Jean-Paul Sartre was 24 and Simone de Beauvoir 21 when they met in Paris in 1929. While both were fiercely intelligent, about to finish first and second in a national exam for students of philosophy, only Sartre was ugly. Nevertheless, de Beauvoir agreed when soon Sartre suggested an unconventional vow of lifetime fidelity. Since theirs was an 'œessential' love, neither party needed to avoid 'œcontingent' sexual liaisons. All that was required, as de Beauvoir later wrote, was for the two sexual libertines to share 'œeven the least of our discoveries' with the other. In large part, Hazel Rowley writes, the two celebrated existentialists remained faithful to their promises until Sartre's death 51 years later.
But Rowley isn't interested in celebrating this famously unorthodox love story, said Louis Menand in The New Yorker. In fact, though the veteran literary biographer is no prude, she seems quietly 'œhorrified by the behavior she describes.' Ever since de Beauvoir's Letters to Sartre were published posthumously in 1990, it's been clear that the two philosophes were less forthright about their affairs than their ideals demanded, and that 'œthey held most of the people in their lives,' particularly their contingent lovers, 'œin varying degrees of contempt.' Since some of those wounded lovers are still alive and still talking, Tête-à -Tête is 'œbasically an update of a breaking story' rather than the final word. But the most heartbreaking news it conveys is that the great de Beauvoir got the raw deal. While Sartre craved serial seductions, she obviously would have given up all her other lovers if she could have had the wall-eyed genius 'œfor herself alone.'
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