The BEST philosophy? Have lots of SEX!

He thought her ravishing; she found him ugly, short and a snob. But Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre stayed together for 51 years — on condition they could sleep with anyone they liked

BECOMING BEAUVOIR: A LIFE by Kate Kirkpatrick (Bloomsbury £20, 240 pp)

THEY wrote side by side in Parisian cafes, working late into the night over glasses of whisky while honing each other’s groundbreaking philosophical theories.

Intellectually in love and physically possessive of one another for 51 years, Simone de Beauvoir and JeanPaul Sartre lived according to their ‘pact’ of being allowed to have ‘contingent’ love affairs as long as they told each other the truth, making them one of the most intriguing celebrity literary couples of the 20th century.

Reading this evocative new biography of de Beauvoir, you can literally smell the coffee and the Gauloises.

what was their relationship genuinely like, though? And is it true that, as has gone down in history, de Beauvoir was Sartre’s mere intellectual sidekick? (The French disparagingly nicknamed her ‘Notre Dame de Sartre’.)

In this fascinating and deeply researched book, Kate Kirkpatrick blows away a thousand myths that have grown up around them.

She reveals that, far from Sartre being the perpetual object of her obsession, de Beauvoir had other much more physically passionate affairs both before and during the Sartre years, one of them with Claude Lanzmann, director of the Holocaust masterpiece Shoah; and she suggests that it was de Beauvoir who came up with some of the central tenets of Sartre’s philosophy before he did.

FOR example, her decision to split her existence into two parts, ‘ for others’ and ‘ for myself’, predated Sartre’s idea of ‘being for itself’ and ‘being for others’.

De Beauvoir grew up in a strict Catholic household, with a mother who expected her to settle into unintellectual domesticity.

She became an atheist and tortured herself in her diary with endless philosophical questions: ‘To live a life of devotion to others or to live life for myself?’ ‘How could the self of today make decisions for the self of tomorrow?’ ‘ what does it mean to love?’

Do stop philosophising, I found myself begging her, and get on with the business of living.

There’s clearly no stopping the French philosophical mindset once it takes hold; and it was this very mindset that captivated

Sartre, and his that captured de Beauvoir’s. She was a brilliant, workaholic philosophy student, studying at the Sorbonne (having fought with her parents to go there); Sartre first heard of her when he and she were among only 26 in the whole of France to pass an unbelievably difficult exam.

when they first met on a Monday in July 1929, de Beauvoir thought Sartre ugly, short and an intellectual snob. He thought her ravishing, ‘with a slightly broken voice that only added to her allure’.

By Thursday, she began to be impressed by the way he thought. She liked ‘his way of being authoritarian and adopting me, and of being so harshly indulgent’. Thirteen days after meeting, she wrote: ‘He had understood me, foreseen me and possessed me.’ Any woman who has ever fallen in love with a man for his mind will recognise the feeling.

‘I will abandon myself to this man with absolute confidence,’ she wrote in her diary — although she was still quietly conducting affairs with two other men, one of whom, the sensual René Maheu, had ( rather unsexily) failed that philosophy exam.

I relished the details of de Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s characters that Kirkpatrick