Costals and Solange

Costals and Solange’s relationship is presented by Simone de Beauvoir as an example of masculine domination sustained by contempt. Costals claims that women trap men in happiness, weakness, and dependence, yet he wants Solange to welcome his attention and confirm his generosity. His alternating promises and refusals reveal a bond in which he reserves for himself both the power to define the relationship and the right to change its terms.

A Theory of Women That Shapes the Relationship

Costals’s treatment of Solange belongs to a wider view of women that de Beauvoir attributes to Henry de Montherlant. In this view, a woman is associated with immediate life and immanence, while a man’s aspiration to transcendence supposedly requires distance from her. The lover is cast as a threat to male self-sufficiency: because she needs a man, she is described as parasitic, and because she loves him through his weakness as well as his strength, her affection is recast as an attempt to diminish him.

That theory does not merely explain Costals’s attitude from a distance; it shapes what he permits Solange to be. The ideal woman in Montherlant’s scheme is not an independent equal but a submissive object of pleasure, valued for accommodating a man without making claims of her own. De Beauvoir cites Douce as an example of this ideal and Rhadidja as another woman imagined in similarly docile terms. Solange’s position is measured against this standard: her value to Costals depends on how well she serves his sense of himself.

Affection as Possession and Self-Display

Costals sometimes tries to shape a woman in his own image. He describes wanting Solange to be like an Arab scarf for him and says he did not raise her up to him for her to be anything else but him. The language makes intimacy an act of appropriation: closeness is welcome when it enlarges his self-image, not when it recognizes Solange as a separate person with claims of her own. He also takes amusement in manufacturing happy memories for her, placing himself in the role of author of experiences that she is expected to value.

His conduct around Solange’s first sexual experience makes the imbalance concrete. Rather than consider her comfort, Costals sends her to the bathroom. De Beauvoir treats this episode as evidence of a broader entitlement: even when a woman is cherished, he assumes that he need not take particular care for her. Costals’s insistence that he gives joy, warmth, peace, and strength while owing nothing in return turns the relationship into a one-sided account of generosity. He may pay his mistresses to reassure himself that no debt binds him, but payment does not erase the asymmetry de Beauvoir identifies: he represents himself as the giver and Solange as someone who receives without giving.

Gratitude, Pity, and Reversible Promises

Costals expects Solange to yield to what he calls his generosity. When he imagines that she does not appreciate his caresses, he becomes furious. Her response matters to him not as an expression of an equal partner’s desire, but as confirmation that his attentions have made her happy and that he has consequently shown himself to be powerful and magnanimous. De Beauvoir draws attention to the contradiction: Costals treats women as insignificant and lacking in substance, yet invests considerable energy in obtaining their satisfaction and gratitude. His apparent generosity depends on their recognition of him.

Pity offers another way for Costals to inhabit the superior position. He sometimes feels sympathy for women and makes promises under its influence, including a promise to marry Solange. But when pity fades, the promises disappear; Costals grants himself the right to change his mind. The relationship therefore has no stable mutual commitment on the terms described. Its rules are made by Costals, who can present himself as tender or magnanimous without accepting an obligation to sustain either quality.

Contempt and the Meaning of the Bond

De Beauvoir challenges Costals’s presentation of desire mixed with scorn as a tragedy. Montherlant’s male figures describe the strain of desiring women they disdain, but the analysis argues that the supposed conflict serves the man’s pleasure and pride. To desire and repel in nearly the same gesture lets him display power while avoiding the vulnerability of regarding a woman as an equal. Solange’s role in that pattern is not evidence of an inevitable conflict between the sexes; it reflects a hierarchy Costals chooses to preserve.

The disparity between Costals’s grand self-conception and the humble women he chooses also weakens his claim to superiority. De Beauvoir notes that placing a great writer opposite a provincial virgin tormented by sex and boredom, or a vacuous and calculating bourgeois girl, gives him an easy measure against which to appear exceptional. Solange’s relationship with Costals thus becomes part of a larger critique: his contempt does not prove that women are inferior. It reveals how he manufactures their inferiority as a condition of his own vanity, while calling his refusal of reciprocity freedom.