It’s warm, it’s August, and a light breeze is coming from the mountains. He jumps on a train and takes a room at a small hotel nearby, and they meet up every day. ![]() Yet it is not Maheu but Sartre whom she invites to visit her. As she roams the meadows, she thinks of Sartre but more often of his good-looking friend Maheu. She departs the next day for a summer at her aunt’s house in the countryside. When the results of their oral exams are posted, Sartre comes first, Beauvoir second. Now and then they go for a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, followed by an outing to the cinema to see a western. ![]() Sartre invites Beauvoir to dinner and declares, “From now on I’m going to look after you, Castor.” They go on to spend the next fortnight together, with Kant, Rousseau, Leibniz, and Plato for company. So she’s Castor, a name she’ll keep for the rest of her life. Sartre is keen on Valkyrie, but Maheu says she’s like a beaver that gnaws away at the trees of knowledge and assembles them into a new structure. When Beauvoir has left, the two men try to come up with a nickname for her. She’s knocked off her stride only once, by the sight of the bedside lampshade, a patchwork of red underwear given to Sartre by Simone Jollivet, a high-class prostitute from Toulouse with literary ambitions. Beauvoir is shocked by the dirt, mess, and smell, but she tries not to let this put her off when they are all seated, she delivers a forty-minute interpretation of Leibniz’s metaphysics. He is joined in his small room in halls by his fellow student René Maheu. On July 8, Sartre finally meets Simone de Beauvoir outside the walls of the Sorbonne. The girl had a delicately painted mouth and tender gray-blue eyes, and her fiancé or husband, slender, elegantly balding, contemptuous of everything on earth but her, was looking at her with pride and Franz felt envious of that unusual pair. Sometimes the man carried a butterfly net. Nabokov had smuggled a reference to his bliss with Véra into his new novel, King, Queen, Knave:įranz had long since noticed this couple they had appeared to him in fleeting glimpses, like a recurrent dream image or a subtle leitmotiv- now at the beach, now in a café, now on the promenade. Véra worked for a law firm and translated, and Vladimir gave tennis lessons, acted as an extra, and taught bright boys chess and old ladies Russian. The couple somehow scraped by in the strange world of 1920s Berlin. The movement of the stars above our encounter And what if you are to be my fate. A poem he published in the Russian émigré newspaper Rul contained verses no one but she could decipher: ![]() Vladimir snared Véra a few years earlier. Then she will float out of the house on high heels with the first warm breath of night. After her performances or her film shoots, she will often come home, kiss the sleeping Maria on the forehead, change her clothes, and apply a fresh dash of perfume. The nanny, Tamara, now shares the marital bed with Rudolf, much to Marlene’s relief. She calls him “Daddy,” he refers to her as “Mummy.” Their daughter, Maria, is four years old. At home, they perform their own production of Misalliance. “But who would risk marrying a man for love? I shouldn’t.” Marlene Dietrich speaks these lines on the stage of the Komödie am Kurfürstendamm, in a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance, drawing languorously on her cigarette and lowering her eyelids.Īfter the show, she drives home to Rudolf Sieber, the husband she didn’t marry for love. ![]() “Simone told me you were short, wore glasses, and were very ugly.” “But how did you recognize me so easily among all these people?” Sartre asks. A young blonde woman comes rushing up to his table. He has read somewhere that this is what people do. He plans to take her to the nearby Jardin du Luxembourg and sail model boats on the pond. He sits in a tearoom in Rue de Médicis waiting for her. He finally manages to arrange a date with her a few weeks later. The moment Jean-Paul Sartre first gazes into Simone de Beauvoir’s eyes at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in the spring of 1929 is the only time his mind goes blank.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |