Becoming Beauvoir Read online

  On 9 June 1910 a second daughter was born. She was christened Henriette-Hélène Marie but was called Hélène or, within the family, ‘Poupette’ (meaning ‘little doll’). Although she was only two and a half years younger, Simone saw Hélène as a student in need of her expert tutelage; she was already a teacher in the making. The family had hoped for a boy, and Beauvoir detected their disappointment at her birth, writing in her memoirs (with characteristic understatement) that ‘it is perhaps not altogether without significance that her cradle was the centre of regretful comment’.8 In Hélène’s own memoirs we read that after the birth announcement her grandparents had written a letter congratulating Georges and Françoise on the arrival of a son. They didn’t bother to soil new paper when they were informed that it was a girl – they simply added a postscript: ‘I understand that the birth was a little girl, according to the will of God.’9

  Beauvoir described her earliest years with a feeling of ‘unalterable security’ broken only by the realization that eventually she, too, was ‘condemned to be an outcast of childhood’. She loved to be outdoors exploring nature, relishing in running through lawns and examining leaves and flowers, seed pods and spiders’ webs. Each summer the family spent two months in the country: one month at Georges’ sister Hélène’s house (a turreted nineteenth-century château called La Grillère) and another at his father’s estate, Meyrignac. The château at Meyrignac was set in a large property of more than 200 hectares, providing ample opportunity for Simone to lose herself in the beauty of nature. Her wonder at natural spaces would be a permanent feature of her life; she continued to associate the countryside with solitude, freedom and the highest heights of happiness.10 But for all its grandeur, much to the surprise of some Parisian visitors, the château had neither electricity nor running water.11

  Their Paris apartment, by contrast, was now plush, sparkling, and overwhelmingly red – red moquette upholstery, a red Renaissance dining room, curtains of red velvet and red silk. The drawing room walls were mirrored, reflecting the light of a crystal chandelier, and there were silver pose-couteaux for resting their table knives. In the city Françoise would say goodnight to her daughter in dresses of tulle and velvet before going back to play the grand piano for their guests. Here solitude and natural spaces were harder to come by: Simone had to settle for that ‘common playground’, the Luxembourg Gardens.12

  Simone was a precocious reader and her family cultivated her curiosity with great care. Her father made an anthology of poetry for her, teaching her how to recite it ‘with expression’, while her mother enrolled her in one book subscription service or library after another.13 The year of Simone’s birth was the year in which French state schools were finally granted permission to prepare girls for the baccalauréat – the exam which allowed access to universities. But a girl of Beauvoir’s milieu did not go to a state school. In October 1913 (when Beauvoir was 5½ years old) it was decided that she would attend a private Catholic school, the Adeline Désir Institute (which she nicknamed Le Cours Désir). Although Beauvoir later recalled jumping for joy at the prospect of going, it was a black mark for a girl of her status to be educated in a school at all – those who had the means had governesses at home. She only attended two days a week – Wednesdays and Saturdays – and the rest of the time her schoolwork was supervised by her mother at home, with her father taking interest in her progress and successes.14

  Hélène missed her sister on school days and their relationship remained very close, partly because of a deep affection and partly because the girls were not allowed to socialize with anyone their mother had not vetted, and their mother did not think many of their peers passed muster. Georges and Françoise doted on their eldest but did not consider Hélène an individual in her own right. Hélène knew that her parents were proud of Simone: When Simone came first in her class, she was praised profusely by their mother; when Hélène also came first Françoise credited her success to the fact that she had it easier with an older sister to help her. Hélène recognized that ‘as the second-born girl, I was not really a welcome child. But Simone valorized me even though she could have crushed me by siding with our parents, and that’s why I remained attached to her. She was always nice, always defending me against them.’15 The family had few toys, but the sisters enjoyed playing imaginary games and confiding in each other.16

  Figure 2 Françoise de Beauvoir with her daughters, Hélène (left) and Simone (right).

  At the age of 7 Simone had her first private communion – beginning a practice that she would continue to observe three times a week, either with her mother or in the private chapel at the Cours Désir. The same year she wrote her first surviving story, Les Malheurs de Marguerite (The Misfortunes of Marguerite) – it was 100 pages long, written by hand in a little paperback notebook she received from her grandfather Brasseur.17

  Until the age of 8 there was only one other child that Simone thought worthy of her respect: her cousin, Jacques. He was six months older than her, but had had a boy’s education – and a good one, at that: she was dazzled by his confidence. One day he made her a stained-glass window, inscribed with her name. They decided that they were ‘married in the sight of God’ and she called him ‘her fiancé’.18 In hindsight Hélène wrote that if it weren’t for their isolation, Simone would not have assigned this childish fiancé so much importance – but for at least a decade she thought she really would marry him.

  The day Beauvoir entered the fourth-first form (at the age of 9) she met a second outsider, beyond her immediate family, who was worthy of her respect: someone whose life and death would have a profound effect on her. Elisabeth Lacoin – Zaza, as Beauvoir called her19 – was a bright and vivacious student at the Cours Désir, and after meeting at school the two developed an amicable rivalry. She introduced Simone to a new and delicious dimension of life: friendship. With Hélène, Simone had learned what it meant to say ‘we’; with Zaza she first tasted what it meant to miss someone.

  Hélène de Beauvoir described Zaza as highly strung – ‘like a sleek and elegant racehorse ready to bolt out of control’20 – but in Simone’s eyes she was a marvel. She played the piano beautifully, wrote elegantly, became womanly without losing her ‘boyish daring’, and had the nerve not only to admire Racine (as one should) but to hate Corneille (as one shouldn’t). She had subversive ideas, stuck her tongue out at her mother during a piano recital, and despite such displays of ‘personality’ she was greeted by her mother with love and affection.

  So along with the sweetness of friendship Beauvoir discovered a bitter aftertaste: comparison.

  She later realized that it was not a fair contest to compare her own life, and her own mother, with Zaza’s: ‘I felt myself from within, and I saw her from without.’21 By the age of 18 Beauvoir was using this distinction, which would go on to play a significant role in her work, between the ‘duality so often observed between the being that I am within myself and the being seen from the outside’.22

  With the benefit of hindsight, Beauvoir recognized that Zaza’s mother, Madame Lacoin – as Simone’s parents noted the day they started to encourage friendship with Zaza – was from a good Catholic family, made a good Catholic marriage, and was a good Catholic mother of nine. She was also wealthy, and secure enough in her status to tolerate Zaza’s defiance because she could afford to laugh at convention. The same could not be said for Madame de Beauvoir.

  If a childhood could be summarized in commandments, the two greatest commandments of Simone’s de Beauvoir’s were ‘Thou shalt not do what is improper’ and ‘Thou shalt not read what is unsuitable’. Françoise de Beauvoir had an unshakably rigid upbringing, with ‘provincial propriety and the morals of a convent-girl’.23 Her unwavering faith in God was accompanied by an equally impregnable zeal for etiquette: she ‘never dreamed of protesting in any way against an illogicality sanctioned by social conventions’.24 If this meant that a male friend, living ‘in sin’ with a woman, could be received in their house but the woman c
ould not: so be it. Françoise was, in her daughter’s words, ‘apt to confuse sexuality with vice’: she mistook desire itself for sin. Since convention allowed men indiscretions so did she; women bore the brunt of her dissatisfaction. She was sickened by ‘physical’ questions, and never discussed them with her daughters – Beauvoir had to learn about the surprises of puberty from her cousin Madeleine.

  Madeleine was older than Simone, and knew more about bodies and the ‘improper’ uses of them. One summer day in the country, she told Simone and Hélène about the changes their bodies would soon undergo: that there would be blood and bandages. She offered definitions for mysterious terms – ‘lover’, ‘mistress’ – arousing curiosity about the causal chain preceding childbirth. Emboldened by new knowledge, when the sisters returned to Paris and their mother, Hélène asked Madame de Beauvoir where babies came out. She said they came out of the anus, painlessly. In this and other instances, Françoise misled her daughters about their own bodies’ possibilities in shocking ways: Beauvoir would grow to view her body as ‘vulgar and offensive’.25

  Minds, on the other hand, Françoise did not neglect – she even learned English and Latin in order to better help her children. Georges and Françoise both placed a high value on education – a well-bred girl was a well-read one – but they were less than unified about religion. Her mother was as devoutly Catholic as her father was dogmatically atheist. This polarity was to have a profound impact on Beauvoir. Her father provided her with book after book, carefully curated selections from the great works of literature. Her mother provided her with religious literature and a living model of self-sacrificial Catholic devotion. She attended her daughters’ classes (which the Cours Désir allowed mothers to do until the girls were 10) and regularly took them to mass at Notre-Dame-des-Champs or Saint Sulpice. By her mid-teens, both the education and the Catholicism would prove to be sources of tension between Beauvoir and her parents. She later described her childhood as suspended between scepticism and faith, and credited this ‘imbalance’ with making her life ‘a kind of endless disputation’: it was, she thought, the main reason she became an intellectual.26

  When the First World War was declared in August of 1914 Georges and Françoise feared occupation, and the family stayed at La Grillère until they could determine whether it was safe to return to Paris. There Simone remembered canning and knitting for the war effort as ‘the only time in my life I did those sorts of feminine occupations with any pleasure’.27 The previous year Georges had been discharged from the army with a weak heart. But he was called to active service even so, and was at the front by October. Within weeks he had a heart attack so was again discharged from active duty and sent to a military hospital to recover. When he left the hospital for Paris in early 1915, he reassumed duty in the Ministry of War. Paris was beset by inflation, his income was miniscule, and his investments were paying hastily diminishing returns. His expenditure, however, did not adapt accordingly.

  During these years Simone’s beautiful girlhood moved into awkward adolescence. While Hélène’s healthy, doll-like features made her epithet ‘Poupette’ increasingly apt, Beauvoir ate little, looked sickly, and was diagnosed with scoliosis. The strictness of her mother’s moral code, the tightening of the family finances, and the rules of Paris under blackout provided her increasingly compulsive tendencies with other avenues for gaining her parents’ approval.

  She was becoming a dutiful daughter – but then her universe began to totter.

  2

  The Dutiful Daughter

  As a small child, Simone remembered her family with a rapturous sense of belonging.1 But from the age of 11 onwards, she began to feel increasingly confused by what was expected of her, and shocked that what she wanted to become was not what her family wanted her to be. They had raised her to be precocious, to read, to question: so why did they tell her to stop thinking, stop reading, stop questioning? She began to feel miserable and unhappy, in part because of her unanswered questions and in part because she was witnessing an unwelcome transformation in someone she loved. As a girl Beauvoir thought her father a rarity among men.2 No one she knew rivalled his wit, his brilliance, his wide reading, his ability to recite poetry or his passion in argument. He enjoyed acting and loved being the life of the party. But the family’s misfortune eventually cost him even his good humour. The boulevardier, the man about town, was déclassé and dispirited.

  After the First World War, Georges de Beauvoir’s already precarious fortunes took a turn for the worse. His investments (in pre-revolutionary Russian stocks) were now worthless, and suddenly the family had only his earnings to live on. Simone overheard vexed conversations about money: Françoise could not understand why Georges would not return to Law; Georges offered a retaliatory reminder that things would be different if her dowry had been paid. Their passion for each other was now mixed with bickering and spite. One night, when Simone returned home with Louise, her mother had a swollen lip.3 The truth was that Georges could not afford to return to legal practice: he didn’t have the capital to pay for office rent or furniture or any of the things needed to start the business, let alone the means to support the family while waiting for his business to become profitable. He was 40 and had already had two heart attacks: he lacked the health, the means and the will to do what Françoise wanted.

  Fortunately for Georges, the previously disgraced Gustave Brasseur (Françoise’s father) had a habit of landing on his feet and came to his son-in-law’s rescue. For the last two years of the war he had been the director of a shoe factory. He had secured military contracts for boots and shoes, making his business highly profitable, and so offered Georges the role of co-director.4 This was not a seemly profession for a Bertrand de Beauvoir, but he had no alternative but to accept. He treated his title as honorary and worked irregularly, only when it could not be avoided. After the war the demand for military boots died out, and so did the factory’s prosperity. Once again Georges was rescued by a family member, who offered him a role as a newspaper advertising salesman. Since he was neither a natural salesman nor a reliable worker, that work too was soon lost.

  From then on, he drifted from one role to the next. His daily habits cost him several jobs; despite his family’s straitened circumstances Georges rose at 10 a.m., went to the Stock Exchange around 11 a.m. to be seen, ate lunch, briefly visited his office, played bridge all afternoon, had an evening drink at the café and then went home for dinner.5 According to Hélène, Simone always spoke too charitably of their father; in Hélène’s view, ‘all the men in the Beauvoir family were lazy and did not like to work; the women are the strong ones who did it all and saved face for the men’.6 It seems unlikely that Beauvoir’s generous depiction of her father was motivated by genuine affection in view of what later years had in store, but it is possible that some kind of family loyalty moved her to paint him in flattering tones. A more compelling possibility is that Beauvoir knew, by the time she was writing her memoirs in the mid-1950s, that if she portrayed herself as a ‘bitter’ woman who was unsympathetic towards her own father, hostile readers would use her bitterness in ad feminam rebuttals of everything she stood for.

  For a year after the end of the First World War life continued much as usual in the boulevard du Montparnasse. But by the summer of 1919 the Beauvoir family could make no more economies. They moved to a flat in the rue de Rennes, number 71. On the fifth floor, it was dark and dirty, and had no lift, no running water, no bathroom and no central heating.7 Although their father still had a study in addition to the parental bedroom and reception rooms, Simone had no space to call her own: the sisters shared a room so tiny that the gap between their beds only allowed them to stand one at a time. They still had Louise, at first – the sixth floor of their building had rooms for the servants of its occupants. But soon after Louise was married and moved to the rue Madame and Françoise had to run her dilapidated apartment alone.8 At first she attributed this state of affairs to the difficulty of finding good help, but t
he truth was that the family couldn’t afford to look.

  This was a clear sign of the depths to which they had fallen: one of the ways of distinguishing between the haute bourgeoisie and the middle class was that the former always had at least one live-in servant; the latter never did. Françoise had always had a temper but in the rue de Rennes she lost it more and more frequently, while at the same time attempting to turn indignity into an opportunity for virtue. She began to show neglect and contempt for her body; the girls, too, wore worn and dirty dresses. But this was not a cause of shame in the mind of their mother, who had begun to calculate life in a different currency. They may have had little cash, but they had culture and piety – commodities of much greater value.

  As a woman Simone de Beauvoir would be remembered for her distinctive style, and as a novelist and memoirist her prose is textured with textiles: whether the material of a woman’s dress or the pattern of a Mexican blanket. But as girls, both Simone and Hélène remembered suffering from a ‘lack of elegance’ for much of their childhoods – in later life Simone referred to their situation as one of ‘semi-poverty’.9 There were other girls at the Cours Désir who were poorly dressed on account of their ‘decent poverty’ – after all, no respectable girl should dress in a way that could attract accusations of coquetry – but their classmates observed that ‘Simone de Beauvoir was dressed even worse’.10

  Even after she had escaped from its scarcity, Beauvoir’s childhood left her with a lasting sense of economy. At school, her notebooks became so crammed with tiny handwriting that her teachers complained. She was frugal not only with money and material things, but with herself: ‘I remained convinced that one must make use of everything, and of oneself, to the utmost’.11 She applied herself to her studies and simultaneously learned the ways of a good Catholic girl: her efforts were so successful that the chaplain praised her mother for ‘the radiant beauty of her soul’.12 She joined a lay religious order for children called the ‘Angels of the Passion’. In her own words: ‘I had made a definite metamorphosis into a good little girl. Right from the start, I had composed the personality I wished to present to the world; it had brought me so much praise and so many great satisfactions that I had finished by identifying myself with the character I had built up: it was my one reality’.13 But she irritated many of her classmates: she was a know-it-all with a healthy dose of holier-than-thou.