Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 1944–47

This chapter looks into how Nathalie Sarraute's literary fortunes were turned when she encountered Jean-Paul Sartre again after the Liberation. It describes Nathalie's meeting with Sartre at the Café de Flore, which was one of the venues in Saint-Germain that served as headquarters for Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir during and after the Occupation. It narrates how Nathalie found Sartre as a rare interlocutor with whom to discuss her writing, such as the “Portrait of an Unknown Man,” which she had been working on since 1940. The chapter analyzes Sartre's discussion on Jewish identity as the projection of an anti-Semitic viewpoint, which influenced Nathalie as she herself had been made Jewish by the Occupation. It also reviews Nathalie's “tropisms,” which explored the susceptibility of the individual to the image of himself in the eyes of an interlocutor.