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Sartre was never in robust health. Blind in his right eye from the age of three, he lost most of the sight in his one good eye after a heart attack in 1973 and had to give up the last volume of a huge biography of Gustave Flaubert that he had worked on for 16 years. Nursed by the faithful Beauvoir, he spent his last years in seclusion in Paris or wintering in Italy. His death last week, from pulmonary congestion after acute heart failure, came after a brief hospitalization.
Sartre has been called the conscience of his generation. Unquestionably he was too often wrong for that. In a lifetime of search for a place where man could put his feet, he never found a place for his own —and he knew it, which is more than most people know or care to admit. He did care, and it is the eloquence and intensity of that caring (for himself and on behalf of others) that is Sartre's monument. ∎