Andrée Hacquebaut

Andrée Hacquebaut is presented in Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis as a woman whose efforts to exist as an intelligent, autonomous person are systematically turned into evidence against her. In Henry de Montherlant’s fiction, Costals’s apparent sympathy and promises of help become instruments of manipulation, while the narration makes Andrée unattractive and ridiculous. Beauvoir argues that this portrait does not merely depict an individual failure: it reveals a design in which a woman who tries to become a person is made to seem a caricature.

Identity and Representation

Montherlant’s portrayal gives Andrée little room to appear outside the terms imposed on her. She is described as ugly, awkward, poorly dressed, and unclean, with her physical details made to signify a supposed lack of femininity. The limited culture attributed to her is presented as enough to destroy that femininity, while Costals calls her intelligent and the novel repeatedly persuades the reader to see her as stupid. He professes sympathy, yet the portrayal makes her obnoxious. Beauvoir identifies this split between what Costals says and what the narrative makes visible as a calculated equivocation: Andrée’s intelligence and self-assertion are not allowed to count as evidence of personhood.

The stakes extend beyond her appearance or manners. Beauvoir argues that Montherlant treats femininity as an obscure, fixed essence defined by women’s lack of virility. In this framework, a woman who attempts to think or act autonomously cannot simply become a human subject; she is cast as neither properly feminine nor masculine, and therefore as a sham. Andrée’s characterization serves this argument by making female intellectual aspiration appear inherently absurd rather than recognizing the constraints imposed on her.

Costals’s Pity and Promises

Costals’s relations with women are organized around asymmetry: he casts himself as the one who gives, judges, and decides what a woman deserves. Beauvoir describes his condescension in answering women’s letters and his pleasure in shaping a woman to his own image. Andrée is among the women to whom he promises assistance, but the promise belongs to a form of pity that costs him little and leaves him in control.

That pity does not establish a reciprocal bond. Costals makes promises when he feels moved, then lets them die when the feeling passes, treating his change of mind as his prerogative. Beauvoir’s account makes the consequence for Andrée clear: the promise of help offers no dependable security, because Costals alone determines whether it will be honored. His ostensible generosity preserves rather than challenges the unequal relation between them.

Manipulation and Humiliation

Costals’s treatment of Andrée becomes more deliberately degrading when he plays a sadistic game with her. As Beauvoir describes it, his pleasure lies not simply in causing suffering but in watching Andrée debase herself. His conduct makes humiliation the test he imposes on her, while his own position as judge remains untouched.

Beauvoir sets this treatment beside Costals’s broader practice of tempting poor women with money and jewels, then exulting when they accept his gifts. In Andrée’s case, the same structure turns a promised kindness into a means of control: he encourages a vulnerable woman to act within a situation he has arranged, and then takes her response as confirmation of her inferiority. Her apparent abasement is thus not independent proof of an essential weakness; it is the outcome the unequal encounter has been designed to produce.

Narrative Role and Significance

Andrée’s role exposes the mechanism by which a male character’s self-image as sovereign, generous, and superior depends on women being kept in a subordinate position. Costals can alternate between pity and contempt because he claims the power to define the terms of the relationship; Andrée is denied an equivalent authority over how her actions are understood. The novel’s portrayal invites the reader to mistake the result of this arrangement for evidence about women’s nature.

Beauvoir turns that portrayal against its intended conclusion. Andrée’s contradictory presentation—called intelligent by Costals but rendered foolish by the narrative, offered help but subjected to a degrading game—makes visible how the fiction manufactures its proof of female inadequacy. Her significance lies not in a fully developed account of her independent life, which the evidence does not provide, but in the way her characterization reveals the violence of a literary argument that punishes a woman for attempting to become a subject.