During the last months of the German Occupation in 1944, the young man who was to become France's most controversial contemporary philosopher and the woman who was to become its most controversial feminist met the professional criminal who was to become its most controversial playwright. "The conversation was most agreeable," said Jean-Paul Sartre. Last week, nearly six years after Sartre's death, his longtime companion Simone de Beauvoir, 78, died of a lung ailment. The next day Jean Genet, 75, succumbed to throat ! cancer. Said Premier Jacques Chirac, inarguably: "The end of an era."
It was a trio of soloists. De Beauvoir epitomized the French bourgeoisie. Her father was a lawyer and a non-believer, but her mother insisted on a stern Roman Catholic education. It did not have the desired effect. At twelve the child decided, "I no longer believe in God," and resolved to study philosophy at the Sorbonne.
Genet was born illegitimate, reared in a state orphanage and sent at seven to foster parents on a farm in central France. He became an altar boy, and the priest thought he had "a religious nature," but his foster mother caught him stealing from her purse. "You little thief!" she cried. Genet took that as his creed: "I answered 'Yes' to every accusation made against me, no matter how unjust . . .Yes, I had to become whatever they said I was . . . I was a coward, thief, traitor, queer, whatever they saw in me."
De Beauvoir was 21 and Sartre 23 when the fellow philosophy students met and began arguing (they both planned to become teachers). "It was the first time in my life that I had felt intellectually inferior to anyone else," De Beauvoir recalled in her five-volume memoirs. Sartre halfheartedly proposed marriage, but instead they worked out a deal: complete equality between them, complete freedom to have affairs with others, complete honesty about everything. And so, without ever actually sharing an apartment, they lived together for the rest of their lives, always addressing each other with the formal "vous."
Genet spent most of his 20s in jail on charges of theft, prostitution and related crimes. There, on strips of brown wrapping paper, he composed a long poem about a homosexual murderer, then a novel about a male prostitute, Our Lady of the Flowers (1943). Scandalized, the eminent critic Paul Valery declared, "This must be burned." Others strongly disagreed. In 1948, when Genet faced a life term as a repeat offender, Sartre, Andre Gide, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau and other literati circulated a petition protesting the sentence. It won Genet a presidential pardon.
By then Sartre was famous as the leading exponent of the creed known as existentialism (Being and Nothingness, 1943) and the chief guru to the postwar denizens of St. Germain des Pres. De Beauvoir was not far behind. She won the prestigious Prix Goncourt for her fourth novel, The Mandarins, an astringent survey of the Paris literary life as well as a memoir of her own affair with ^ Chicago Novelist Nelson Algren. More enduring fame came from her monumental manifesto The Second Sex (1949), one of the cornerstones of modern feminism.