Mini-article about Jean-Paul Sartre’s love letters

Here is the mini-article about Jean-Paul Sartre’s love letters published in The Times, February 13^th.

^{It was like discovering a lost Inca ruin. Buried in a cardboard box in Manhattan, at the Morgan Library. While researching a book, ‘What It Feels Like To Be Alive’, I recently came across a bundle of forgotten philosophical love letters from Jean-Paul Sartre to a young American woman, Sally Swing.}

^{Sartre’s most famous one-liner is ‘Hell is other people’. In Being and Nothingness, the great French existentialist argued that we have only two options: sadism or masochism. He was a self-confessed ‘bastard’, but to Sally Swing – ‘mon cher petit animal’ – he was capable of writing ‘some of the most beautiful love letters imaginable’.}

^{Swing (23) was a tyro journalist in post-war Paris, despatched to the Cannes film festival in 1947 to interview the philosopher. Sartre (42) was ‘ugly as sin, but utterly charming.’ So began an affair that was to last several years, kept aloft by air-mail.}