Sartre's second century

148 Chapter Ten
himself persecuted, has been explained as an effect of Sartre's short-lived
experimentation with mescaline. But it is clear also, as different doctors
affirmed—so Simone de Beauvoir tells us in La Force de Vage {The
Prime of Life)—that it comes from further afield. In Les Mots, Sartre
recounts the following anecdote:
I nearly fainted one day in the train to Limoges as I leafed through the
Hachette almanac: I had happened upon a hair-raising engraving: a quayside
in the moonlight, a long, rough claw coming out of the water and
seizing a drunkard, dragging him down to the bottom of the dock [...]. I
was scared of water, scared of crabs and trees. Scared above all of books: I
cursed the torturers who peopled their stories with these atrocious images.
Nevertheless I imitated them [...]. What then fell from my pen—octopus
with flaming eyes, twenty-ton shellfish, giant talking spider-crab—was
myself, a child monster, it was my dissatisfaction with life, my fear of
death, my insipidity and my perversity [...].
If mescaline did indeed induce hallucinations in the adult Sartre, why,
we may ask, the ones which find expression in his work? The answer is
easy: they go back to his glossolatrous (language-worshipping) childhood.
So would it be unreasonable to suggest that his fixation on crustaceans
springs from the fact that the word for lobster, homard, not to write
hommard, could be taken to mean, with a little imagination, homme
primitif (primitive man) or homme degenere (degenerate man)? Naturally,
just as Flaubert refrains from spelling "Hommet" the name of his stupid
humanist Monsieur Homais, which would point too obviously to the way
we are meant to think of him, Sartre resists the temptation openly to call
human beings homards, a term which would be manifestly pejorative, like
roublard (crafty devil), froussard (coward), vantard (braggart), pleurard
(whiner) and, indeed, mouchard (sneak), not to speak of a host of other
words ending in -ard. So he uses instead the term crabe.
It is in Les Sequestres d'Altona, as I have intimated, that the
resemblance between human beings and crabs is best elucidated. Frantz
"Je pensai m'£vanouir un jour, dans le train de Limoges, en feuilletant
Talmanach Hachette: j'&ais tomb£ sur une gravure a faire dresser les cheveux: un
quai sous la lune, une longue pince rugueuse sortait de l'eau, accrochait un
ivrogne, Tentrainait au fond du bassin [...]. .Feus peur de l'eau, peur des crabes et
des arbres. Peur des livres surtout: je maudis les bourreaux qui peuplaient leurs
rdcits de ces figures atroces. Pourtant je les imitai [...]. Ce qui venait alors sous ma
plume—pieuvre aux yeux de feu, crustac£ de vingt tonnes, araignde g£ante et qui
parlait—c'dtait moi-meme, monstre enfantin, c'&ait mon ennui de vivre, ma peur
de mourir, ma fadeur et ma perversity" (ibid., 129-30).