Daily Mail:

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were perhaps the most influential couple of the 20th century. 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.

Despite her high-flown rhetoric, it was only for revenge and out of frustration that she embarked on affairs, always secretly hoping they would provoke Sartre to return to her.

And, astonishingly, it was her craven desire to please him that led de Beauvoir to groom young female lovers for Sartre, commonly girls she had bedded herself.

Whoo-hoo! Such great minds! Such noble intellectual heroes! So worthy of our undying adulation and praise. Read the rest if you want to hear a long, sordid, sad tale of how they took drugs and cruelly used everyone around them — and each other — as mere playthings.

[....] Today, she would be behind bars for her sexual activities with her young pupils, but in those days she got away with it. 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'.

Yet Simone had no maternal feelings for them at all. She showed no empathy even when one of them, a Jewish girl whom she seduced when she was 16, nearly lost her life at the hands of the Nazis who were advancing on Paris.

Simone's lack of scruples extended to her war record. She took no part in the Resistance, like other writers of the time, concentrating on her sex life.

Later, they were major supporters of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. I'm sure they had as much compassion for the Cuban people as did for the young people they destroyed for their recreation and vanity.

Again, note their behavior was enabled and justified through their philosophical and political assumptions. This is the engine of western leftism: sexual desire and activity, a dysfunctional conscience, coupled with need to view one's self as moral (or even elite) produce harmful political activity and enabling philosophies, including a need to remove any pesky transcendent source of morality (i.e. God) from the picture.

Globetrotting celebrities - the intellectual equivalent of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor - they went everywhere to support the latest popular cause.

And even at the end Sartre was surrounded by as many as nine young women, all fussing about his health.

For many years he had kept himself going with amphetamines, black coffee and cigarettes, followed by sleeping pills and red wine. Now he was incontinent, lame and blind.

On the brink of his death in 1980, Sartre was also flirting with Judaism and Simone was appalled - to embrace God would have been to reverse their entire lives' work.

Nice to know they lived for a good cause.