Sartre e Simone

A história de amor mais singular do século XX. Dois escritores profundamente imersos um no outro e ambos no mundo inevitável, uma das coisas mais bonitas que o existencialismo já produziu.

Se inclusive eles eram uma farsa, posso entender porque o amor é o menor dos meus contentamentos na vida.

(...) But soon after it appeared, a stash of de Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre, which she had claimed lost, revealed the celebrated partnership as a web of lies and manipulation, sustained by de Beauvoir’s role as pimp and procurer, supplying the icy Sartre with young girls to deflower – the only aspect of sex he really enjoyed – and engaging in erotic triangles that led third parties to breakdown or suicide.

In a 21st century caught between biological determinism and yummy mummies, de Beauvoir’s assertion that “one is not born a woman, one becomes one,” no longer resonates. De Beauvoir’s entire life, as Carole Seymour-Jones shows vividly in A Dangerous Liaison, was an appalled response to the hypocrisies of bourgeois marriage which she witnessed as an intelligent daughter, born in 1908, in stiff, belle époque Paris. Her pact with Sartre in 1929, committing to an “essential” relationship within which each was free to have “contingent” liaisons, was a bold experiment in rewriting the marriage contract for the 20th century.

The relationship was regarded in the 1960s and 1970s as a template. But even aside from the jealousy, loneliness and misery it brought de Beauvoir as she tried to balance loyalty to Sartre with ruthless use of other lovers, it was never going to be representative because de Beauvoir had a blind spot: she viewed maternity and children so bleakly that they never entered her scale of values. Seymour-Jones is eloquent on the fall-out from this . In old age both de Beauvoir and Sartre adopted rival grown-up daughters, Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir and Arlette Elkaïm Sartre, to nurse them, and their reputations, through life and posterity.

The de Beauvoir-Sartre myth, spiced with Gallic chic, has shaped women writers since the 1960s so powerfully that it casts its influence across historical subjects, especially French ones, as far back as the revolution.

So in Germaine de Staël & Benjamin Constant, Renee Winegarten writes: “This was indeed the most famous and significant liaison and literary and political partnership before the union of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre ... but it was more fraught, fiery and tempestuous than theirs.”

(Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s visual arts critic)