French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre was an unlikely candidate for a "literary Don Juan" (as he liked to call himself). The first girl that he became infatuated with in school rejected him, calling him a "cross-eyed old fool." It was an inauspicious introduction to the opposite sex. His prospects did not look any more promising as an adult: He stood just five-foot-one, dressed in oversized clothes, and had no concept of personal hygiene.

Sartre miraculously overcame these deficiencies by simply ignoring them and projecting an aura of confidence. He admitted that, as a youth, "[1] was very melancholy because I was ugly and that made me suffer. I have absolutely rid myself of that, because it's a weakness." He only needed one thing to seduce women: les mots ("his words").

He lost his virginity at the age of eighteen to an older married woman. "I did it with no great enthusiasm," he said, "because she wasn't very pretty." It was okay for him to be ugly, but Sartre held the women he slept with to a higher standard. In a similar vein, he felt no respect for prostitutes because "a girl shouldn't give herself like that" ... yet he regularly visited brothels with his university friends.

When Sartre was twenty-one, he fell in love with Germaine Marron and requested her hand in marriage. Her parents originally consented but called the wedding off when Sartre failed his teaching exam in the summer of 1928. "I was relieved," Sartre wrote. ''I'm not sure of having acted quite correctly in this whole affair."

In fact, he had not been acting "correctly" during his engagement: He had been having an affair with Simone Jollivet, a playwright and actress who lived in the nearby city of Toulouse. When Sartre presented Jollivet with a bottle of perfume, he was miffed that she placed it on her nightstand beside four other bottles from four other lovers. "What? Do you own me?" she said angrily. "Am I supposed to sit here and wait for your occasional appearances [in Toulouse]?" After thinking it over, Sartre agreed with her. "She was right, of course, and I knew it. I concluded that jealousy is possessiveness. Therefore, I decided never to be jealous again."

In 1929, while studying for his second attempt at his teaching certification, Sartre met a fellow philosophy student who shared his values: Simone de Beauvoir. The long and winding road from their meeting to their burial in a shared Parisian grave is recounted earlier in this book (page 31), but suffice it to say that the open nature of their relationship allowed Sartre the freedom to sleep around as he pleased. His burgeoning literary fame - as a playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and critic-guaranteed him a constant stream of young ladies who were eager to make his acquaintance.

Sartre's love life was not without drama. He often saw several different women concurrently, booking them into separate slots in his busy schedule. (It's amazing that he ever found the time to write.) The details of his various liaisons is dizzying, but here's a taste from Hazel Rowley's Sartre-Beauvoir biography Tête-à-Tête:

His women all lived within ten minutes of him; they rarely saw one another, and none of them knew the truth about his life. Arlette had no idea that after going for three weeks' vacation every year with her, Sartre went away with Wanda for two or three weeks. Wanda did not know that Sartre still saw Michelle. When he slept at Beauvoir's, he told Wanda he was sleeping at home. His letters to Wanda were filled with outrageous inventions. He'd be late back to Paris, he once told her. He was locked up in a castle in Austria.

He continued to live out his promiscuous dream right up until the end of his life. In 1979, at the age of seventy-four, a toothless and blind Sartre remarked to one of his girlfriends that, not counting Beauvoir and her girlfriend Sylvie Le Bon, "there are nine women in my life at the moment!" Not a bad ending for a "cross-eyed old fool."

IN HIS OWN WORDS

Sartre's Crabs

When he was thirty-two, Jean-Paul Sartre was plagued by a bad case of crabs. As he told John Gerassi in 1971:

After I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. [Three or four of them] followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, "Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?" I would talk to them all the time. I would say, "Okay, guys, we're going into class now, so we have to be still and quiet," and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang .... The crabs stayed with me until the day I simply decided that they bored me and that I just wouldn't pay attention to them.