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JEAN-PAUL SARTRE THE WORDS TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY BERNARD FRECHTMAN GEORGE BRAZILLER, NEW YORK Copyright © 1964 by George Braziller, Inc. Originally published in French under the title Les Mots © 1964 by Librairie Gallimard All rights in this book are reserved. For information address the publishers George Braziller, Inc. 215 Park Avenue South, New York 3 Printed in the United States of America To Madame Z Part 1 READING A,oun d 1850, in Alsace, a schoolteacher with more children than he could afford was willing to become a grocer. This un• frocked clerk wanted compensation. Since he was giving up the schooling of minds, one of his sons would school souls. There would be a minister in the family; it would be Charles. Charles stole away; he preferred to take to the road in quest of a circus rider. His portrait was turned to the wall, and the family was forbidden to mention his name. Whose turn was it? Auguste hastened to imitate the paternal sacrifice. He went into busi• ness and did well for himself. There remained Louis, who had no particular bent. The father took this quiet boy in hand and in less than no 9 THE W0KDS time made a minister of him. Later, Louis carried obedience to the point of likewise begetting a minister, Albert Schweitzer, whose career is pub• lic knowledge. Meanwhile, Charles had not found his circus rider. His father's noble gesture had left its mark on him: all his life he retained a passion for the sublime and put his heart and soul into manufacturing great circumstances out of little events. He did not dream, as can be seen, of eluding the family vocation. He wished to de• vote himself to an attenuated form of spirituality, to a priesthood that would allow him circus riders. Teaching filled the bill: Charles chose to teach German. He defended a thesis on Hans Sachs, adopted the direct method, of which he later called himself the inventor, published, in collabo• ration with M. Simonnot, a highly esteemed Deutsches Lesebuch, and was rapidly promoted: Macon, Lyons, Paris. In Paris, he delivered a speech on Prize Day that had the honor of being printed separately: "Mr. Minister of Education, Ladies and Gentlemen, my dear children, you would never guess what I am going to speak about today! About music!" He excelled in oc• casional verse. He was in the habit of saying at family gatherings: "Louis is the most pious, Auguste the richest, and I the most intelligent." The brothers would laugh; the sisters-in-law would purse their lips. In Macon, Charles Schweitzer had married Louise Guillemin, daugh- 10 1 / Reading ter of a Catholic lawyer. She hated her wedding trip. He had carried her off before the end of the meal and rushed her into the train. At the age of seventy, Louise was still talking about the leek salad they had been served at a railway snack-bar: "He took all the white and left me the green." They spent two weeks in Alsace with• out leaving the table. The brothers told each other scatological jokes in the provincial dialect; from time to time, the pastor would turn to Louise and translate-them for her, out of Christian charity. It was not long before an obliging doctor pro• vided her with a certificate exempting her from conjugal intercourse and entitling her to a sepa• rate bedroom. She spoke of her headaches, got into the habit of lying down and began to hate noise, passion, enthusiasm, the whole rough, theatrical life of the Schweitzers. That lively and shrewd but cold woman thought straight but in• accurately, because her husband thought accur• ately but amiss. Because he was credulous and a liar, she doubted everything: "They claim the earth goes round. What do they know about it?" Surrounded by virtuous play-actors, she con• ceived an aversion for play-acting and virtue. That subtle realist who had strayed into a family of coarse spiritualists became Voltairian out of defiance, without having read Voltaire. Dainty and pudgy, cynical, sprightly, she became a pure negation. With a raising of eyebrows, with an 11 THE WORDS imperceptible smile, she reduced all the grand attitudes to dust, purely for her own sake, with• out anyone's realizing it. Her negative pride and self-centered rejection consumed her. She saw nobody, being too proud to court favor for first place and too vain to be content with second. "Know how to make people want you," she would say. She was wanted a great deal, then less and less, and, not seeing her, people finally forgot about her. She now almost never got up from her chair or bed. Naturalists and puritans—this combination of virtues is less rare than one thinks —the Schweitzers were fond of crude words which, though belittling the body in very Chris• tian fashion, manifested their broad acceptance of the natural functions. Louise was fond of understatement. She read lots of spicy novels, but it was not so much the plot that interested her as the transparent veils in which it was en• veloped: "It's daring, it's well written," she would say with a delicate air. "Gently, mortals, be discreet." That woman of snow thought she would die laughing when she read Adolphe Belot's Girl of Fire. She liked to tell stories about wedding-nights which always had an unhappy ending: sometimes the husband, in his brutal haste, would break his wife's neck against the headboard, and sometimes the young bride would be found in the morning, sheltering herself on top of the wardrobe, naked and mad. Louise 12 r 1 / Reading lived in semidarkness. Charles would enter her room, push open the blinds, light all the lamps; she would put her hand to her eyes and wail: "Charles! You're blinding me!" But her resist• ance did not exceed the limits of a merely formal opposition: her feeling for Charles was one of fear, of tremendous annoyance, at times too of friendship, provided he did not touch her. She always gave in to him as soon as he started shout• ing. He fathered four children upon her by sur• prise: a girl who died in infancy, two boys, and another girl. Out of indifference or respect, he allowed them to be brought up in the Catholic religion. Louise, though a non-believer, made be• lievers of them out of disgust with Protestantism. The two boys sided with their mother; she weaned them away from that bulky father; Charles did not even notice it. The elder, Georges, went to the Ecole Polytechnique; the younger, Emile, became a teacher of German. He intrigues me: I know that he remained a bachelor and that he imitated his father in everything, though he did not love him. Father and son ended by falling out: there were memorable reconciliations. Emile concealed his life; he worshipped his mother and, to the very end, continued to visit her secretly, without notice; he would cover her with kisses and caresses, then start talking about his father, first ironically, then in a rage, and would slam the door behind him when he left. She loved him, 13 THE WORDS I think, but he frightened her: those two un• couth, difficult men wearied her. She preferred Georges, who was never there. Emile died in 1927, mad with solitude: a revolver was found under his pillow and a hundred pairs of torn socks and twenty pairs of worn-out shoes in his trunks. Anne Marie, the younger daughter, spent her childhood on a chair. She was taught to be bored, to sit up straight, to sew. She was gifted: the family thought it distinguished to leave her gifts undeveloped; she was radiant: they hid the fact from her. Those proud, modest bourgeois were of the opinion that beauty was beyond their means or below their station; it was all right for a marquise or a whore. Louise's pride was utterly barren: for fear of making a fool of herself, she refused to recognize the most obvious qualities of her children, her husband, and herself. Charles was unable to recognize beauty in others: he con• fused it with health. Ever since his wife's illness, he had been consoling himself with robust, ideal• istic ladies who were ruddy and moustached and who had nothing wrong with them. Fifty years later, when turning the pages of a family album, Anne Marie realized that she had been beautiful. At about the same time that Charles Schweitzer met Louise Guillemin, a country doctor married the daughter of a rich landowner from Perigord U 1 / Reading and settled down with her on the dreary main street of Thiviers, opposite the pharmacy. The day after the wedding, it was discovered that the father-in-law did not have a penny. Dr. Sartre, outraged, did not speak a word to his wife for forty years. At the table, he expressed himself by signs; she ended by referring to him as "my boarder." Yet he shared her bed and, from time to time, made her pregnant. She gave him two sons and a daughter; these children of silence were named Jean-Baptiste, Joseph and Helene. Helene married, late in life, a cavalry officer who went mad. Joseph did his military service in the Zouaves and retired at an early age to the home of his parents. He had no occupation. Caught between the stubborn silence of one parent and the shouting of the other, he de• veloped a stammer and spent his life fighting words.

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