Wagner and Wagner’s wife, Cosima, during Nietzsche’s visit to their
Swiss lakeside home at Triebschen, which he had been following in
Charles Andler’s multivolume biography of Nietzsche,^25 the young
Sartre reveals a good deal about his own relations with Simone Jollivet
as well as variations of the “family romance” with his mother and
grandfather or, again, with her and his stepfather.^26 When a respected
older friend, Mme. Morel, to whom he showed the story broke into tears
of laughter at the suffering of “poor Frederick,” Sartre seems to have
realized the work was a failure, and he did not pursue its publication
further after it was rejected by Gallimard.^27
This and the next two “novels” are important not so much for their
literary promise as for the image they project of Sartre’s philosophical
view at that time. Raymond Aron sees this interest in Nietzsche arising
from an essay Sartre wrote for Le ́on Brunschvicg’s seminar, where he
defended the view that Nietzsche was a philosopher in the full sense
rather than simply a literary man, as the professor was inclined to
contend.^28 Still, if we can believe his youthful epigram in theCarnets
Midi, Sartre shared Brunschvicg’s ambivalence about Nietzsche as
well.^29 More importantly, Aron insists that this is the first time Sartre
stated in a systematic manner his own ideas about contingency and
articulated his personalWeltanschauung.^30
The protagonist, Fre ́de ́ric, is depicted as a Normalien hired to give
lessons to the couple’s children. He gradually loses his original admir-
ation for the “great man” while developing an unrequited love for his
wife. The bittersweet ending anticipates a frequent Sartrean theme in his
(^25) Charles Andler,Nietzsche, sa vie et sa pense ́e, 6 vols. (Paris: Bossard, 1921 – 1934 ), especially
volumeii, which deals with “L’Idylle de Tribschen” on which Sartre’s novel is based. For
other possible sources at that time, seeEJ 193 ,n. 1.
(^26) SeeEJ 198 ,n. 1.
(^27) On Mme Morel, seeCe ́r 184.
(^28) Me ́moires 36.
(^29) In hisCarnets Midi, the young Sartre writes: “He [Nietzsche] is a poet who had the bad
fortune to be taken for a philosopher” (EJ 471 ). Still, Sartre continued to be interested in
Nietzsche, as Contat and Rybalka note: “One of Sartre’s most mysterious texts, one that no
one seems to have read (to date, it cannot be located and perhaps has been lost) is a long
study on Nietzsche undertaken at the time of theNotebooks for an Ethics( 1947 – 1948 ) and
which, according to what Sartre told us, was part of his ethical research” (EJ 194 ,n. 1 ). The
narratives in these initial “novels” reveal an approach to moral good and evil that is redolent
30 of both Spinoza and Nietzsche, as we shall see.
Me ́moires 36.
Philosophical reflections in a literary mode 29