Costals encourages Solange’s infanticide

In Simone de Beauvoir’s account, Costals encourages Solange to contemplate infanticide, and her welcome of that possibility arouses him. The episode exposes how his cultivated scorn becomes a means of testing and deepening women’s degradation, while he reserves the freedom to judge them from above.

The Episode and Its Immediate Effect

Costals encourages Solange in infanticide; the possibility is welcomed by her, and his senses are aroused. The passage establishes a consequential relation between his prompting, her willingness, and his response, but does not say that the contemplated act is carried out. Its focus is on what the possibility allows Costals to feel: a heightened scorn for a woman he regards as debased.

Scorn as a Means of Degradation

The episode belongs to a broader pattern in which Costals seeks to drag women into abjection. He affects distress at his own disgust, as though that distress proved its sincerity, but the account argues that he finds advantages in scorn and systematically pursues them. He gives poor girls money and jewels, then exults when they accept these malicious gifts; with Andrée, he makes a sadistic game of watching her debase herself. Solange’s contemplated infanticide extends this pattern: his pleasure lies not simply in condemning her, but in encouraging a possibility that lets him condemn her more completely.

The Caterpillars and Sovereign Power

Simone de Beauvoir sets Costals’s conduct beside Montherlant’s apologue of caterpillars. In the example, the man decides which creatures to spare and which to destroy, enjoying a power over life and death that carries no risk of reciprocity. The analogy clarifies the structure of Costals’s relation to women: he assumes the position of a sovereign judge, free to give, withdraw, pity, or punish according to his own pleasure. For that arrangement to hold, those under his power must be treated as animals and induced to accept the inferior condition assigned to them.

Significance in the Argument

Solange’s contemplated act matters in the passage less as a completed plot event than as evidence of how domination manufactures its own justification. Costals provokes or encourages degradation and then treats the resulting abjection as grounds for scorn. Simone de Beauvoir connects this logic to larger systems in which the powerful enforce weakness and then cite it as proof of their superiority, including racial domination in Louisiana and Georgia and the systematic degradation practiced in concentration camps. The episode thus places Costals’s private conduct within a wider critique of power that creates the inferiority it claims merely to observe.