The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvior is a surprisingly entertaining book... ... particularly if you despise Communists and Communism. de Beauvoir stripped away the facade of nobility and concern for the poor that Communists like to put on and revealed that French leftists were - surprise! - spoiled, narcissistic fools.   In my review of The Mandarins, I wrote: Similarly, the only explanation given for the pro-Communist/pro-Soviet attitude is a salve on a guilty conscience, specifically guilt because Henri and his class of intellectuals are rather well-off. We know that they are well-off because they are drinking champagne, going out on the town, living in houses, and not going hungry. When Henri contemplates supporting the Soviet Union - or when he feels guilt or doubt about pointing out that the Soviets have death camps - he explains to himself that only the Soviet Union is likely to feed millions of starving Chinese. According to Henri, "American domination meant the perpetual oppression and undernourishment of all Oriental countries." (p. 242.) Of course, the Communists did have a pesky habit of treating people as things. (p. 241 - 242), Henri ratiocinates his way to supporting Communism by asking "but what does that mean compared to feeding the hungry?" (p. 242.) Nadine, likewise, explains her brief foray into the Communist Party by explaining that if she had been a member of the Communist Party she would not have had to feel guilty about the hungry kids she saw in Portugal during her trip there with Henri. (p. 171.) Likewise, there is a revealing scene where Anne is talking to some Americans about American support for Henry Wallace - FDR's former vice president until he was dumped in favor Harry S Truman because of Wallace's Leftist/Communist sympathies. Anne receives the explanation that "[t]hat man will never create a real leftist party. He's just an alibi for people who want to buy themselves a clear conscience cheaply." (p. 553.) A few pages later, Anne is shocked at finding Americans who don't agree that America will become fascist, and she drops the conversation because she realized that they "wanted to continue leading their comfortable, carefree, esthetes' life; no argument would dent their genteel egotism" (p. 563), which seems like a strange critique coming from a woman flits over to America at whim to have an affair and seems to want nothing more than to continue her comfortable, carefree, esthete's life.

Of course, there are American Mandarins.  A case in point is found in two on-line articles by and concerning American writer Michael Thomas. In this essay for Newsweek, Michael Thomas writes: But it won’t just end with taxes. When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street’s tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell’s head under the Christmas tree?) There will be kleptocrats who threaten to take themselves elsewhere if their demands on jurisdictions and tax breaks aren’t met, and I say let ’em go! Hey, enough with that "New Civility" nonsense. Thomas means business! But when you read this "inside baseball" puff-piece you find out that Thomas is  the kind of wealthy, spoiled, self-indulgent narcissist that Simone de Beauvoir was writing about in the 1940s.   A few excerpts will show this: We were all out by the pool,” Michael’s son William—from his first marriage, to Brooke Hayward—was telling me over the phone from his home in Sag Harbor. It was one of those Southampton summers in the late ’60s/early ’70s; dad was with his second wife, Wendell Adams, then. Her attractive younger sister Jane was always around, looking for a wealthy husband. “Jane was kind of uptight and a little bit prudish, but she had her bikini on and she was kind of showing off her bikini, and my father, right in front of me and my teenage friends and all these other people having the usual cocktail party out by the pool, got up and grabbed her and stripped her bikini off her and threw her in the pool, in front of his wife, too. I’m standing there and I’m holding the Polaroid land camera in my hand but I’m so stunned that I can’t take a picture.” Ha! Ha! Dad sexually assaulted and humiliated a woman in front of his sons. What a cut-up. Then, there's this: It’s a habit that, coupled with his abundant talent and ambition, might explain why he ended up “living my life backward.” By age 31, he was made general partner at Lehman Brothers, making $300,000 a year, which was a lot in those days. After the world of high finance had had enough of him, and he of it, he turned his hand to writing novels. And - Bobby Lehman helped him get a gig as the curatorial assistant in the department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, making $6,000 a year. He felt like his life was pretty much set. Two years later, he was locking horns with some asshole who was up to no good at the museum. Mr. Lehman asked him if might like to try out finance. How much? Six thousand five hundred. Deal! Then, of course, he had to go tell his father the news that his brilliant son had decided to sell out and take a meaningless job in banking. Because what kid isn't able to flush his first job and go to work for a top line banking business because he's dealing with "some asshole"? And - Distance prevailed even during his tenure at Lehman, when father and son worked in the same building. In those days, the Lehman brothers ate lunch at the round table: “Let’s say there were 35 partners, and some would be out of town, and some would be in the smaller rooms with clients, and there’d be maybe 15 or 25 of us. But, by ’71 or early—yeah, ’71, when Joe Thomas sat down for lunch, he would have two or three martinis. So I’m sitting there, and I don’t drink during the daytime, and so I’m sitting there, and, you know, your father’s at the end of the table, and everybody can see he’s half in the bag. And it’s tough.” Ah, yes, three martini lunches...the common touch. And - And, much like his father, he found the work pretty uncompelling. He compensated for that by enjoying himself a little too much and boasting a little too loudly about the wonderful talents of Madame Claude. “I mean, this was a wonderful time,” he recalled. (At this point in our conversation, he asked his son Francis, who recently graduated from college, to fetch him another Scotch.) “Madame Claude loomed very large; she was the biggest madam in the world, she had the best-looking girls. I remember once when I was at Lehman Brothers, our French partner, Jean Francois Malle, who is now dead, who was the brother of Louis Malle, we were in the bar and this fabulous-looking girl was there, and Jean Francois said to me, ‘She has to come with us now.’ So I called Madame Claude.” Her name was Annabelle. Later he would host a dinner party, eight men and Annabelle. “And she was fabulous,” he said. “Fabulous.” Because who among us isn't on a first name basis with a pimp or doesn't find enjoyable the idea of a "dinner party" with a hooker and eight men? And -

“We used to say if a girl is in a room and she’s better-looking and has good manners and that her conversation is better than any of the other women in the room, the chances are she’s from Madame Claude.”

Not like modern day pimps who barely teach their hookers any refinement.

And -

Mr. Niven recalled a party thrown by Jan Cushing for Arthur Schlesinger to celebrate his book about the Kennedys. Needing to fill a last-minute chair, she called up Michael, who drank three Johnnie Walkers straight up before crashing in.

“When he got there, he saw this girl with enormous tits and immediately went over and started talking to her, and soon enough she was giggling a lot because, as I’m sure you know, Michael can be quite funny.”

The girl with the enormous tits was still giggling when Ms. Cushing tried to get everyone to focus up. She asked Michael to ask Mr. Schlesinger a question. “What’s the capital of South Dakota,” he said. The girl next to him giggled, as did George Plimpton and Mr. Niven.

Ah, the times we had back then... getting bombed, crashing swanky parties, hanging out with Jan Cushing, Arthur Schlessinger and the girl with the enormous tits....

So, the guy who wrote the manifesto calling for the beheading of corrupt Wall Streeters is himself an alcoholic, jaded, rake who made his money on Wall Street.

Sounds a lot like he's trying to buy grace on the cheap just like the narcissistic, wealthy French existenstial leftists of the 1940s.

The Secret Life of French Marxist Intellectuals - Existentialist Division.

These pretenders think they can tell us anything about how to live?

The relationship between Simone de Beauvior and Jean Paul Sartre was simply perverse, and it was a perversity that hurt other people.  According to the Daily Mail:

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.


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.

Indeed, the only thing that aroused her to action was the pregnancy of one of her entourage.

She found the condition of pregnancy 'insulting' because it was an impediment to woman's self-fulfilment in the wider world, and Simone arranged an illegal backstreet abortion which nearly ended the girl's life.

Sartre's war record was equally dubious. Captured by the Germans, he got on so well with his guards that he managed to engineer his release in 1941.

But he did not rush straight into Simone's arms. He had been in Paris with another woman for two weeks before he told her he was free.

In 1940, when the Germans occupied Paris, Sartre's first reaction was to preach resistance, yet he soon lost interest and, instead, accepted the teaching post a Jewish professor had been forced to leave by the Nazis.

Sartre even fraternised with the German censor when he wanted his work published.

Since the couple were free to come and go as they pleased, the war proved one of the most exciting periods of their lives and the one which has gone down in history.

Writing in the pavement cafes of St Germain, with Picasso and his mistress at the next table, and going to nightclubs with the black-clad singer Juliette Greco, they enjoyed themselves to the hilt, fully expecting the Germans would remain in Paris for at least 20 years.

They now had at least five lovers between them - men and girls - all sleeping with each other.

It was too much for the mother of one pupil who brought an official complaint in 1943 against de Beauvoir, accusing her of corrupting a minor and acting as procurer in handing her daughter over to Sartre.

The charges failed to stick because de Beauvoir's little 'family' closed ranks and lied.

And though Simone lost her teaching job, she compensated for it by publishing her first novel.

Born from her real life experiences, it was about a menage a trois. Sartre's weighty philosophical tome Being And Nothingness was also published that year.

This was the rallying cry of existentialism, the creed that preaches there is no God and that man and woman are, therefore, free to do as they will.

It would become the bible of our licentious times, taken up by liberals everywhere in the West, and yet it was practically ignored at first.

Sartre drowned his sorrows at its lack of success with rampant womanising, this time in the company of the writer of the moment - the handsome, tall, dark Algerian Albert Camus, who joined in most of the couple's sex games.

Camus slept with all their impressionable young girls, but he could not bring himself to sleep with Simone herself whom he found 'a chatterbox, a blue stocking, unbearable'.


As an Allied victory became inevitable, Sartre began to paint himself once again as a Resistance fighter and, as such, was lionised when he visited America in 1945.

I've just finished reading de Beauvior's "The Mandarins" - my review should be up momentarily - and I found it to describe the empty, posturing, comfortable, buying cheap grace lifestyle described in this article to a "T."  It's a well-written book, but it has left me confused as to whether de Beauvior intended to write a book memorializing the fact that she and her fellow intellectuals were worthless human beings.

Of course, there's this:

The Americans did not take to Simone as they had to Sartre. They disliked her drinking, they mocked her clothes and they noticed her faint whiff of body odour.

And:

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.

After he died, Simone was left alone with his body in the hospital, and she crawled under the sheet to spend one last night with him. Now that his restless mind was stilled she at last had him where she wanted him.

And so she wrote her nihilistic epitaph for the tomb they would ultimately share, ensuring their bleak and Godless creed would go down in history. 'His death separates us, my death will not reunite us,' it read.

Finally, she'd had her own way - but in her heart she must have known it was only because she had managed to outlive him.