Henry de Montherlant’s Les Jeunes Filles and Simone de Beauvoir’s L’Invitée - Part 2
A summary of the two novels - the second of three parts
The Girls and She Came to Stay
The Girls is composed of four sequential novels, Les Jeunes Filles (The Girls) (1936), Pitié pour Les Femmes (Pity for Women) (1936), Le Démon du Bien (The Hippogriff) (1937), and Les Lépresuses (The Lepers)(1939).[1] Through a series of letters, diary entries and traditional narrative passages, the novels follow the relationship between Pierre Costals, a thirty-three year old successful novelist and confirmed bachelor,[2] with four unmarried young women: Andrée Hacquebaut, a thirty-year old intellectual from Loiret; Thérèse Pantevin, a twenty-five year old religious devotee from Normandy; Solange Dandillot, a twenty-one year old Parisian bourgeoise; and Rhadidja, a sixteen-year-old Moroccan. Costals’ relationship with Thérèse is purely epistolary and religious in overtone. They never meet and she is placed in a lunatic asylum by her family when she finally attempts to visit Costals. Andrée’s persistent, and mostly unreciprocated, letters to Costals result in a series of tragi-comic meetings with Costals in Paris, ending in a missed rendezvous that leads Costals to terminate their relationship. Costals courts and then seduces Solange, toys with marriage, despite his abhorrence for the institution and, increasingly, for Solange, but finally ends the relationship. Solange marries a provincial businessman, but when she proposes a resumption of her sexual relationship with Costals she is brutally rebuffed. Costals has a physically intense, paying relationship with Rhadidja, which he ends upon discovering she has leprosy. The Girls concludes with Costals resuming his bachelor life in Paris, having successfully repelled the hippogriff[3] on each occasion it mounted an attack.
She Came to Stay is set in the build-up to WWII, although this setting plays a minor role until the final chapter when Pierre and Gerbert are called up for military service, leaving Françoise and Xavière together in Paris.[4] The principal characters are: Françoise,[5] a script editor, who lives independently in a Parisian hotel;[6] Pierre Labrousse,[7] a thirty-year old successful actor and dramatist; Gerbert, a young actor in Pierre’s play Julius Caesar; Elisabeth,[8] sister of Pierre and an upcoming painter; and Xavière,[9] a sixteen year old girl from Rouen. Françoise and Pierre are in a relationship, but have granted each other sexual freedom.[10] They invite Xavière to move to Paris and live at their expense in the same hotel as Françoise. Elisabeth is having an affair with Claude, a married man who refuses to leave his wife, leading Elisabeth to strike up an unsatisfactory sexual relationship with Guimiot, an actor in Julius Caesar directed by Pierre. Xavière and Pierre are attracted, although their relationship remains unconsummated, but nonetheless arouses intense insecurity in Françoise about the solidity of her relationship with Pierre.[11] When Pierre discovers Xavière has allowed Gerbert to take her virginity, he feels a strong sense of betrayal. Françoise and Gerbert have a sexual affair on a walking holiday together.[12] During their absence, Pierre convinces Xavière that her relationship with Gerbert should be the focus of her attention. On Françoise’s return, Pierre confides his real reason for desisting is his disgust at Xavière’s betrayal. After Pierre and Gerbert have left Paris for military service, Xavière reads Françoise’s correspondence with Gerbert and Pierre, which reveal Françoise’s affair with Gerbert and Pierre’s true motive for ending his relationship with Xavière. In fury, she breaks with Françoise, claiming she is responsible for Pierre abandoning her. The novel ends with Françoise’s killing Xavière by turning on the gas in her room. “She had at last made a choice. She had chosen herself.”[13]
[1] All references are to The Girls, translated by Terence Kilmartin, Pan Books, 1987. No separate reference is made in this article to the four individual titles. For an illuminating explanation of the titles of the four novels, see: Bulwa, supra, 31.
[2] Costals had a son from a previous affair, with whom he has a mutually affectionate relationship, but keeps the son’s existence concealed from Solange.
[3] The hippogriff is a word invented by Costals to refer to a chimera that represents unmarried women’s incessant demands upon men for marriage (The Girls 151-52).
[4] For an opposing analysis of the significance of the imminent onset of war, see: Christine Everley, “War and Alterity in ‘L’Invitée,’” Simone de Beauvoir Studies, vol. 13, Brill, 1996, pp. 137–50. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/45170462. Beauvoir has stated the departure of Pierre and Gerbert for military service was a plot device, albeit unsatisfactory, to leave Françoise and Xavière alone (The Prime of Life 273).
[5] “Most often the viewpoint I adopted was that of Francoise, whom I had endowed with my own experiences, though making important changes and transpositions” (The Prime of Life 269).
[6] On settling in Paris in 1938, Beauvoir and Sartre lived in the same Parisian hotel but on separate floors, “thus we had all the advantages of a shared life without any of its inconveniences” (The Prime of Life, 251).
[7] In The Prime of Life, Beauvoir says she based Pierre on Sartre which, “by a combination of mental blocks and self-criticism,” led to Pierre possessing, “less depth or truthful characterization than any of the novel’s other protagonists” (273).
[8] See Beauvoir’s analysis of the character of Elisabeth in The Prime of Life, at pp. 271-72.
[9] “The character of Xavière in She Came to Stay was composed to some extent with her [Olga Kosakiewicz] in mind, but even so underwent a systematic reconstruction” (The Prime of Life 194). Olga Kosakiewicz (1915-1983) was a student and lover of Beauvoir.
[10] Sartre and Beauvoir famously concluded a “pact of freedom” from the early 1930s (see Moi, Simone de Beauvoir (237-40).
[11] This element of the novel is based on a similarly fraught situation between Sartre and Beauvoir occasioned by their triangular relationships in the 1930s with Olga. Beauvoir relates the strains of the triangular relationship in The Prime of Life, notably at pp. 205-209.
[12] The affair between Françoise and Gerbert was based on Beauvoir’s affair with the philosopher Jacques Bost while he was in a relationship with Olga. Beauvoir makes no reference to her affair with Bost in The Prime of Life but it was revealed in Beauvoir’s posthumously published correspondence with Sartre (Moi, The Making of an Intellectual Woman, 11-12, 18-19, 26).
[13] All quotations from L’Invitée are from She Came to Stay, translated by Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse, Penguin Books, 1966.