“Was it the weight of war on my too young shoulders?” Claude Lanzmann asked in his memoirs. “Was it the precarious equilibrium of those years between life and death? This new freedom of mine meant that I needed to prove my own existence with sometimes gratuitous acts.”1 The experience of war and the feeling of having cheated death for four years were key to postwar Paris intellectuals’ and artists’ unquenchable thirst for freedom in every aspect of their lives. Whether born into the working class or the bourgeoisie, they wanted little to do with their caste’s traditions and conventions or with propriety. Family was an institution to be banished, children a plague to avoid at all costs. However, these were the hardest notions to do away with, and while Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir managed to stick to their initial plan of “no marriage, no children,” or simply “no children” for Arthur Koestler, for the sake of art and life experimentation, others, usually men, decided to carry on the hypocrisy of their elders by marrying and then enjoying a secret and very free other life on the side. It did not make them particularly happy, though, and men like Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty who chose trompe l’oeil existences crushed many lives around them.
Strong and remarkable women were also hungry for freedom in all its forms. Simone de Beauvoir and Janet Flanner, Édith Thomas and Dominique Aury, were among the many women who called men’s bluff and decided that they, too, would live according to their desires and ambitions without any restraints. Financially independent, intelligent, bold, curious about life’s pleasures and sensations, not afraid of the danger of repeated illegal abortions, those feminist pioneers offered a model of emancipation for many generations to come. Heterosexuals, homosexuals, or bisexuals, on the subject of sex they had “a Greek amoral point of view.”2 Juliette Gréco, Françoise Sagan, and Brigitte Bardot were all the little sisters of Simone de Beauvoir.
“FAMILY, I HATE YOU”
Camus was missing Maria Casarès enormously. When she had heard a few months earlier that Francine Camus was pregnant, she had broken up with him. Camus had always told Maria that Francine was no more and no less than “a sister” to him, but the idea of a pregnant sister understandably irritated the young woman. Maria was twenty-two, she had plenty of male admirers, and the success of Les enfants du paradis had made her a star. Why should she let Camus spoil the fun? She would break a few new hearts while he changed diapers. Camus tried to forget Maria and buried himself in his work. He went to the rehearsals of his latest play, Caligula, every day at the Théâtre Hébertot. The leading role had been given to a young and very handsome unknown actor; his name was Gérard Philipe and he was going to be Caligula, the tyrannical Roman emperor who transcended good and evil in search of his own absolute freedom. For Camus, Caligula told the story of the most human and tragic of mistakes: to think that one’s own freedom can be exerted at the expense of everybody else’s.
On September 5, 1945, Francine gave birth to twins, Catherine and Jean, while Camus was at rehearsal. Camus was elated at first but the feeling did not last long. His mother-in-law and sister-in-law had arrived from Algiers to help Francine with the babies, but he did not feel at ease in his new role. What he resented most was the lack of time for his work and the silent demands made on him by his wife. He now started to understand and greatly envy Beauvoir and Sartre’s pact: no children, ever, together or with anybody else. Arthur Koestler had told his English girlfriend, Mamaine Paget: marriage, yes, children, no.3 Mamaine had accepted, even if reluctantly. Perhaps Francine would have accepted it too? Without the burden of children, Beauvoir and Sartre could lead very rich and productive lives. They worked hard, they played hard, they had an iron discipline, writing fourteen hours a day, going out every evening, cultivating a large family of loyal friends and lovers, living in hotel rooms with no issues of domesticity, and spending every penny they earned—was not this the only, and truly revolutionary, way for a writer to live? Camus deeply admired them for it, and profoundly resented his own situation.
There was no turning back, though: the children had been born, he was a father and a husband, he could not rewrite the story. He would simply have to cheat and lie the way the bourgeois had always done. He wasn’t proud of the thought, but it was a question of personal survival. He had work to do, things to say, battles to fight, an oeuvre to produce, and that was more important than everything, absolutely everything, and everyone, else. He had begun writing a novel that he wanted to call La peste (The Plague), but there was no time to finish it. He dreamed of a hotel room where he could write, where he could be alone, where there would be no in-laws, no babies screaming, no smell of vomit and diapers. And in the evening, Camus wanted to dance again. He loved dancing, just as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty did.
Camus took every opportunity to leave home. His twins had just been born when he accepted his American publisher Alfred A. Knopf’s invitation to tour the United States to coincide with the U.S. release of The Outsider. Sartre’s enthusiasm for America had piqued Camus’ curiosity. In New York, Camus, more puzzled than fascinated by American culture, was looking for a key into this new world. The key would be named Patricia. Five days after the publication of The Outsider to glowing reviews,4 the thirty-three-year-old Albert Camus met the twenty-year-old Patricia Blake. Like Dolorès for Sartre, Patricia was going to give America to Camus. Patricia was one of those “long-legged [American] dames”5 Camus admired. But she was also more than that.
The daughter of a doctor, a pianist in her spare time, Patricia had just graduated from Smith College. She had read Lenin and Marx, was attracted to Communism, and loved Proust. She was pretty, fair-haired with blue eyes, and earned thirty-five dollars a week as a copy editor at Vogue magazine. The day after their first encounter they were lovers, and soon Patricia’s girlfriends at Vogue were calling Camus “the young Humphrey Bogart.” Patricia was in love, Albert was smitten. He lived in a Central Park West duplex flat lent to him by an admirer. Patricia would visit almost every day and they would often go out to dinner in Chinatown, which fascinated him. After dinner, they often ended up in a nightclub. Camus loved dancing; it was his way to cheat death. He had put on weight, looked ill, and was coughing up blood; the truth was he thought he would not make it back home. Patricia mistook his intensity for passion. In fact, despite his feelings for Patricia, he longed to go back to the many flaws of Paris and Europe, to a place where people did not just “pretend to live,” a place where “conversations were full of wit, even bad, full of irony, of passion and its string of lies.”6
Like Sartre, Camus did not forget to bring back new world riches to the old world, and the last few days were frantic with buying everything that Parisians lacked or that was so scarce it cost a small fortune. He came back with a crate of sugar, coffee, powdered eggs, rice, chocolate, flour, baby foods, canned meat, soap, and detergent weighing two hundred pounds. As soon as he reached Paris, however, he thought about exporting back to New York another kind of nourishment: he bought a subscription to Les Temps modernes for Patricia. An ocean might have come between them but the conversation would go on as brightly as it had in “Black Harlem, Jewish Brooklyn and vulgar Cony Island.”7 Back home, relations with Francine were cold, to say the least. She was silently resentful; he was silently offended and angry. He had been happy with Patricia, and the only way to remain happy was to write. La peste was awaiting.
Camus found ways to escape his family that were deemed socially acceptable. On August 5, he deserted Paris with his family, and settled into the Château des Brefs, the property of his publisher Gallimard in the Vendée region. The place was so big that Camus was given a room where he could work far away from crying children and a wife who was doing her utmost, but often failing, not to sulk. Camus started almost every day by writing to his darling Patricia. On August 12, he commented: “This is a beautiful and vast old house, furnished with antiquities and old tapestries with ancestors looking at you from their frames. I have found peace here, that is to say that I write for ten hours a day without being disturbed, and I’m finally finishing La peste.”8 On August 21, in another letter to Patricia, Camus announced that he had finished his manuscript at long last, but did not know whether to call it La peste or La terreur. He could have called it Totalitarianism, the subject of his novel. As a token of his undying love, Camus sent Patricia Sartre’s one-kilo philosophy treatise L’être et le néant.
ALBERT, SIMONE, AND ARTHUR
Albert Camus, and indeed Jean-Paul Sartre, often fell for pretty students and groupies. It was easy. Those young lovers were enthusiastic, malleable, a little naive perhaps, and would recover in no time once the affair with the great man had ended. If Maria Casarès stood apart, herself a seductress and as ambitious for her art as Albert Camus was for his writing, Camus nonetheless feared intelligent women. Brought up in a male chauvinist French North African culture, he had difficulty reconciling desire and intellect in his relations with women. He needed to dominate one way or another.
In December 1945, Beauvoir and Camus often had dinner at Lipp, opposite the Café de Flore on the boulevard Saint-Germain. They would then end up in the basement bar of the Hôtel du Pont Royal, right next to Gallimard’s offices. Simone was now too well known a public figure to spend time in the Café de Flore without being interrupted. She liked the discretion of the Pont Royal bar, whether during the day or at night, except that writing on the wine barrels that were used as tables was not an easy task. She did not know how to place her legs; opening them wide in order to hug the barrel was not her idea of elegance.9 In the evening, she and Camus chatted at the Pont Royal until closing time and then strolled happily, if not slightly tipsily, to her hotel room at La Louisiane, where they talked and drank some more. Coal was still severely rationed in the winter of 1945 and it was very cold in Simone’s room;10 drinking helped keep them warm.
Beauvoir was attracted to Camus and Camus to Beauvoir. He admired her as a free-spirited and independent woman, and he desired her: she was five years older and beautiful, she was elegant, chic, and fiery, and under her carapace he knew she was also warm and passionate. However, he was frightened of her intelligence; he feared that it might even turn him off. What kind of pillow talk did one have with Beauvoir? he wondered.11 She had no reservations about him. Nothing in him could turn her off, except perhaps his moralizing, but he usually kept that for his readers. He had confided to her his marital problems and his many frustrations. “He wanted to speak and write the Truth!” she wrote in her diary. “The chasm between his oeuvre and his life ran deep. When we were together, he was funny, cynical, a little coarse, bawdy even. He opened up and gave in to his impulses.”12 Beauvoir had seen clearly the paradox lying at the heart of Camus’ existence. He was one of France’s public moral thinkers, and yet the private man could not reconcile his longing for truth with his thirst for freedom. After two in the morning, fueled by alcohol, Albert liked meditating on love: “One must choose in love: lasting or burning!” Simone loved his “kindness and his hunger for passion.” If Beauvoir and Camus ever had an affair, it was during those nights of December 1945.13
If Camus might, in the end, have felt too intimidated by Simone de Beauvoir’s piercing intelligence and beauty,14 Arthur Koestler was immediately inflamed by it. Unknowingly, Camus had been their go-between. Thanks to Camus, Beauvoir had read Darkness at Noon before anyone else in France and had warmed to Koestler’s mind and personal history. From Bwlch Ocyn in Wales, where he had settled a year earlier with Mamaine Paget, Arthur Koestler had not missed a beat of French political and intellectual life and, at forty, he was impatient to dive back into the Parisian whirlpool, especially following the phenomenal success of the French edition of Darkness at Noon. An invitation he could not refuse arrived in the post in September 1946. The theater director Jean Vilar was inviting him to watch the rehearsals of his play Le Bar du crépuscule, une bouffonnerie mélancolique (Twilight Bar)15 and to attend the first night on October 23, 1946. It had been six years since his desperate flight from Paris in a legionnaire’s uniform and under a fake identity;16 how satisfying to come back as a conquering hero and literary champion.
Koestler, alone for two weeks before Mamaine’s arrival, had not waited to be introduced by common acquaintances. He had gone straight to Combat’s office, entered the editor in chief’s little cubicle, and extended his hand to Camus with a warm smile. Then he had gone to the bar of the Hôtel du Pont Royal, where he knew he would find Sartre and Beauvoir, and waited for them to turn up. On seeing them, he had walked up to them and had said, “Bonjour, je suis Koestler.”17 On both occasions, the rapport between the Hungarian Jew turned English literary lion, the Algerian-born writer, and the Existentialist philosophers was instant.
A week later, Koestler had introduced Mamaine to Sartre and Beauvoir, and they all often met at Sartre’s flat or at the Flore for lunch. On October 23, Mamaine wrote to Celia: “Sartre is simply charming and while he’s talking one feels that existentialism must be the thing, though always without having much idea what it is. He and K. get on very well and we both get on like a house on fire with Simone de Beauvoir.”18 A few hours later that very night, Koestler would also get on like a house on fire with Simone.
Late that evening, the two couples bumped into each other at the bar of the Hôtel du Pont Royal. Mamaine was tired and went to bed, leaving Koestler with Beauvoir, Sartre, and Jean Genet. Back at the hotel, she could not sleep. She wrote to her sister to pass the time. “K shows no sign of coming in, which worries me rather as he must be terribly drunk by now (3 a.m.), hence this rambling letter, as I cannot think of what else to do.” Koestler would be another few hours. He was with Simone, in her round room in the Hôtel La Louisiane, making love furiously to the French philosopher whose passion he had felt from the moment he had met her. She had in turn been attracted to his intensity, his all-devouring energy and blazing intelligence, but she had also sensed in him a certain violence. They had been curious about each other, and had perhaps wanted to test themselves against each other, like boxing champions in the same weight class. As the door shut behind them, he almost ripped off her clothes. She was not entirely surprised to find him rough, very rough. And when he left her at dawn to join Mamaine, who had finally fallen asleep, Simone knew there would not be another night with Koestler. She had realized, by the way he ravished her, that Koestler was a violent and impulsive man, a world-weary seducer. He seemed to be using women in his life like props. Had she not heard him say just that to Mamaine the other night? “You’re my only prop,” he had said. Simone de Beauvoir was nobody’s prop.
MAMAINE, JEAN-PAUL, AND ALBERT
A week later, on October 31, Camus and his wife, Francine, Koestler and his girlfriend Mamaine, and Sartre and Beauvoir met for dinner “in an Arab bistro to eat some Arab food.” From there they went to a bal musette “with blue and pink neon lights and men dancing on stage with girls in very short skirts.” The evening and night were to prove so memorable that Mamaine wrote to her sister the day after to tell her everything in detail. “For the first time in my life I danced with K, and also saw the engaging spectacle of him lugging the Castor (who has I think hardly ever danced in her life) round the floor, with Sartre (who ditto) lugged Madame Camus.” The new friends were having a good time, and the night was young, so Koestler invited them all to a Russian nightclub. The Sheherazade was really not Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir’s kind of place, but Koestler’s energy was irresistible. On entering the nightclub, they were plunged into almost total darkness with violinists playing soulful music in their ears. The Parisian friends all looked at each other in embarrassment.
Koestler ordered enough champagne, vodka, and Russian hors d’oeuvres (known as zakuski) for a regiment, and everybody started relaxing. “Sartre got very drunk almost at once, Beauvoir also got drunk and K got drunk too (we drank vodka and champagne in large quantities). Francine Camus (who is extremely beautiful and nice) also got tight. Camus and I did not get drunk, though we nearly did.” Not surprisingly, when a pickpocket snitched his wallet with 13,000 francs in it, Koestler did not feel a thing. Time flew by. Sartre knew he was giving a talk, which he had not written yet, to thousands of people at UNESCO the following day, but he was having too good a time to leave. Suddenly the violinists surrounded their table and began playing “Ochi Chornya” (“Dark Eyes”), one of the most famous Russian sentimental songs. On hearing the first notes, Koestler took his head in his hands and started weeping uncontrollably.
The friends patted Koestler on the shoulder and someone said, “Is it time for an onion soup?” In the street, walking toward Les Halles, the “belly of Paris” as Zola had called it, the men started soliloquizing. Camus kept repeating, “If only one could write the Truth!” Sartre was giggling, thinking aloud, “And in a few hours, I’ll be addressing a crowd about the writer’s responsibility!” And Koestler, behind them, exclaimed: “We must absolutely agree on politics or I do not see how we could be friends!” Seated in front of an onion soup, the imperious Koestler insisted on ordering oysters and white wine to wash it all down. “By that time, Sartre was simply roaring drunk, and awfully sweet and funny. He kept pouring pepper and salt into paper napkins, folding them up small and stuffing them into his pocket.”19
Camus, laughing and referring to the UNESCO talk, told Sartre: “Tu parleras sans moi!” (You’ll have to speak without me). Sartre burst out: “Je voudrais bien parler sans moi!” (I wish I could speak without me, too!). When they finally looked out the window it was broad daylight. The three couples said good-bye and very unsteadily went on their way. Crossing the Seine at the Pont Neuf, Simone leaned on the bridge and began sobbing over the tragedy of the human condition. “I do not understand why we do not throw ourselves into the water!” she told Sartre. Now also weeping, he replied, “Well, let’s do it!” At a different bridge, the Pont Royal, Koestler and Mamaine had also wept profusely, but not over the human condition. Simply because of the river’s “incredible beauty” with “those lovely lemon-green and yellow poplars with their black trunks, and the houses reflected in the water by the early morning light.”
Beauvoir could not remember later how they got back to their respective beds. Eight hours later, the worse for wear, looking rather pale, she was seated in the front row at UNESCO’s big amphitheater for Sartre’s lecture. Sartre appeared on stage: “his face was ravaged.” Sartre had slept only two hours. When his alarm went off, he got up and walked with great difficulty to his pharmacy where he grabbed a tube of Orthédrine. It was full; he swallowed all the pills. Orthédrine was a stimulant drug, widely available in pharmacies, on which the résistants who had used it during the war had bestowed a kind of magic aura.
* * *
No amount of pills could distract Sartre from his feelings for Mamaine, whom he had been taken by. She found him charming and very amusing. “Of all the people I have met with K, I like Sperber20 best, and Sartre,” she wrote to her sister Celia that week. However, Sartre was not the only one to have a crush on Koestler’s girlfriend. There was Koestler, of course, but there was Camus, too. He had found Mamaine exquisite. And Camus particularly liked beating Sartre in the seduction game. Whom had Mamaine fallen for, Sartre or Camus? The things that happened that night wouldn’t be revealed until a few months later.
“I LOVE YOU AS A MAN LOVES A WOMAN”
Although both had resigned from the Communist Femmes françaises at the end of 1945 and did not share an office anymore, Édith Thomas and Dominique Aury had remained close. The two women were very different. They had come from diametrically opposed political milieus. Dominique came from the extreme Right and Édith from the extreme Left. Yet both had ended up as résistantes during the war, Dominique through patriotism, Édith through idealism. Dominique was a seductress, a smooth operator, flexible, extremely polite and discreet. Édith loved truth and authenticity while Dominique reveled in secrets and sometimes lies. But they shared three overriding qualities: intelligence, generosity, and humor. From their very first encounter, they became friends. The two were in awe of each other, for different reasons. Dominique admired Édith, and Édith was fascinated by Dominique. Édith knew Dominique had a lover with whom she shared a great physical passion, but she did not know who the man was. Albert Camus?21 Dominique was so discreet that it was impossible to know for certain. As for Édith, she was as desperately lonely as ever.
Édith had grown very harsh, both with herself and with others. At thirty-seven she was too ashamed of her body to risk seduction; she had almost turned the page on men, on sex, and on love; in fact she had only lost her virginity at the age of thirty-two, in “more pain than pleasure,” as she had confided to her diary.22 She had had very few and very brief encounters since, and all had been unsatisfactory. “I’m like a whore in so far as all men are the same to me: I cannot love any of them. I’m as lucid as one can be.”23 She far preferred friendship to love. Dominique, the only person she had let come close, seemed to be the only one to see the sensitive and luminous beauty in Édith.
After months of close friendship, Dominique had decided to reveal her true feelings for Édith. A seductress, a conqueror of both men and women, Dominique knew how to snare her prey. On October 27, she invited Édith to have a coffee. “As soon as I arrived, Dominique told me: ‘Édith, this is an ambush.’ She looked pale and troubled, almost ill. ‘I love you as a man loves a woman.’” Édith recounted the exchange and her feelings about it in her diary immediately after returning home.
What to do? Oh God (who does not exist), what to do? I have for her a profound affection and esteem. We share the same feelings about people and books. I love her delicacy and her intelligence. If she were a man, I would be elated by her love. If I were a man, I would love her. But I’m a woman and she’s a woman. What to do? Why am I always putting myself in awkward situations?24
Édith could not conceive of sex between two women, not out of prudishness but simply because it had never occurred to her that she could one day be concerned by it personally. In fact, she did not have anything against homosexuality. “For me, there is no evil nor any good, no vice nor any virtue in homosexuality. So why refuse it? I have in fact a Greek amoral point of view.”
A few hours later, on the same day, Dominique walked up the stairs to Édith’s flat on tiptoe and as quietly as possible slipped a letter under Édith’s door. It was another declaration of love, using the respectful vous and not the familiar tu.
Édith, my love. Forgive me, as I could not keep silent any longer. I would like to be standing next to you still, and to tell you that I love you, and to kiss you. I do not know how to control myself anymore. Your softness confuses me. You do not know what it feels like to be burnt, and to have under my lips your hands so soft, or your soft black hair, or your cheeks’ downy hairs, there, just above the ears. Édith, I have never loved a woman the way I love you. I have never loved a girl for whom I also had admiration, respect and this combatant camaraderie based on tenderness and which is so powerful in time of war. To have held you in my arms even for a second this morning made me wobble, and reach for the wall for support. I kiss both your hands, Édith.25
Not used to such a display of emotions, both surprised and tormented by it, Édith quickly fell into the trap Dominique had laid for her. The day Sartre dragged himself on the stage of UNESCO for his talk on the responsibility of writers, the same day Koestler, Mamaine, Camus, and Francine spent entirely in bed, two women on the other side of the Luxembourg Gardens also chose not to leave the bedroom. One was initiating the other in carnal pleasures she had never thought possible. Dominique played the bad boy and Édith the vulnerable jeune fille. Dominique had promised that their liaison would not affect their friendship. She knew she could not remain faithful to one lover, she could not make any promises of the sort, but she was and would always remain a very loyal friend. Their first afternoon and night together transfigured Édith. She threw herself headfirst into their affair. “I’m burning. I’m like a small bundle of dry wood, a handful of straw. I’m thirsty. Am a lone walker in the middle of the desert. I’m hungry. Will you be my orchard, my water spring? Or will you be like fire, consuming everything and leaving me mortally unsatiated?”26
Walking together past the statues of queens of France in the Luxembourg Gardens one frosty November morning, after another torrid night during which Dominique played the “passionate teenage boy” and Édith “his first ever mistress,” Édith tried her best to appear distant and cool: “Dominique, I could never stand the presence of a man in my life and I fear this is what is going to happen again.” Dominique’s eyes welled up with tears: “Oh, Édith, are you telling me that I’m going to lose you? Tell me what I should do, I’ll do everything you want me to do.” By the end of November, Édith had totally fallen under Dominique’s spell. She was now the one writing desperately passionate letters.
For such a rigorous mind, one that had always cherished doubt and rejected certainties, Édith proved particularly unrestrained, perhaps even naive, in her passion for Dominique. “I’m not going out tonight to meet Stephen Spender, I just want to keep feeling your kisses on my skin. Could this time be love, my love?”27 Édith sometimes wrote several times a day to Dominique: “I only want you, Dominique, you, alone in the desert, a desert made of sand and white bones, just for you. I don’t understand a thing about love if it’s not whole and absolute. My destiny is to love a human being the way I love you, so that there is only one being inside me, filling me up.”28 For months to come, Édith and Dominique would share a passion that would transport Édith to a state of delirious ecstasy. Did she know it could not last? Dominique may have left her mysterious male lover for Édith but she was a born huntress, and after passion subsided she always chased other prey. If her torrid affair with Arthur Koestler, whose collection of articles The Yogi and the Commissar she was translating into French, was going to be short-lived, her relationship with Jean Paulhan, which had been slow-burning for months, would eventually overshadow her feelings for Édith. Édith sensed it and feared it.
SARTRE AND BEAUVOIR: ROLE MODELS
The young Anne-Marie Cazalis might have been presented with the Valéry award for best newcomer in poetry at the age of twenty-three, but what she wanted most in life was not to become the next Paul Valéry. She wanted to be Simone de Beauvoir, to live in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and work as a journalist. Like many people her age, she had read L’invitée (She Came to Stay) in 1943. The story, fictionalized but still recognizable, of Beauvoir and Sartre’s ménage à trois with their former student Olga Kosakiewicz had electrified a whole generation. And Cazalis had fallen under the spell. “I had never thought one could live so freely. Simone had earned the right to live like this, and thanks to her, this freedom was given to my generation, like a gift.”29 Cazalis started writing bits and pieces for France Dimanche, nothing important or even very interesting, but it was a start and it meant she was often outside, roaming the streets looking for stories and people to interview.
One day, while walking down the rue Saint-André-des-Arts, she noticed a curvy young brunette. The teenager was wearing a black turtleneck and jodhpurs, and her eyelids were lined with heavy black kohl. She was beautiful, she ate gherkin and mustard sandwiches, and, Cazalis later learned, despite her attire, she never rode horses.30 Her name was Juliette Gréco. The two young women soon became inseparable friends. In the evening they often met at the Méphisto, a bar that stayed open until one in the morning and had a secret basement where only the lucky few were admitted. Cazalis had heard that Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus, and the journalists from Combat used it as one of their headquarters. One had to press the bell for a long time, and Cazalis and Gréco were not always let in. When unlucky, they spent their evenings at Jacques Prévert’s local, Le Bar Vert, 10 rue Jacob. The girls particularly relished the graffiti in the phone booth. One read: “When you hear ‘Allo?’ doesn’t it make you think of the Seine?”31
* * *
In October 1945, Claude Lanzmann had just been accepted to Louis-le-Grand’s Hypokhâgne preparatory class. The twenty-year-old had spent the last five years in the town of Clermont-Ferrand and the Auvergne region risking his life as a French résistant. He also happened to be Jewish, not that it actually meant much to him until 1941 and Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws. Lanzmann and his friend Jean Cau were among the most gifted students of their class. Both men had an equal passion for literature and women but little appetite for studying, and they soon came up with a grand scheme. Jean Cau was convinced that in order to become a writer, one needed to start by being the private secretary of a celebrated author. “For him, it was a Balzacian rite of passage.”32 One afternoon, Lanzmann found his friend bent over a desk in the Lycée’s library with an ardent gaze. He was writing, or rather composing, a dozen letters, to among others Malraux, Aragon, Sartre, Gide, Mauriac, and Paulhan. Days, weeks passed. Finally, one morning, the Lycée’s supervisor gave Cau a letter. It was the only reply he would get from all the luminaries he had contacted. It was from Sartre. Lanzmann and Cau carefully opened and read the letter with moist hands. Sartre was inviting Cau to meet him any day of the week he liked at the Flore, between two and three o’clock in the afternoon.
They met; Sartre liked the young man, and his first secretariat was organized from the Lycée’s library. In truth, neither Cau nor Sartre had any idea what “secretariat” really meant and how it could help the philosopher. “Cau invented the method and its purpose, forcing Sartre, little by little, to put some order in his diary and finances”33—in other words, in his life. Sartre was known for spending his money freely. Insisting on being paid cash for his work, he liked carrying huge wads of banknotes and always paid at restaurants and cafés, never letting anyone else foot the bill, and left huge tips for the waiters. His generosity was astounding and attracted many friends in temporary or chronic financial difficulty. Sartre would discreetly pay for former students’ abortions, cover the rent of his past and present lovers, make loans to impoverished writers—the people indebted to him were legion. In fact, Sartre had no desire to own anything and, true to his word, never would. Cau quickly realized that his main activity would be to free Sartre from his increasingly busy social life and from all the profiteurs so that he could have long stretches of time during the day to concentrate on his writing. Cau abandoned his studies, found a small room in a dingy hotel on the rue des Écoles right next to the Sorbonne in the 5th arrondissement, and moved a little desk into Sartre’s flat where, every day from ten in the morning until one in the afternoon, he answered the phone, replied to the mail, and managed Sartre’s diary. Sartre’s life became very organized. At one thirty he left to have lunch at Lipp, or the Flore, returning at four thirty. Simone would then turn up around five and write on her little bridge table with its green cloth and they would work side by side until at least eight o’clock, even nine, then go and have dinner. Sometimes, to loosen his fingers and relax, Sartre took to the piano and practiced a Beethoven sonata or a Bach prelude. They drank tea through the afternoon from their respective thermos flasks, an old habit from their hotel days, and smoked like chimneys, Sartre his pipe, Beauvoir her cigarettes.34 Meanwhile, Jean Cau was waiting for an opportunity to introduce the pair to his friend Claude Lanzmann. Lanzmann would later make a great impression on the philosophers, particularly on Simone.
Sartre and Beauvoir fascinated young people like Hollywood stars; they had a special aura. It was not, however, a one-way relationship. Sartre and Beauvoir constantly learned from the young. It was an enriching exchange for all involved. Boris Vian, who was educating both Sartre and Beauvoir in jazz, often took them to the latest jazz clubs, like the one that had just opened in the shadow of the Pantheon, Le Caveau des Lorientais, in the basement of a hotel35 at 5 rue des Carmes in the 5th arrondissement. The owners of this modest hotel, a Breton couple named Pérodo, thought it a good idea to ask their many regular jazz musician guests to play for the young people of the Latin Quarter every evening from five to seven. The basement was badly ventilated, but for two hours nobody should suffocate: they would leave the doors open and the youngsters would simply feel a little hot. To be granted the prefecture’s authorization, the Pérodos had argued that all profits from the jazz club would be given to the badly damaged town of Lorient, which had been almost razed by Allied bombing during the liberation. The Pérodos offered the cheapest entrance fee on the entire Left Bank;36 they set out to attract the young, and so they did.
The opening of the club did not go unnoticed. Juliette Gréco and Anne-Marie Cazalis soon made it a daily routine to meet in the rue des Carmes at five o’clock each afternoon. “For five francs, one could get in and have a glass of orangeade with saccharin! At a time when we were all penniless.”37 They also secretly hoped to bump into Beauvoir and Sartre. The twenty-two-year-old French clarinetist Claude Luter—a blue-eyed, fair-haired young man six feet tall with a penchant for reading Tarzan comic books—was another attraction. Starry-eyed young girls rushed to the “Lorientais,” as Claude Luter and his musician friends were soon nicknamed, as much for their athletic allure as for their music. The black American trombone player Tyree Glen, visiting Paris, noticed Luter during an afternoon session and went to talk to him. He was surprised that such a young man should adopt the New Orleans style. They spent the night talking about New Orleans jazz and Sidney Bechet, whom Luter and his Parisian friends would resurrect from oblivion in just a couple of years and put back on the international stage.
Claude Luter was as broke as his adoring fans. Sometimes he had to take his clarinet to the pawnshop and wait a few days to receive payment for his various gigs in order to get his instrument back and return to performing. Neither he nor Juliette Gréco nor Anne-Marie Cazalis could afford decent meals. They lived off coffee and tartines at the Café de Flore until five in the afternoon, when they’d get their orangeade at the jazz club. Juliette Gréco had moved to the Hôtel Bisson, 53 ter Quai des Grands Augustins, next to Michel Leiris. Unlike the art critic’s, her tiny room of a home had no grand views over the Seine, just a little window giving onto a dark and filthy courtyard.
WOMEN’S EMANCIPATION
It was la rentrée in Paris, the period in early September when Parisians come back rested and suntanned from their provincial family homes, children count their pencils and wipe the dust from their satchels, and reviewers sharpen their wits for the new season of novels, films, and plays. La rentrée was always a time for new projects, and Simone had one. Just before their summer holidays, Sartre had suggested to her a possible topic for an essay: women’s condition—in other words, what it meant to be a woman. Simone liked the idea and would draw on her experiences. She was no longer a debutante; at thirty-eight, she could take more risks in both subject and form.
At first, she thought the task would be easy and that this study would be almost like an exercise in style; she envisaged a very short essay. Simone had been brought up by her father, who had hoped for a boy. Seeing her intellectual and academic abilities, he had pushed her, so her experience was different from that of many other women. “I had never had any feeling of inferiority, no one had ever said to me, ‘You think that way because you are a woman’; the fact that I was a woman, my femaleness, had never bothered me in any way. ‘In my case,’ I said to Sartre, ‘it hasn’t really mattered.’” Sartre urged her to reconsider: “But still, you weren’t brought up in the same way as a boy: you should take a closer look.”38 She did. Every morning she went to the National Library on the rue de Richelieu.
There, on the beautiful but hard wooden benches of the oval room, bathed in the warm September sun filtering through the glass skylight, Simone had an epiphany. “It was a revelation. This world was a masculine world, my childhood was nourished by myths concocted by men, and I hadn’t reacted to them in the same way I would have done if I had been a boy. I became so interested that I gave up the project of a personal confession in order to focus on the condition of woman.”39 This was not going to be a short and quick essay. She had started researching The Second Sex, a book that would shake the world.
Simone had so far lived her life as she pleased by breaking social conventions, so researching this subject was also a journey of self-discovery. She would understand in the process why she fascinated younger women. Her life was a model of emancipation, one that the younger generation aspired to and one that she was going to analyze in great detail, not shying away from sexually explicit content.
* * *
At exactly the same moment, Édith Thomas was working on historical biographies of remarkable women through the ages. Her two latest novels,40 which had finally been published at the end of 1945, had encouraged her to pursue this direction.
Having published seven novels since the age of twenty-two without ever enjoying real success, she thought changing literary genres, from fiction to nonfiction, might prove liberating. After all, she had just been appointed chief curator at the Archives Nationales with access to a vast wealth of historical documents and material.
She interested two publishers, one in a portrait of Joan of Arc,41 another in a collection of profiles of feminist pioneers from the Second Republic of 1848.42
Dominique was now working as a feature writer and critic for L’Arche, a literary magazine. She wanted to help Édith in every way she could. She saw in Édith a champion of women’s rights or, as it was called then, la condition féminine. “All the heroines in Édith Thomas’s novels refuse, at their own peril, the ordinary condition of women. They refuse to live for and through somebody else. They want to be autonomous.”43 Bolstered by Dominique’s support, Édith embarked on those new editorial projects, while finishing a collection of short stories she would call Ève et les autres. There was an overall theme in these short stories: women reclaimed their independence from their husbands and from God, and asserted their ambition to be free and to fulfill all their desires in life.
Thomas was an excitable and feverish writer and often got carried away by ideology. Simone de Beauvoir’s brilliance lay, on the contrary, in a rigorous intellectual approach combined with a cool and superbly concise style. And while posterity chose to remember only one of them, it is striking that both women, of similar age, were coming to grips with the same existential dilemmas at the same time just a few streets away from each other: how to be free and a woman, how to be independent and autonomous in a man’s world.
Many women around Simone had not mustered the courage to break free. This was the overwhelming norm in the middle class. Simone only had to look at the thirty-year-old English rose Mamaine Paget, Arthur Koestler’s partner and wife-to-be. Orphaned at a young age, along with her twin sister Celia, she had been educated at exclusive English and French boarding schools paid for by relatively well-off cousins. Intelligent, polyglot, cultured, pretty, and feminine, the sisters had turned heads in their late teens at the chic opera soirées of Glyndebourne, in the south of England. However, all they could apparently aspire to was to become socialites or “wives of.” The alternative, to break away from their milieu, would have required an incredible determination, a steely character, and even a certain degree of madness. Mamaine did not have this in her. She was soft in a good way, sensitive, caring, a little mischievous certainly, but not rebellious. Mamaine was everything Simone de Beauvoir and Édith Thomas had refused to be and had fought hard not to be. Mamaine, like Francine Camus, was going to be a wife whose talents would lie in fostering her husband’s career without ever getting the credit for it. This imbalance, this injustice, and the hypocrisy surrounding it would both poison their marital and family lives and ruin their health.
Mamaine had been the secret behind her husband’s success since she met him at a party given by Cyril Connolly in his London flat in Bedford Square in January 1944. This became especially true once he decided to write and publish in English. Mamaine was Koestler’s translator, editor, and copy editor, and the one he constantly bullied and occasionally made love to, though not exclusively. It was the second time he had switched languages. As a student he had gone from Hungarian to German, and he had now decided to leave German aside. He also had a history of relying heavily on the women in his life to translate, research, type, and edit his work. His current success, Darkness at Noon, had been written in German on the eve of the war and translated into English by his then British girlfriend, the sculptor Daphne Hardy, who had passed the manuscript on to Macmillan in London.
There were some advantages for the women who ran Koestler’s work and life. Through Koestler, Mamaine lived a scintillating life and met the greatest intellectuals and writers of her time, who often fell for her, and very occasionally she for them. On February 15, 1946, she wrote a postcard to her sister Celia from the dining car of a train leaving Lausanne in Switzerland: “Dear Twinny, yesterday I lunched with [Tristan] Tzara,44 who asked me to go to Vienna with him as a guest of the [Russian] government; he’s a Stalinist of the deepest dye.”45
The couple also regularly entertained renowned guests: the recently widowed George Orwell had come to spend Christmas with his eighteen-month-old son, Richard, and had rather embarrassingly asked Mamaine’s sister Celia to marry him (desperately, Orwell had asked a string of young women to marry him). There was also the “extraordinarily witty and charming” philosopher Bertrand Russell and his third wife; after one too many drinks, Russell had issued fantastic predictions. “Russell said that as the Catholic population of America was increasing by leaps and bounds the United States would one day be Catholic-controlled, and we should then be faced with a new choice: Stalin or the Pope.”46
Mamaine had agreed to move in with Koestler a year earlier and to live in Wales at Bwlch Ocyn. Arthur did not like London and somehow the Welsh hills reminded him of Austria. He had promised marriage, a promise he took seven years to deliver, perhaps because of his refusal to have children, which she had eventually and reluctantly accepted. Their daily life could be austere. Having to do all the domestic chores, occasionally helped by a “moronic servant,” Mamaine also did all Koestler’s secretarial work.47
For the younger generation just after Mamaine’s, who were born in the late 1920s and early 1930s and who were children during the war, autonomy was much more desirable than domestic life and worth taking risks for. It might have been the air of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the return of real and strong coffee to their cups, or their adoration for Simone de Beauvoir, but Juliette Gréco and her friend Anne-Marie Cazalis were not going to be anyone’s submissive other halves. It was not only a question of working and earning one’s living but also, as Édith Thomas had said about her heroines, one of self-reliance and not feeling dependent on anyone else in order to feel whole. Those younger women also firmly intended to enjoy a very free sex life, just like Dominique Aury and Simone de Beauvoir. Gréco and Cazalis found Combat’s young and not so young journalists, who spent their nights at the Méphisto bar on the boulevard Saint-Germain, very attractive. “Between two jives, they disappeared from Paris for a few days, traveling to the Black Forest to go and interview Martin Heidegger. The German philosopher would puff on his porcelain pipe and declare: ‘the atomic bomb is the logical consequence of Descartes’ and would then dismiss his French visitors.”48 Despite their admiration, Gréco and Cazalis were not going to throw themselves at these journalists. They were, in fact, gamines fatales. They decided to take men as seriously as men usually took them.
One evening in February 1946, the thirty-eight-year-old phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was also a terrific dancer in his spare time, noticed a raven-haired teenager with doe eyes at the Méphisto. He approached her. Her silence and seeming indifference intrigued him greatly. The married Merleau-Ponty had just fallen for Juliette Gréco, aged nineteen. She was not entirely insensitive to his charm, though, and the Creole black pudding they served at the Méphisto helped.49 She was very hungry in those days, with very little money to live on, but was too proud to tell anyone. She felt instant sympathy for people who shared their dinner with her. Merleau-Ponty was also a professor of philosophy, and in her book that was the closest one could get to God—that is, if God existed. The day after her first encounter with him she bought the February issue of Les Temps modernes; she had heard he had a long opening essay in it titled “Faith and Bad Faith.”