ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL
213
"Say, this is really fine; write it down in your notebook ... if
only to have a good laugh at it later." Amused and ceremonious,
Sartre returns the little notebook in which, every day, his friend
Fredet records citations and thoughts inspired by his readings, his
discoveries, his passions. There, Montherlant, Proust, Hafiz coexist
with Saint-John Perse, Giraudoux, the Hebrew alphabet, cuneiform
characters, and hieroglyphs. In the euphoria of discovery and eclec–
tici$,m, Sartre will become an avid devotee of this notebook, which
he 'will read, reread, and copy, using it as a source for new ideas.
With Fredet, a surgeon's son, who shares with him the cultural ease
of the Paris bourgeoisie, Sartre seeks out the period's most avant–
garde texts .
2
This intense eclecticism, this absolute dilettantism continues
until the day when Colonna d'lstria, their memorable professor of
philosophy-"a cripple terribly shrunken and much smaller than I,"
according to Sartre - suggests the reading of
Time and Free Will
as
background material for a dissertation on duration. Sartre will never
become completely Bergsonian, and yet, during these years of in–
tellectual gestation, Bergson will indisputably play a crucial, in–
tense, revelatory role: "In Bergson, I immediately found a descrip–
tion of my own psychic life." After this discovery of an instrument far
more powerful and useful than any he has yet encountered, Sartre
will become a philosopher almost by necessity. He will attribute ex–
treme omnipotence to what he calls philosophy, even though his
definition of the term is strictly and exclusively personal, as he will
later admit: "What I at that time called 'philosophy' was actually
'psychology'."3 The reading of Bergson meant the discovery of a
center: philosophy would become his supreme tool, and an ideal
assistant allowing him simultaneous access to two privileged fields of
interest: the psychic life of the budding writer, and the fictional
world he was going to create. Secure in his possession of this magic
key, Sartre began to prepare for his entrance examination to the
Ecole Normale Superieure.
M . Colonna d'lstria had good reason to be proud: of the
twenty-eight candidates accepted by the ENS, half had passed
through his hands in the
khiigne
of Louis-Ie-Grand . "I am delighted to
2. Interviews with Rene Fredet, March 23 , and June 29, 1983.
3. Paul Arthur Schilpp, "Interview with Sartre ,"
The Philosophy ofJean-Paul Sarlre
(La
Salle, Ill. , Open Court , 1982), pp. 5-51.
