Tete-a-Tete by Hazel Rowley

Beauvoir caught the express from Bordeaux to Marseille.
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    She stopped at the top of the flight of steps at the St. Charles station, and looked down at the scene below. “I was in Marseille—alone, empty-handed, cut off from my past and everything I loved. I stood staring at this vast unknown city, where I now had to make my own way, unaided, from one day to the next.” 32
    Beauvoir embraced her solitude with the fervor of a young monk. She got herself a room within easy walking distance of her school, the Lycée Montgrand, near the Old Port. In the mornings she would stride through the ornate front gates, march into the staff room without greeting anyone, and sit in a corner with a book.
    In her spare time, she went on long walking trips. In her memoirs, she describes this as obsessive behavior. “If I had given up even one trip through indifference or to satisfy a mere whim, if I had once asked myself what the point of it all was, I would have destroyed thewhole carefully contrived edifice.” 33 The exhausting rambles preserved her from “boredom, regret, and several sorts of depression.”
    Every Thursday and Sunday, whenever she did not have to teach, she left home at dawn in an old dress and canvas espadrilles, with a Guide Bleu and a Michelin map in her backpack, and walked as much as forty kilometers a day. She did not consider joining one of the town’s walking groups. She never bought herself decent walking shoes. By herself, she climbed steep hills, strode along copper-colored cliffs, and clambered down gullies. Older female colleagues warned her that she could be raped. She pooh-poohed this “spinsterish obsession,” and continued to hitch rides in passing cars.
    One hot afternoon, she was trudging down a dirt road, and two young men pulled up. They said they would give her a lift as far as the next town. They drove a little way, then pulled off the main road, mumbling something about a shortcut. She realized they were heading for the only deserted spot in the area. When they slowed down at a crossing, she opened the door and threatened to jump out. They stopped and let her go. It was not the only occasion on which she extricated herself from a difficult situation just in time.
    When her sister visited in November (Sartre paid her fare), Beauvoir marched her over the mountains. Poupette developed bad blisters, but did not dare complain. On one famous walk, she became feverish. Beauvoir finished the trek alone, leaving her sister shivering for several hours in a gloomy waiting room until a bus took her back to Marseille. It turned out to be the onset of influenza.
    One brave colleague tried to pierce Beauvoir’s solitary carapace. In The Prime of Life, published in 1960, Beauvoir called her “Madame Tourmelin,” but otherwise she made no attempt to disguise her. The woman’s real name was Suzanne Tuffreau. 34 She was one of the English teachers at the school, and with her brown hair, fresh pink complexion, thin lips, and tortoiseshell glasses, she looked, to Beauvoir, like an Englishwoman. She was thirty-five, twelve years older than Beauvoir, and crazy about Katherine Mansfield—both her work and her life. Beauvoir noticed that Tuffreau did not seem nearly as passionate about her husband, who was recovering from tuberculosis in a distant clinic.
    Suzanne Tuffreau introduced Beauvoir to her friends. They often ate together, went to concerts and films, and, one weekend, made an excursion to Arles. Thanks to her new friend, Beauvoir moved into the room above Tuffreau’s apartment—charming digs on the elegant Avenue du Prado, with a balcony overlooking the rooftops and plane trees. Tuffreau kept badgering Beauvoir to let her come hiking. Finally Beauvoir consented.
    She appeared complete with rucksack, studded shoes, and all the proper equipment, and tried to make me keep to the Alpinist’s pace, which is very slow and steady. But we were not