A Disgraceful Affair: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bianca Lamblin [Hardcover]

Bianca Lamblin (Author), Julie Plovnick (Translator), Bianca Yalom (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1996 | ISBN-10: 1555532519 | ISBN-13: 978-1555532512 | Edition: 1ST

In this intimate memoir, Bianca Lamblin tells the story of her menage a trois with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and their abandonment of her, a Jew, at the onset of World War II.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this tell-all memoir, Lamblin evens the score between herself and renowned French thinkers-and lovers-de Beauvoir and Sartre. Their menage a trois-begun in 1938 when Lamblin was a 17-year-old student of de Beauvoir (who was 29)-ended when Sartre dismissed her, at de Beauvoir's instigation, right after the outbreak of WW II. The two women maintained a 40-year friendship after the war, but later Lamblin became enraged at de Beauvoir's humiliating account of their threesome in Letters to Sartre, published posthumously, although Lamblin's real name was not used. She also declares the two failed to appreciate the danger to which she was exposed during the war because she was a Jew, and she takes issue with many of the details in Deirdre Bair's Simone de Beauvoir. Whatever one may conclude from the affair, this memoir is fueled by spite rather than insight. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Arguably moving on the one hand and controversial on the other, this work involves two of the most prominent French thinkers of this century, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. It is the story of Bianca Bienenfeld, a 17-year-old student who was seduced by her philosophy professor, de Beauvoir, and then passed on to de Beauvoir's partner/lover Sartre. The three lived in a menage 'a trois between 1939 and 1940, when the relationship ended and the teenager was abandoned. The shock of being let down wasn't easy for the Jewish youngster to bear, especially during those menacing and politically dangerous years. Following the war, Bianca Lamblin, now married, resumed a platonic friendship with de Beauvoir. The former teacher and student met every month for 40 years. After de Beauvoir's death, Bianca was in for yet another disappointment. In the posthumously published Letters to Sartre and War Journal, de Beauvoir contemptuously ridiculed Louise Vedrine, a pseudonym for Lamblin, who found her portrait by someone she thought a close friend vulgar, full of hypocrisy, and upsetting. Always candid, this exceptional account brings to light some intimate?and not too surprising?aspects of the life of Sartre and de Beauvoir. Recommended for large collections.?Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Northeastern; 1ST edition (March 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555532519
• ISBN-13: 978-1555532512
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #563,600 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Professeurs Dearest!, June 4, 2000

By 

Charles S. Houser (Binghamton, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Disgraceful Affair: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bianca Lamblin (Hardcover)

On the surface, A Disgraceful Affair is Bianca Lamblin's account of her brief triangular relationship with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre and how that affair affected her life long after Sartre's, then Beauvoir's, romantic interest waned. Its carefully guarded sentences reveal a woman who has been deepley hurt by her mentors but who is being painstakingly careful in her effort to be fair as she sets the record straight. Readers looking for juicy tidbits will need to look elsewhere (Lamblin describes Sartre as a charming wooer but an unskilled lover, and does not waste ink elaborating).

If the reader takes the facts as the author presents them--and there is nothing implausible or erractic in what Lamblin relates--what unfolds is a brief, startlingly clear reflection on what it means to evolve one's own workable philosophy of life based on the cards one is dealt and the living examples one has to choose from. After her rejection by her existentalist mentors, Lamblin consciously chose a conventional, slightly leftist, life. Her mentors' narcissism seems to have turned her away from a life focused on pursuing celebrity and getting published (aside from a few academic philosophy articles, A Disgraceful Affair is Lamblin's only published work, one she didn't begin writing until she was in her seventies and all the key figures in the story had died). Unlike her mentors, she chose to marry and have children, decisions that disturbed and disgusted Beauvoir.

Those looking for portraits of Sartre and Beauvoir should know that Beauvoir (unfortunately called "the Beaver" throughout the book, a nickname that might have been better left untranslated) is the more fully realized. Lamblin renewed her relationship with Beauvoir after the War and continued to have platonic meetings with her for the rest of Beauvoir's life. Lamblin's depiction of Beauvoir's life after Sartre's death is one of profound pathos and emotional disenfranchisement. By that point, Beauvoir's alcoholism was quite advanced and the reader senses that the great thinker and prolific writer's death must have been a lonely, troubled, and confusing end indeed.

The reader should be warned that there is a sort of craftlessness to Lamblin's writing. For me, this added to the sense of authenticity of what she was attempting to communicate. She often tells the reader what she is going to say--or why she is relating a particular incident--before launching into her account of an event. This tends to pull the reader up short. As off-putting as this might be, for me it further convinced me of the author's essential guilelessness and I ultimately judged this practice as awkward but not offensive. In addition, I suspect that Julie Plovnick's translation of the French original is a little wooden and literal-minded (for instance, she translates "lucide" as "lucid" in a context where I suspect "perceptive" might have been the intended meaning).

Readers interested in the way people, and especially women, make meaning of the troubles life throws their way will enjoy this book. Other books along this line that I have enjoyed are Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, The Liar's Club by Mary Karr, and A Loving Gentleman: The Love Story of William Faulkner and Meta Carpenter by Meta Carpenter Wilde and Orin Borsten.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tangled up with Sartre and Simone., August 10, 2004

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Disgraceful Affair: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bianca Lamblin (Hardcover)

Although I'm not usually interested in other people's sexual affairs, reading this telling memoir of the unconventional relationship shared by French existentialists, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and her protege, Bianca Bienenfeld, was intriguing. Lamblin was a sixteen-year-old student at the Lycee Moliere when she was seduced by her professor, de Beauvoir ("the Beaver"), who was twenty-nine. Their menage a trois began the following year, in 1938, when de Beauvoir introduced Lamblin to her partner/lover, Sartre, who was thirty-three (p. 170), and ended in 1940 when, at de Beauvoir's instigation, Sartre abandoned Lamblin. Lamblin was a Jewish teenager at the time, and the breakup occurred on the eve of WWII. However, it was only after she was later humiliated by the 1990 posthumous publication of de Beauvoir's LETTERS TO SARTRE, in which de Beauvoir ridiculed Lamblin and her "pathetic nature" (p. 7), and exposed their intimate relationship to the world, that Lamblin wrote this account of "the threesome." As the saying goes, "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," and this is a work of "bitter memories" (p. 102), written by a woman dismissed by the two lovers who nearly destroyed her life.

De Beauvoir acknowledged to Sartre that their liason with Lamblin filled her with remorse for the suffering it caused her protege. "She's the only person to whom we've really done harm, but we have harmed her," she wrote, "she weeps all the time--she wept three times during dinner, and she weeps at home when she has to read a book or go to the kitchen to eat . . . She's terribly unhappy" (p. 133). At one time Lamblin also admitted to de Beauvoir that despite the fact that she "suffered greatly" because of her liason with de Beauvoir and Sartre, they nevertheless gave her philosophy and "a broader view of the world" (p. 173). However, with time, Lamblin's perspective shifted, and sadly she concludes her memoir noting that, in the end, "Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir did me only wrong" (p. 173). Stated differently, Lamblin's memoir is a testament that her mentors taught her the cruelty of love.

Lamblin's memoir also offers a fascinating, first-hand glimpse into the infamous "morganatic marriage" (p. 27) or "essential" relationship between de Beauvoir and Sartre: no marriage (too boring), no children (too demanding), and freedom to live their own lives and pursue their own sentimental and sexual adventures. Their only promise was to tell each other everything without lies (p. 23). She contrasts this unconventional relationship against her own subsequent marriage to Bernard Lamblin. Although, on a personal level, Lamblin may succeed in exposing her former lovers in a very different light than what they probably would have preferred, her memoir fails in the end to diminish the intellectual stature of de Beauvoir and Sartre.

G. Merritt

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Castor's castoff, September 24, 2000

By 

"laclay" (Boulder, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Disgraceful Affair: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bianca Lamblin (Hardcover)

A tragically desperate attempt of Bianca Lamblin, the "contingent" by-product of the Simone de Beauvoir/Jean-Paul Sartre "essential" relationship, to retrospectively appropriate her life after Journal de guerre and Letters to Sartre revealed all the chilling detachment with which Simone de Beauvoir adroitly manipulated her as the unsuspecting victim of the "threesome." Despite her claim to have finally regained the status of a subject of her own story, Lamblin's final stance as a victim undermines her narrative. One almost wishes she would have stopped a couple of paragraphs short of the end. Her final decision to reject the experience as "having done her only wrong" leaves her with all the pain she tried to alleviate by writing.

She started the book with a purpose of making her life cohere in the face of betrayal. Her naive loyalty and guilelessness help her "cling instinctively to life," as she seems to find consolation in her simple moral choices and unselfish devotion. Despite her plain, predictable, unengaging style, I sympathized with Lamblin in her struggle to maintain a precarious balance between objectivity and self-vindication. She tries to distance herself from Simone de Beauvoir, stressing their differences and disengaging herself from her famous lover's philosophical influence by reclaiming her own war-time experience as a Jew and choosing to have a family and children. And yet she continues to be constantly tormented by her inferiority to the existential duo - her attacks on Sartre's "revolutionary" ideas, for instance, remain purely emotional. She is profoundly not at peace with herself, irritated, angry, and oftentimes behaves like a hurt child, throwing the same words back at her offenders ("Truly, I would call THEIR intelligence monstrous and at the same time downright feeble").

And yet her innate grace and her perhaps never completely squelched attachment to "the Beaver" make her stop short from launching an open smearing campaign. Because she is keenly aware that the reader will be perceiving her book as an attempt at "retributive justice," she makes an effort to stay as objective as possible, which, in my opinion, is exactly what prevents her from venting her hurt feelings. Despite a simplified Lacanian explanation of her life Lamblin offers at the very end of the book, her story is a tragic example of an unresolved conflict.

But perhaps what vindicates her is a sense the reader gets of a fundamental private turmoil and instability on which Simone de Beauvoir's seemingly "philosophically justified" world was based. It comes as a nice reprieve for someone who was tempted to make her ideas from The Second Sex into life principles.