These pretenders think they can tell us anything about how to live?
The relationship between Simone de Beauvior and Jean Paul Sartre was simply perverse, and it was a perversity that hurt other people. According to the Daily Mail:
Left behind in Paris, Simone continued to seduce both men and women, writing titillating descriptions of her activities to Sartre behind the Maginot Line, which reveal her heartlessness and the vulnerability of her conquests.I've just finished reading de Beauvior's "The Mandarins" - my review should be up momentarily - and I found it to describe the empty, posturing, comfortable, buying cheap grace lifestyle described in this article to a "T." It's a well-written book, but it has left me confused as to whether de Beauvior intended to write a book memorializing the fact that she and her fellow intellectuals were worthless human beings.
Today, she would be behind bars for her sexual activities with her young pupils, but in those days she got away with it.
Tragically, the lives of these girls, who were pathologically jealous of each other over their teacher's attentions, were permanently blighted.
One took to self-harming, another committed suicide. Most remained pathetically unfulfilled and dependent on the childless Simone, who perversely referred to them as her 'family'.
Yet Simone had no maternal feelings for them at all. She showed no empathy even when one of them, a Jewish girl whom she seduced when she was 16, nearly lost her life at the hands of the Nazis who were advancing on Paris.
Simone's lack of scruples extended to her war record.
She took no part in the Resistance, like other writers of the time, concentrating on her sex life.
Indeed, the only thing that aroused her to action was the pregnancy of one of her entourage.
She found the condition of pregnancy 'insulting' because it was an impediment to woman's self-fulfilment in the wider world, and Simone arranged an illegal backstreet abortion which nearly ended the girl's life.
Sartre's war record was equally dubious. Captured by the Germans, he got on so well with his guards that he managed to engineer his release in 1941.
But he did not rush straight into Simone's arms. He had been in Paris with another woman for two weeks before he told her he was free.
In 1940, when the Germans occupied Paris, Sartre's first reaction was to preach resistance, yet he soon lost interest and, instead, accepted the teaching post a Jewish professor had been forced to leave by the Nazis.
Sartre even fraternised with the German censor when he wanted his work published.
Since the couple were free to come and go as they pleased, the war proved one of the most exciting periods of their lives and the one which has gone down in history.
Writing in the pavement cafes of St Germain, with Picasso and his mistress at the next table, and going to nightclubs with the black-clad singer Juliette Greco, they enjoyed themselves to the hilt, fully expecting the Germans would remain in Paris for at least 20 years.
They now had at least five lovers between them - men and girls - all sleeping with each other.
It was too much for the mother of one pupil who brought an official complaint in 1943 against de Beauvoir, accusing her of corrupting a minor and acting as procurer in handing her daughter over to Sartre.
The charges failed to stick because de Beauvoir's little 'family' closed ranks and lied.
And though Simone lost her teaching job, she compensated for it by publishing her first novel.
Born from her real life experiences, it was about a menage a trois. Sartre's weighty philosophical tome Being And Nothingness was also published that year.
This was the rallying cry of existentialism, the creed that preaches there is no God and that man and woman are, therefore, free to do as they will.
It would become the bible of our licentious times, taken up by liberals everywhere in the West, and yet it was practically ignored at first.
Sartre drowned his sorrows at its lack of success with rampant womanising, this time in the company of the writer of the moment - the handsome, tall, dark Algerian Albert Camus, who joined in most of the couple's sex games.
Camus slept with all their impressionable young girls, but he could not bring himself to sleep with Simone herself whom he found 'a chatterbox, a blue stocking, unbearable'.
As an Allied victory became inevitable, Sartre began to paint himself once again as a Resistance fighter and, as such, was lionised when he visited America in 1945.
Of course, there's this:
The Americans did not take to Simone as they had to Sartre. They disliked her drinking, they mocked her clothes and they noticed her faint whiff of body odour.And:
For many years he had kept himself going with amphetamines, black coffee and cigarettes, followed by sleeping pills and red wine. Now he was incontinent, lame and blind.
On the brink of his death in 1980, Sartre was also flirting with Judaism and Simone was appalled - to embrace God would have been to reverse their entire lives' work.
After he died, Simone was left alone with his body in the hospital, and she crawled under the sheet to spend one last night with him. Now that his restless mind was stilled she at last had him where she wanted him.
And so she wrote her nihilistic epitaph for the tomb they would ultimately share, ensuring their bleak and Godless creed would go down in history. 'His death separates us, my death will not reunite us,' it read.
Finally, she'd had her own way - but in her heart she must have known it was only because she had managed to outlive him.
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