Mouth-to-mouth with life

“Mouth-to-mouth with life” is Henry de Montherlant’s image for living in a state of sensory intensity and pleasure. Simone de Beauvoir examines the phrase as both an avowal and a test: if Montherlant celebrates possession and sensual experience, his chosen standard cannot justify treating women’s desires as inferior or making renunciation and destruction into signs of superiority.

Montherlant’s ideal of pleasure

Montherlant describes a life devoted to what he loves and calls it “a mouth-to-mouth with life.” Beauvoir sets that declaration beside his stated ambition to use his senses better than other people and to possess pleasing beings in peace and poetry. In her reading, the language promises an embrace of life, but its operative terms are possession and pleasure, not a project that reaches beyond the self.

That distinction matters because Montherlant rejects love and friendship as empty, does not believe in art for art’s sake or in God, and leaves pleasure as the domain in which he can act. Beauvoir does not accept that his pursuit of immanence is fundamentally different from women’s sensuality. If sensual pleasure were the measure by which the sexes were ranked, she argues, women could have at least as strong a claim to it. His phrase therefore cannot support a hierarchy that condemns women for attachment to immediate life while praising his own pursuit of it.

Pleasure, possession, and contradiction

Beauvoir places Montherlant’s celebration of the senses against his attitudes toward women and girls. She notes his anger when a mistress would not make her twelve-year-old daughter available to him, and sets that demand beside his sweeping claims of open-mindedness. The conflict is not between his lofty ideal and women’s supposedly lesser pleasure; it is between his self-image as a defender of expansive experience and his insistence that other people’s boundaries should yield to his desires.

The same contradiction appears in his moral judgments. Montherlant accepts that nothing has value and everything is equal, yet also calls for censorship during the Occupation and expresses disgust at some people’s sexuality while exalting other forms of it. Beauvoir’s challenge is not that pleasure itself is disqualifying, but that he condemns in others what he permits or admires in himself, without offering a consistent standard by which his preferences could claim authority.

The phrase as a measure of life

Montherlant’s later retrospective intensifies the image: he describes twenty years as a dream filled with pleasure and recalls living “high and wide, drunk on what I love.” Beauvoir answers that women can return this mouth-to-mouth with life. The phrase thus changes function within her argument: from a self-congratulatory emblem of exceptional vitality, it becomes evidence that the intensity Montherlant claims as his own is not proof of masculine superiority.

Beauvoir also distinguishes such intensity from genuine transcendence. A life organized around possession and private pleasure does not become a higher undertaking merely because it is described in heroic language. Renunciation and sacrifice, she argues, acquire meaning only in relation to human aims; without those aims, declarations of elevation can conceal contempt and oppression rather than overcome them.

Destructive mysticism and its consequences

Beauvoir connects Montherlant’s ideal to the destructive mysticism of his plays. In her account, the plays present two murders, one physical and one moral, and make the destruction of women appear as sacrifice to an abstract principle. She warns that supposedly superhuman ideals can become cover for persecution: a false hero measures his superiority not by what he creates for the future but by the harm he inflicts on others.

The phrase “mouth-to-mouth with life” therefore carries a sharp irony. Montherlant’s language suggests intimate contact with the world, yet Beauvoir finds that he turns inward toward a self-image sustained by pleasure, defeat, and domination. His own image of endlessly turning without bringing up fresh water gives her a final counterpoint: the claimed abundance has not produced renewal. In Beauvoir’s critique, an affirmation of life becomes ethically empty when it cannot recognize the value of other lives.