Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

deserved.
    Merleau-Ponty, however, wanted Sartre to read his manuscript as a philosopher, not as a friend. He left it with hardly a word, and Sartre, who was as usual very busy, glanced over it in a cursory way and made congratulatory noises. This was not good enough for Merleau-Ponty. Sartre recalls the incident: ‘He discovered my bolthole, and confronted me there. I suddenly found him standing in front of me, smiling, the manuscript held out. “I agree with what you say,” I babbled. “I’m very glad,” he said without moving. “You should still read it,” he added patiently. I read, and I learned, and I ended fascinated by what I was reading.’
    Raymond Queneau, poet, novelist and philologist, was – with Merleau-Ponty – one of the most distinguished members of Sartre’s circle. Queneau, who was a senior editor at Gallimard, led a scholarly life oppressed by the most profound despair; yet this never seemed to affect his conviviality, his infectious laughter, his passion for jazz and his fascination with logic and mathematics.
    Michel and Zette Leiris were also part of the group. Michel Leiris was a novelist and ethnologist, while Zette managed the gallery of her brother-in-law, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso’s dealer, who lived with themsecretly during the Occupation. Their apartment, which had often concealed other Jews and members of the Resistance, was on theQuai des Grands Augustins, overlooking the Seine. Paintings by Picasso, Miró and Juan Gris hung on its walls above good French bourgeois furniture. They had many friends among the artists of the Left Bank, including André Masson, Giacometti and Picasso, whose studio was literally round the corner; and it was in their apartment that Picasso’s play
Desire Caught by the Tail
was first performed in a reading on 19 March 1944, over three years after it was written.
    Camus was the presenter, with a large stick to thump the floor to indicate changes of scenery, which he described. The play was evocative of ‘avant-garde works from the 1920s’;, as the list of characters shows. Michel Leiris had the main part – le Gros Pied. Other readers included Jean-Paul Sartre as le Bout-Rond, Raymond Queneau as l’Oignon, Jacques-Laurent Bost as le Silence, Zanie de Campan as la Tarte, Dora Maar as l’Angoisse Maigre and Simone de Beauvoir as la Cousine. Picasso and his friends put it on for their own amusement, but ‘
la fine fleur de l’intelligentsia parisienne
’ was breathless in anticipation of a major event. By seven o’clock the Leirises’ salon was packed.
    Picasso’s little comedy, almost an exercise in nostalgia, served only to underline the obvious. Surrealism as a movement was as good as over before the war, having virtually exhausted its potential to subvert received thought, and foundered on the political split when Aragon, Éluard and others felt that only Communism had the answer. One day in the Flore, Sartre asked Queneau, a former Surrealist, what he thought was left from the movement. ‘The impression of having had a youth,’ came the reply.
    In May 1944, shortly before the Liberation, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were sitting in the Flore when they heard a voice. ‘
C’est vous, Sartre?
’ They were confronted by a tough, shaven-headed character with a broken nose. This was Jean Genet, described by his biographer as ‘the Proust of marginal Paris’. Genet may have had a ‘distrustful, almost aggressive look’ as a result of the toughness of a life in reformatories, on the street as a male prostitute and in prison, but ‘his eyes knew how to smile, and his mouth could express the astonishment of childhood’.
    In the autumn of 1945, Simone de Beauvoir in a cinema queue on the Champs-Élysées met ‘a tall, blonde, elegant woman, with an ugly face bursting with life’. She assumed she was a woman of fashion but in factthis was the unpublished novelist Violette Leduc, who was living off her wits and strength as a ‘suitcase-bearer’, bringing back to Paris hefty cases full of butter and meat from Normandy, which she sold to black-market restaurants.
    A few days later, Violette Leduc came to Simone de Beauvoir in the Café de Flore bringing the manuscript of her novel,
L’Asphyxie
. On being advised to change the ending, she disappeared and did exactly as she was told. Beauvoir was so impressed with the final result that she passed it to Camus, who was then on the editorial committee at Gallimard, and he