first encounters: When Jean-Paul Sartre met Simone de Beauvoir

Illustration by Edward Sorel Text by Nancy Caldwell Sorel Next week: Fred Astaire and Count Basie

Simone de Beauvoir grew up in the closed society of proper bougeois Paris, so to go to the Sorbonne at all, much less to study philosophy, was a hard-won success. To her father, philosophy was gibberish; her mother worried that she would lose her faith, overlooking the fact that this had already happened. De Beauvoir knew she would have no dowry, ergo no husband; she should at least be able to choose her career.

By her third year, she was acquainted with most of her fellow students, with the glaring exception of a young man of brilliant mind but dubious reputation (alcohol, women), Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre and a few close friends shared a private language, heavy on the bon mot sarcastique, and they labelled de Beauvoir "the badly dressed one with the beautiful blue eyes". Still, he knew she was expected to score very high on exams that he had failed the previous year, for not sticking to the subject. He sent her his drawing of Leibniz, the subject of her thesis, and asked to be introduced.

Toward that end, de Beauvoir was invited to a study session on a Monday morning in June 1929, in Sartre's room at the Cite Universitaire, for the purpose of expounding on Leibniz. She had long yearned to be included in this unorthodox group, and was terrified that they might find her "silly", although the one known for high jinks was Sartre. As host, however, he was reassuringly deferential. Shorter than de Beauvoir, he wore a "more or less clean" shirt, she noted, and slippers. The room was a shambles: the bed unmade, ashtrays unemptied, books and papers everywhere. He escorted her ceremoniously to the only chair. She had barely started on Leibniz when the others declared him impossibly boring, but no one suggested that that was her fault, so she stayed for a discussion of Rousseau, interspersed with philosophical parodies by Sartre declaimed to Offenbach's music. It was a day that authenticated her dreams. A dowerless young woman had options other than marriage, of which the bourgeois life need never be a part