The story of Sartre and de Beauvoir as never told before

If this couple expected their arrangement would spare them the trials and heartache of a conventional marriage, they were wrong.Their multiple affairs went on until World War II when Sartre was called up and their sex games had to be conducted through letters.Left behind in Paris, Simone continued to seduce both men and women, writing titillating descriptions of her activities to Sartre behind the Maginot Line, which reveal her heartlessness and the vulnerability of her conquests.Tragically, the lives of these girls, who were pathologically jealous of each other over their teacher's attentions, were permanently blighted.One took to self-harming, another committed suicide. Most remained pathetically unfulfilled and dependent on the childless Simone, who perversely referred to them as her 'family'.

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Sartre had always said the best way to learn about a country was to sleep with its women.

clipped from www.dailymail.co.uk Their legendary love pact - they never married but swore mutual devotion to each other with the freedom to have affairs - was an attempt to overthrow the stifling hypocrisy that, for so long, had dictated most people's lives. Yet a fascinating new book paints this supposedly high-minded duo as serial seducers bent on their own gratification and as a couple who used their apparently lofty philosophy as a springboard to excuse their multiple liaisons, often with under-age teenagers who were broken by the experience. And while Simone de Beauvoir preached her ideal of feminist independence and equality, eschewing such 'bourgeois' concepts as marriage and children, and claiming women should behave just like men, the truth is such a lifestyle made her bitterly unhappy and she became obsessively jealous over Sartre's countless conquests. In this sordid relationship of supposed equals, he was always one step ahead of her - though it didn't start that way.