JEAN-PAUL SARTRE and Simone de Beauvoir, the dominant intellectuals of mid- century Paris, had an unusual relationship which they termed "a morganatic marriage". He also called it an "essential" love which would accommodate "contingent" love affairs, thus providing them with a range of emotional experiences. Sartre took full advantage of this proviso; de Beauvoir had fewer love affairs, but, on her own admission, she had difficulty curbing her jealousy.
Into this menage came Bianca Bienenfeld, a 17-year-old student at the Lyce'e Moliere in Paris where Simone de Beauvoir taught philosophy. She was a clever student (top of her class, said de Beauvoir), and by her own admission, dazzled by the beauty and "brilliant, piercing, bold intelligence" of her teacher, for whom she developed a passionate attachment.
For almost a year, Bianca did not meet Sartre, about whom she was curious and not a little jealous. When they did meet, he seduced her into a short affair, as was his wont with de Beauvoir's young friends. In this book, Bianca accuses de Beauvoir of pimping for Sartre, yet at the same time she describes their "threesome" as a love triangle.
In her own autobiography, de Beauvoir mentions only friendship, but then Bianca extracted a promise from both her and Sartre that her relationships with them would never be mentioned either verbally or in writing, an injunction which de Beauvoir obeyed except in her letters.
Bianca had some grounds for believing that they had formed a "threesome" because the two writers had already had such a relationship with another of de Beauvoir's students, Olga Kosakiewicz. Olga was part of a coterie of young followers which they called "the Family"; but she had a more privileged position than the others because of Sartre's passionate attachment to her. In fact, Olga was for a time a surrogate for the children they had decided to forgo.
Bianca sought the same prerogative, perhaps, for her part, unconsciously seeking parent substitutes. The affair with Sartre lasted less than a year, and despite knowing that he was having concurrent affairs with several other young women, she found its termination so traumatic that the pain never left her. For de Beauvoir, Bianca's obsession with the affair was tiresome, yet they remained in contact and on friendly terms until Bianca married Bernard Lamblin, one of Sartre's students and moved out of Paris during the war.
Bianca Lamblin wrote her book at the age of 70 in a blinding rage against the posthumous publication of de Beauvoir's Letters to Sartre. There, in black and white, she saw that the two had discussed her in what she considered terms of ridicule and contempt. The letters could certainly be regarded as hurtful by a 19-year-old; but, on the other hand, they were a private discussion about the melodramatic antics of a young friend - not very commendable but not unusual.
The sad thing is that Bianca carried the ferment of her rejection by Sartre, and an imagined desertion by de Beauvoir, into her own marriage, which, although she does not admit it here, was almost wrecked by it. She was not deserted by de Beauvoir; on her own admission, during the war years Bianca deliberately avoided her. They resumed a friendship after the war which lasted until de Beauvoir's death. Lamblim's book is full of such contradictions and often a lack of logic unexpected in a teacher of philosophy.
With the self-absorption of youth, she might not have been expected to understand the complex relationship that existed between de Beauvoir and Sartre, or to appreciate that she was coming between them. Indeed, she blames de Beauvoir for trying to hold on to him.
Her old-age anger against her former friend is the rage of the child against a thwarting, mother-figure, not the sober reflection of a mature woman. Sartre and to a lesser extent de Beauvoir are not without blame, but Lamblin, on reading the Letters, should have shrugged her shoulders and said "Ah, la folie de jeunesse".