My bread is disgust

“My bread is disgust” is the phrase Simone de Beauvoir uses to crystallize Henry de Montherlant’s cultivated scorn. In her analysis, the phrase condenses a larger pattern: contempt for women becomes a source of nourishment for the male hero’s sense of superiority, while the scornful observer treats himself as exempt from the human weaknesses he condemns.

The phrase and its setting

The heading “Montherlant or the Bread of Disgust” introduces de Beauvoir’s examination of Montherlant as one of several writers whose attitudes give a particular form to the collective myth of woman. She places his view in a tradition of arrogant dualism and notes his Nietzschean opposition to the Eternal Feminine: the hero, in this scheme, is to rise against the Great Mother rather than submit to her.

Montherlant’s phrase “My bread is disgust,” spoken by Alvaro, appears alongside the declaration “Disdain is nobler than desire.” De Beauvoir reads these expressions not as neutral descriptions of a feeling but as statements of a stance: disgust and disdain allow the speaker to imagine himself elevated above the woman he judges.

Contempt as self-elevation

The phrase’s force lies in its image of disgust as sustenance. De Beauvoir argues that scorn supplies Montherlant with an alibi: by condemning others, he can feel wholly unlike them and dismiss accusations against himself. His denunciations of foolishness and cowardice become grounds for believing himself intelligent and brave, even when his own conduct offers no such proof.

She connects this posture to his response at the beginning of the Occupation. Montherlant scorned his defeated countrymen as though he stood outside their defeat, yet, de Beauvoir observes, he had done no more than they to prevent it and had not even consented to serve as an officer. His resumed accusations thus sharpen the contradiction contained in the phrase: disgust presents itself as moral distinction while concealing the speaker’s own implication in the world he condemns.

Women made into objects of scorn

De Beauvoir also traces the phrase’s gendered work through Montherlant’s writing and conduct. His account of women casts them as deficient in reason and understanding, while his fiction repeatedly presents mothers as obstructing sons’ ambitions. In her reading, this is not merely criticism of particular women: woman is assigned abjection in advance so that the male hero can appear lofty by comparison.

The episodes involving Solange and Andrée show how contempt becomes an active relation rather than an abstract opinion. Costals takes pleasure in seeing Andrée debase herself, and he encourages Solange’s possibility of infanticide; when she accepts that possibility, his senses are aroused by the prospect of condemning her. The phrase therefore names a recurring economy in which a woman’s degradation supports the man’s self-image. De Beauvoir’s analysis turns “My bread is disgust” against that economy: what sustains the posture of superiority is not proof of transcendence, but the repeated act of making another person contemptible.