The nature of Sartre and Beauvoir's partnership was never a secret to their friends, and it was not a secret to the public, either, after they were abruptly launched into celebrity, in 1945. They were famous as a couple with independent lives, who met in cafés, where they wrote their books and saw their friends at separate tables, and were free to enjoy other relationships, but who maintained a kind of soul marriage. Their liaison was part of the mystique of existentialism, and it was extensively documented and coolly defended in Beauvoir's four volumes of memoirs, all of them extremely popular in France: "Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter" (1958), "The Prime of Life" (1960), "Force of Circumstance" (1963), and "All Said and Done" (1972). Beauvoir and Sartre had no interest in varnishing the facts out of respect for bourgeois notions of decency. Disrespect for bourgeois notions of decency was precisely the point.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "The nature of Sartre and Beauvoir's partnership was never a secret to their friends, and it was not a secret to the public, either, after they were abruptly launched into celebrity, in 1945. They were famous as a couple with independent lives, who met in cafés, where they wrote their books and saw their friends at separate tables, and were free to enjoy other relationships, but who maintained a kind of soul marriage. Their liaison was part of the mystique of existentialism, and it was extensively documented and coolly defended in Beauvoir's four volumes of memoirs, all of them extremely popular in France: "Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter" (1958), "The Prime of Life" (1960), "Force of Circumstance" (1963), and "All Said and Done" (1972). Beauvoir and Sartre had no interest in varnishing the facts out of respect for bourgeois notions of decency. Disrespect for bourgeois notions of decency was precisely the point." in the context of "Louis Menand, in "Stand By Your Man: The strange liaison of Sartre and Beauvoir" in The New Yorker (26 September 2005)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.