Tete-a-Tete Read Online Free Page B

Beaver,” he said to her gently. They found their seats. Beauvoir placed a thermos of coffee and a box of biscuits by the side of her desk. The topic was announced: “Liberty and Contingency.” She gazed a while at the ceiling, and soon her pen was flying across the page. When they came out, she looked for Maheu, but he had disappeared.
    The exams continued for several days. After the last one, Maheu called around at the Beauvoir family apartment, on the Rue de Rennes, and invited Simone for lunch. He was about to join his wife in Normandy, he told her, but when he got back, the little comrades were going to prepare for the orals together. Would she like to join them?
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    When he failed his agrégation the previous year, Sartre had been obliged to move out of his room at the Ecole Normale. He was now living in one of the student residences at the Cité Universitaire, on the southern edge of the city. On Monday July 8, 1929, Maheu turned up in the morning, as arranged, with Mademoiselle de Beauvoir. Sartre opened the door and greeted her politely, his pipe in his mouth. Paul Nizan looked at her dubiously through his tortoiseshell glasses.
    Beauvoir was taken aback by the filth of Sartre’s tiny student room. There were cigarette butts on the floor, and the air was thick with stale body odor and tobacco fumes. Books and papers were piled everywhere, and satirical sketches were stuck on the walls. They brought in a second chair for Beauvoir. The others took turns on Sartre’s chair, desk, and narrow bed. Beauvoir, who had prepared for this all weekend, gave a close reading of Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics, feeling as nervous as if she were taking the actual oral exam.
    At the end of the day, the men decided that Beauvoir needed a nickname. They teased her with various possibilities. Sartre wanted to call her Valkyrie. To him, she was like a Viking virgin warrior goddess. No, said Maheu. She was Beaver, le Castor. They clenched their fists about her head. It was official.
    They devoted two days to Leibniz, and decided that was enough; then Sartre set about explaining Rousseau’s Social Contract. Beauvoir proved by far the best at finding the flaws in Sartre’s arguments. Nizan frowned and chewed his nails. Maheu looked at Beauvoir with frank admiration. Sartre accused her of making him trot out everything he knew. But Sartre clearly loved imparting his knowledge, and did so with passion. He knew how to untangle complicated ideas and make them comprehensible and exciting. And while he did so, he had the other three in fits of delighted laughter. “More and more, his mind seems to me quite extraordinarily powerful,” Beauvoir wrote in her journal. “I admire him and also feel huge gratitude for the way he gives himself so generously.”
    The men did not hold themselves back in Beauvoir’s presence, and Beauvoir was often shocked by the things they said. But she had been rebelling for years against the stiflingly conventional world in which she had been brought up. Their defiance was a tonic.
    Their language was aggressive, their thought categorical, their judgments merciless. They made fun of bourgeois law and order; they had refused to sit the examination in religious knowledge…. On every possible occasion—in their speech, their attitudes, their gestures, their jokes—they set out to prove that men were not rarefied spirits but bodies of flesh and bone, racked by physical needs and crudely engaged in a brutal adventure that was life…. I soon understood that if the world these new friends opened up to me seemed crude, it was because theydidn’t try to disguise its realities; in the end, all they asked of me was that I should dare to do what I had always longed to do: look reality in the face. 15
    Beauvoir had never imagined that fierce intelligence could go along with such a sense of fun. When they stopped work, the men started singing, joking,