[...] Forgetting that I had been immediately shocked by the middle-class banality of Jacques’ liaison, I blamed myself for having condemned him in the light of purely abstract principles. In fact, I was lost in a dark tunnel, battling against shadows, brandishing the useless sword of an ideal I no longer believed in against the dead past, against Jacques’ own phantasmal shade. But if I abjured this ideal, what other yardstick could I use? In order to protect my love, I swallowed my pride: why should I insist on Jacques being different from other men? The only thing was, if he was the same as all the others – and I knew that in many respects he was inferior to a great number of his sex – what point was there in putting him above the rest? My indulgence was finally turning to indifference.

I returned to Paris, dressed in heavy mourning, wearing a hat swathed in black crêpe georgette; but all the chestnuts were in flower, the tarmac was soft underfoot, and I could feel through my dress the gentle force of the sun. The fair was on in the Esplanade des Invalides: I strolled about there with my sister and Gégé, eating nougat that made our fingers sticky. They met a fellow art-student who took us off to her studio to listen to her records and drink port. What a lot of pleasure for one afternoon! Every day brought me something new: the smell of oil-paint in the Salon des Tuileries; at the Européen, there was Damia, whom I went to hear with Mallet; there were walks with Zaza and Lisa; the blue air of summer, and the sun. I was still filling the pages of my diary: they spoke unendingly of my new-found happiness.

Sometimes we would abandon the Cité for Nizan’s study. He lived with his wife’s parents in a house in the rue Vavin whose façade was covered with glazed earthenware tiles. On the walls of his study there was a large portrait of Lenin, a Cassandre poster and the Venus of Botticelli; I admired his ultra-modern furniture and his very carefully chosen books. Nizan was the most go-ahead member of the trio; he had already had a book published, belonged to various literary circles and had joined the Communist Party; he introduced us to Irish literature and the new American novelists. He was abreast of all the latest fashions in the arts, and even ahead of them. He took us to the dreary Café de Flore ‘to do the old Deux Magots in the eye’, he said, gnawing at his fingernails like a mischievous rat. He was working on a pamphlet attacking ‘official’ philosophies, and was also engaged in writing a book on ‘Marxist Wisdom’. He rarely laughed, but often treated us to his ferocious lop-sided smile. His conversation delighted me, but I found him difficult to talk to because of his air of disdainful abstraction.

How was it that I managed to fit in with them so quickly? Herbaud had taken care not to shock me, but when they were all together the three ‘comrades’ didn’t pull their punches. Their language was aggressive, their thought categorical, their judgements merciless. They made fun of bourgeois law and order; they had refused to sit the examination in religious knowledge: I had no difficulty in agreeing with them on that score. But I was still, in many respects, the dupe of bourgeois humbug; they jabbed a pin in every inflated idealism, laughed high-minded souls to scorn–in fact, every kind of soulfulness, the ‘inner life’, the marvellous, the mysterious, and the precious all fell under their lashing contempt; 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 bothes of flesh and bone, racked by physical needs and crudely engaged in a brutal adventure that was life. A year before, they would have scared me; but I had made much progress since the beginning of the academic year and I very often felt the need of stronger meat than that to which I was accustomed. I soon understood that if the world these new friends opened up to me seemed crude, it was because they didn’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. It did not take me long to make up my mind to do so.

‘He never stops thinking,’ Herbaud had told me. This didn’t mean that he cogitated over formulas and theories all the time: he had a horror of pedantry. But his mind was always alert. Torpor, somnolence, escapism, intellectual dodges and truces, prudence, and respect were all unknown to him. He was interested in everything and never took anything for granted. Confronted with an object, he would look it straight in the face instead of trying to explain it away with a myth, a word, an impression, or a preconceived idea: he wouldn’t let it go until he had grasped all its ins and outs and all its multiple significations. He didn’t ask himself what he ought to think about it, or what it would have been amusing or intelligent to think about it: he simply thought about it. Thus he was always the despair of the aesthetes who were all yearning for elegant elaboration. A couple of years ago, having heard him give an analysis of a philosophical work, Riesmann, who was dazzled by Baruzi’s verbal quibbling, had told me sadly: ‘He has no soul!’ That same year, giving a talk on ‘classification’ his scrupulous honesty had put our patience to the test: but in the end he had compelled our interest in his subject. He always intrigued people who were not afraid of something new, for though he never tried to be original, he never fell into the trap of conformity. The freshness and dogged tenacity of his perceptions grasped the very essence of things in all their lively profusion. How cramped my little world seemed beside this exuberantly abundant universe! Later, it was only certain madmen who could inspire in me a similar sense of humility when they discovered in a rose-petal a tangle of murky intrigues.

‘From now on, I’m going to take you under my wing,’ Sartre told me when he had brought me the news that I had passed. He had a liking for feminine friendships. The first time I had ever seen him, at the Sorbonne, he was wearing a hat and talking animatedly to a great gawk of a woman student who I thought was excessively ugly; he had soon tired of her, and he had taken up with another, rather prettier, but who turned out to be rather a menace, and with whom he had very soon quarrelled. When Herbaud had told him about me, he had wanted to make my acquaintance at once, and now he was very pleased to have me all to himself; for my part, I was beginning to feel that time which was not spent in his company was time wasted. During the fortnight of the oral examinations we hardly ever left one another except to sleep. We went to the Sorbonne together to sit the examinations and to listen to our fellow-students. We went out with the Nizans. We would have drinks at the Balzac with Aron who was doing his military service in the Meteorological Corps and with Politzer who by now had joined the Communist Party. But usually we went about alone together. At the second-hand bookstalls by the Seine Sartre bought me copies of Pardaillan and Fantomas which he far and away preferred to the Correspondence of Rivière and Fournier; in the evenings he would take me to see cowboy films, to which I brought all the enthusiasm of a neophyte, for until then I had been mainly interested in abstract cinema and art films. We would talk for hours sitting in pavement cafés or drinking cocktails at the Falstaff.

We used to talk about all kinds of things, but especially about a subject which interested me above all others: myself. Whenever other people made attempts to analyse me, they did so from the standpoint of their own little worlds, and this used to exasperate me. But Sartre always tried to see me as part of my own scheme of things, to understand me in the light of my own set of values and attitudes. He listened without enthusiasm to what I told him about Jacques; for a woman who had been brought up as I had been, it would perhaps be difficult to avoid marriage: but he hadn’t a good word to say for it. Whatever happened, I would have to try to preserve what was best in me: my love of personal freedom, my passion for life, my curiosity, my determination to be a writer. Not only did he give me encouragement but he also intended to give me active help in achieving this ambition. Two years older than myself – two years which he had turned to good account – and having got off to a better start much earlier than I had, he had a deeper and wider knowledge of everything. But what he himself recognized as a true superiority over me, and one which was immediately obvious to myself, was the calm and yet almost frenzied passion with which he was preparing for the books he was going to write. In the past I had always despised children who played croquet or worked with less intensity than I did: here was someone in whose eyes my frantic determination seemed weak and timid. And indeed when I compared myself with him, how lukewarm my feverish obsessions appeared! I had thought I was an exceptional person because I couldn’t imagine living and not writing: but he only lived in order to write.

He certainly had no intention of leading the life of a professional liteiary man; he detested formalities and literary hierarchies, literary ‘movements’, careers, the rights and duties of the man of letters, and all the stuffy pompousness of life. He couldn’t reconcile himself to the idea of having a profession, colleagues, superiors, of having to observe and impose rules; he would never be a family man, and would never even marry. With all the romanticism of the age, and of his twenty-three years, he dreamed of making tremendous journeys: in Constantinople, he would fraternize with the dock-workers; he would get blind drunk with pimps and white-slavers in sinks of iniquity; he would go right round the world, and neither the pariahs of India nor the monks of Mount Athos nor the fishermen of Newfoundland would have any secrets from him. He would never settle down anywhere, and would never encumber himself with possessions: not merely in order to keep his freedom of movement, but in order to prove how unnecessary possessions are. All his experiments were to benefit his writing, and he would sweep aside all experiences which would in any way detract from it. We were arguing on firm ground here. I admired, in theory at any rate, the systematic derangement of the senses, dangerous living, lost souls, all excesses – drink, drugs, and sex. Sartre held that when one has something important to tell the world, it is criminal to waste one’s energies on other occupations. The work of art or literature was, in his view, an absolute end in itself; and it was even – though he never said so, I was sure he believed this – the be-all and end-all of the entire universe. He shrugged disdainful shoulders at all metaphysical disputes. He was interested in social and political questions; he sympathized with Nizan’s position; but as far as he was concerned, the main thing was to write and the rest would come later. Besides, at that period he was much more of an anarchist than a revolutionary; he thought society as it was then was detestable, but he didn’t detest detesting it; what he called his ‘opposition aesthetics’ admitted quite openly the existence of imbeciles and knaves, and even required their presence in the world: if there was nothing to attack and destroy, the writing of books wouldn’t amount to much.

Apart from a few minor differences, I found a great resemblance between his attitude and my own. There was nothing worldly in his ambitions. He reproved me for making use of religious vocabulary, but he, too, was really seeking ‘salvation’ in literature; books brought into this deplorably non-essential world a necessity which redounded to the credit of the author; certain things had to be said by him, and were therefore an entire justification for the means he used to express them. He was still young enough to feel emotional about his future whenever he heard a saxophone playing after his third martini; but if it had been necessary, he would have been willing to remain anonymous: the important thing was that his ideas should prevail, and not that he should enjoy any personal success. He never told himself – as I had sometimes done – that he was ‘somebody’, that he had a certain ‘value’ or place in the world; but he believed that important truths – perhaps the Truth itself – had been revealed to him, and that he had a mission to teach those truths to society. In the notebooks he showed me, in his conversations and even in his University writings he persistently put forward a system of ideas whose originality and coherence astounded his friends. He had given a detailed outline of them on the occasion of an ‘Investigation’ carried out among University students by Les Nouvelles Littéraires. ‘We have received some remarkable observations from J.-P. Sartre,’ wrote Roland Alix in an introduction to Sartre’s reply, of which long extracts were printed; indeed, a whole philosophy was brought to light in it, a philosophy which had hardly any connexion with what we were being taught by the ‘official’ philosophers at the Sorbonne:

[...] Another thing that impressed me about them was that they had a fairly precise idea of the sort of books they wanted to write. I had gone on fatuously declaring that I ‘would tell all’; it was at once too much and too little. I was alarmed to discover that the novel sets countless problems whose existence I had not even suspected.