Sunday April 13, 2008, The Observer
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It was Dostoevsky who first espoused the notion that if God is dead, everything is permissible. It became one of the founding tenets of existentialist philosophy, but until reading Carole Seymour-Jones's excellent new biography of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, I hadn't quite realised the diabolic glee with which this pair applied the belief to their daily lives.
Having got the business of God out of the way with precocious ease before they hit puberty (for de Beauvoir, He 'ceased to exist' at secondary school; for Sartre, God 'vanished without explanation' when he was 12), they launched themselves into a vortex of depravity with all the alacrity of teenagers breaking a parental curfew. Seymour-Jones's narrative crackles and pops with engrossing anecdotes. De Beauvoir, the radical, pre-feminist author of The Second Sex, used to get so inebriated she would throw up on the Paris Métro. Sartre once woke up in the gutter after passing out on the street alongside his mistress.
Neither of them was particularly bothered with personal hygiene: when Sartre was a German prisoner of war, his fellow inmates poured insecticide over his lice-infested mattress as he slept, while contemporaries of de Beauvoir recall her strong body odour, trailing from her clothes like a thick intellectual mist... [article continues]
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