooding but beautiful girl, who without enthusiasm consented to meet Georges de Beauvoir. His vitality and charm overwhelmed her and in her eyes he would always enjoy the greatest prestige. The transition to married life was not without difficulties. Transported to a milieu where her convent morality was barely respected, she dreaded criticism and, to avoid it, took pains to be like everybody else. “In all matters, she accepted my father’s ideas without ever appearing to find any difficulty in reconciling them with her religion,” Simone would write.³ “My father was constantly astonished by the paradoxes of the human heart, by the playful tricks of heredity, and by the strangeness of dreams; I never saw my mother astonished by anything.”

When Simone was two and a half, the Beauvoirs had a second daughter, Hélène, who was instantly and for good nicknamed Poupette (little doll). The two sisters spent their early years between Louise, their nursemaid, and their young mother, who took up the responsibilities of motherhood with Christian devotion. She chose her daughters’ private school, supervised their reading and learned English and Latin to follow their progress. She took them to mass, said prayers with them morning and evening; she read works of piety, regularly received holy communion, but lost her temper too easily, even if the warmth of her affection made up for her unpredictability. Corporal punishment was rare, but she could shatter her daughters’ self-confidence with a phrase she often used: “It’s ridiculous.” One metaphysical difficulty in Simone’s young life was the fact that her father never went to mass. Feeling herself deeply penetrated by the presence of God, but taught by her mother that Papa was always right, her father’s agnosticism would have been a shock if it wasn’t for the fact that her mother found his attitude quite natural. “The consequence was that I grew accustomed to the idea that my intellectual life—embodied by my father—and my spiritual life—expressed by my mother—were two radically different fields of experience which had absolutely nothing in common. Sanctity and intelligence belonged to two quite different spheres … My situation resembled that of my father in his childhood and youth: he had found himself suspended between the airy skepticism of my grandfather and the bourgeois earnestness of my grandmother. In my own case, too, my father’s individualism and pagan ethical standards were in complete contrast to the rigidly moral conventionalism of my mother’s teaching. This imbalance, which made my life a kind of endless debate, is the main reason why I became an intellectual.”⁴

Her father’s interest in her increased as she grew up. He took great pains with her handwriting and spelling and during holidays dictated tricky passages to her, usually from Victor Hugo. No one she knew was as funny, as interesting and as brilliant as he; no one else had read so many books, or knew so much poetry by heart, or could argue with such passion. Always the life and soul of parties and family gatherings, he treated her as a fully developed person while her mother was more indulgent and found it natural that she should be a silly little girl now and then. “I was flattered most by praise from my father,” she would remember, “but if he complained because I had made a mess in his study, or if he cried, ‘How stupid these children are!’ I took such censure lightly because he obviously attached little importance to the way it was said. On the other hand any reproach made by my mother, or even her slightest frown was a threat to my security. Without her approval, I no longer felt I had any right to live.”⁵

For Poupette, life was more complicated. Although great pains were taken to treat both girls with scrupulous fairness, Simone enjoyed certain advantages. Poupette, who looked like her father, was hurt and perplexed and often sat crying in her little chair. She was accused of being sulky and clung to Simone with absolute devotion, grateful for her bigger sister’s approval. Poupette was to grow up prettier than Simone and to possess more of the social grace her father appreciated so much in young girls.

When Simone was five and a half, her mother enrolled her in a parochial girls’ school with an alluring name, Le Cours Désir. Simone could already read and write and immediately enjoyed having her own books, homework and schedules. At six, she taught Poupette to read and write, something that gave her a sense of pride in her own efficiency. They were all at Meyrignac that summer when one day in August the general alarm was sounded and it was announced that war had been declared. Orders for the requisitioning of horses and vehicles were nailed to doors and their grandfather’s horses were taken to the county seat of Uzerche. A month later at La Grillière, Simone was helping her mother knit woolen caps for soldiers and with Aunt Hélène went to the railway station to distribute apples to turbaned Indian troops on their way to the front. Georges...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Chapter I: Summer of 1929
• Chapter II: Easter 1938
• Chapter III: Christmas 1940
• Chapter IV: Fall of 1946
• Chapter V: November 1949
• Chapter VI: October 1954
• Chapter VII: New Year’s 1961
• Chapter VIII: May 1968
• Chapter IX: Spring of 1977
• Chapter X: Exit with Laughter
• Works by Sartre and Beauvoir
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page