de Beauvoir.^32 Sartre here revisits many of his recollections fromWo rd s
but with a less harsh view. His stepfather, for example, is now described as
“a very good man, indeed he was perfect.” Taken ironically, this, of course,
could have been his chief flaw in Sartre’s eyes, because the engineer felt
obliged to take charge of his stepson’s education, especially his exposure to
the sciences – a dimension neglected by Sartre’s humanist grandfather. As
he describes one critical instance, he and his stepfather were having a slight
altercation regarding a geometrical problem. When Sartre responded
insolently, his mother rushed from the kitchen to give him a couple of
slaps, which, Sartre insists, shocked his stepfather more than himself. But
the event sealed the new order of loyalty that reigned in that house (Film
16 – 17 ). The result was a significant modification of ties with his mother.
Henceforth his relations with her, though always close, would never
have the childlike simplicity that he had enjoyed before her remarriage.
The second break in his familial relations occurred with his grand-
father, occasioned by Sartre’s theft of money from his mother’s purse.
When the old man visited La Rochelle, Sartre expected an ally in the
controversy, but instead he found him joining the others in condemning
Sartre’s thievery. But it helped to hasten his return to Paris and enroll-
ment in the Lyce ́e Henri IV. Still, his and his family’s unqualified mutual
trust had been tainted. In sum, Sartre judges his years in La Rochelle the
most miserable of his life.^33
If Sartre encountered violence among his peers in La Rochelle, he also
learned solitude and came to recognize his ugliness in the eyes of some
students, particularly in the harsh rejection of his advances by a young
girl who dismissed him as “an ugly fool” (vilain sot) in front of his
companions (Ce ́r 369 ). Years earlier, his grandfather, as a surprise to
his wife and daughter, had insensitively taken the little boy to have his
“lovely ringlets” shorn, the locks that had strategically drawn attention
away from his bad eye. Though the source of his mother’s shock at the
return of grandfather and child was concealed from the boy, in retro-
spect, Sartre observes: the old man “had been entrusted with her little
wonder and had brought back a toad” (Words 66 ). It took a young
provincial girl to actually utter the word.
(^32) Sartre: un film.
(^33) SeeCe ́r 193. Even worse than his months in the German prisoner of war camp, so it seems,
which in retrospect were viewed as a period of fraternal comradery.
14 The childhood of a genius