Annie
Cohen-SolaI
THE YOUNG SARTRE
In this typical adolescent friendship , possessive and ex–
clusive, who could have guessed , looking at the odd couple, Gaul
and dandy, that it was Nizan, independent and sly, who had hurt
Sartre? Who would have thought that Sartre, with his verbal ease
and his mocking aggressiveness, experienced the pain of rejection?
In a complete reversal of roles , Sartre pulls out all the stops, while
Nizan buries himself in his books, deriving all the verbal ag–
gressiveness, the laughter, the scorn, and the cynical power he
formerly lacked, seduced by Sartre's new and provoking brutality.
One is silent , the other one vociferous , one elegant, the other slov–
enly , one calm , the other violent, and so it will go until 1927 . Nizan
relishes Sartre's taking on the whole world, playing the role of the
Grand Inquisitor. They take interminable walks through Paris.
They encounter Rastignac in Montmartre , or Proust at the Rond–
point des Champs-Elysees, experiencing, as if they were characters
in novels, the Quai d'Orsay, Sainte-Chapelle, the avenues of the
Bois de Boulogne. "We would walk through Paris," Sartre recalled,
"like two supermen taking advantage of their adolescence to perfect
their myths and theories. At times, a third superman would join us ,
some friend or other: Nizan and I knew he didn't have a trace of the
superman, but out of kindness we let him think he did .. . . Actu–
ally, we loved humanity . . . . Paradoxically, the notion of the
superman had fostered in us the idea of equality . We hadn't yet
become average men, I thought, like those vast crowds we, at times,
joined . They remained inferior to us, but we were profoundly equal
to each other, and to all the other supermen of the world, whom we
did not know, and who did not know us, but who must have surely
existed in the provinces , or somewhere. So we were members of a
club of equals of which we knew only two members , ourselves . In a
way, these ideas were the result of both a slightly Nietzschean aris–
tocratism and the vaguely egalitarian notion of a society that did not
exist."1
Editor 's Note: From SARTRE: A LIFE by Annie-Cohen-Solal. Copyright
©
1985
by Annie Cohen-Sola! , tra nslation
©
1987 by Random House, Inc. From the forth–
comin g book SARTRE: A LIFE to be published by Pa ntheon , a divisio n of Ran–
dom H ouse, Inc.
1. " M ateriaux autobiographiques." p . II .
