Born on 21 June 1905 in Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre lost his father when he was only two years old and his mother, Anne-Marie moved back to her parents' house in Meudon. There she raised her son with the help from her father Charles Schweitzer, a teacher. There the pampered son of a widowed mother was educated by his grandfather in mathematics and French. Sartre was small in stature and cross-eyed and in his free time he used to wander in the Luxembourg Gardens of Paris in search of playmates. His mother remarried when he was twelve and the family moved to La Rochelle, a city in western France and a seaport on the Bay of Biscay, where he was frequently bullied.

From there he went to attend the Cours Hattemer, a private school in Paris and then to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, from which he was graduated in 1929. As a student, he had the strange habit to shock his fellow students. Once in a dance, he turned up stark naked and at a university ball, he paraded a hooker in a red dress. However, by that time, he had learned to make up for his physical lacks by the sheer force of his personality. He already saw himself as a Don Juan, a seducer who ruptured outworn convention and whose presence revealed things in their basic and fundamental light.

In the year1929, Sartre met Simone de Beauvoir, who studied at the Sorbonne. During that time, he was twenty-four, she was twenty-one, and both were studying for the ‘agrégation’, the competitive examination for a career in the French public education system. Simone was a beautiful, attractive and stylish woman and had a boyfriend, René Maheu. On the other hand, Sartre was about five feet tall and he had almost lost the sight in his right eye when he was three. He had no sense of fashion and usually dressed in oversized clothes. He simply ignored his body, but he had the kind of aggressive male ugliness that can be charismatic. However, once she got over the physical impression he made, Simone fell in love with Sartre.

Sartre proposed marriage, but Simone refused. She refused Sartre’s proposal not for any philosophical reason, but because she was sleeping with one of his best friends. Then, probably during October 1929, Sartre suggested their famous pact. It was decided that, their love did not require marriage for its consummation. They would have a permanent 'essential' love, would sleep together and could have affairs, but they must describe the affairs to each other in every intimate detail. They defined it as a ‘transparency pact’, where they would be allowed to live their lives on their own, free to take any other lover, as and when they like and live where ever they pleased, as long as they told one another everything. Sartre and de Beauvoir did exactly that for as long as 51 years, they kept their pact of transparency, being totally open and honest about their lives.

This legendary love pact was an attempt to overthrow the suffocating noose of hypocrisy that dictates the suppressed lives of thousands. They wanted to break the shackles of the oppressive social conformity, always after creating new boundaries and explored their thoughts in their works. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism, a brilliant writer of the century and was awarded the Nobel Prize and she was his lifelong companion, who became an iconic figure for pioneering feminism and the battle for equality between the sexes. Their private lives were wild and experimental. Simone de Beauvoir was bisexual and had affairs with both men and women, while Sartre, despite his unimpressive look and ugly squint, was always surrounded by adoring young women happy to pamper his genius and he enthusiastically enjoyed sleeping with those virgins, after which he rapidly lost interest in them.

Simone was as intelligent as any man. She preached her ideal of feminist independence and equality, criticized the 'bourgeois' concepts of marriage and children. But, such a lifestyle probably made her bitterly unhappy and she became obsessively jealous over Sartre's countless conquests. It seems that, it was only for taking revenge and probably out of frustration that she embarked on those affairs, one after another or more than one at a time and probably all the time she secretly hoped that they would provoke Sartre to return to her arms. The burning and strange desire to please Sartre even led Simone to groom young girls for him, often under-age teenagers, whom she had bedded herself.

When Sartre had a breakdown after experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs, Simone asked one of her young female pupils, her new lover, to nurse him. But Simone was not at all prepared for the crippling jealousy she felt, when Sartre tried to seduce not only the girl but also her younger sister as well. In return to Sartre's faithlessness, Simone took another young girl, her student, to her bed and when Sartre retaliated by deflowering another virgin, Simone seduced her lover's 21-year-old boyfriend.

Wanda Kosakiewicz, a French theatre actress, was one of Sartre’s love interests. However, Sartre was also very much obsessed about Wanda’s older sister, Olga Kosakiewicz, one of the students of Simone de Beauvoir. To start the usual process, Simone first seduced Olga and then tried to pass her on to Sartre. But Olga was not really up for it. She really liked Simone, as she was taller and much better looking than Sartre and despite his best efforts Sartre could not take her to his bed. She resisted him, however without ever entirely pushing him away. But, her attitude could not stop Sartre from changing his course and when her younger sister, Wanda, arrived in Paris in 1937, he opted to seduce her instead. It was not that easy and smooth. When he forcibly kissed her for the first time and tried to hold her down on her bed, she managed to get away and hurried to the bathroom to throw up. However, she did not run away, as she obscurely felt that the man could really teach her something about life, like a high-speed university degree. After two years of continuous insistence, Sartre could ‘deflower’ her at a hotel in Aigues-Mortes in the south of France. Later, she said in a frank confession that she ‘hated’ Sartre and Sartre immediately wrote all about it to his ‘Dear Beaver’.

Sartre and Simone continued their multiple intimate affairs till World War II, when Sartre was called up. However, Simone continued to seduce both men and women in Paris and wrote to Sartre with the detailed titillating descriptions of her sexual activities. But, she never cared about the lives of the young girls, her students, whom she exploited and who were jealous of each other over their teacher's attention. One of the miserable girls took to self injury, another girl killed herself and most of them remained pathetically unfulfilled and dependent on the childless Simone, who perversely referred to them as her 'family'. But, she did not have any soft feelings about them. Once she seduced a 16 year old Jewish girl, but she did not show any empathy to her, when the poor girl nearly lost her life at the hands of the Nazis who were advancing on Paris.

To be continued