Posted by Anne on August 27, 1999 at 00:49:41:

In Reply to: Sartre the womaniser posted by koen on August 24, 1999 at 13:47:14:

: How in God's name did Sartre win the hearts of so many women

I am in the process of reading The Road to Freedom books, and I find that Sartre understood women far better than I would have imagined. For instance, I was surprised at his empathy with Marcelle in The Age of Reason when she finds she is pregnant by her lover of 7 years--who does not believe in marriage.

He also shows a delicacy in understanding women and their emotions and motivations with various other characters in these books--Odette, Mathieu's sister-in-law, and Lola, the older woman who is the lover of one of Mathieu's young student, Boris.

Any man who can get that close to understanding the inner workings of a woman's psyche is going to attract women. Women long to be understood by their men--or at least many do--as, of course, many men long to be understood by their women.

You might also refer to Simone de Beauvoir's letters to Nelsen Algren for an interesting paradox--she says somewhere within the volume Beloved Chicago Man that Sartre was simply not all that interested in (and I have heard there is other anecdotal evidence that supports this).

So women loved him, and he apparently liked them as people, but he wasn't all that interested in . . .seems rather ironic for a womanizer!

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