Simone de Beauvoir knew that a life without love was a waste of time. Her enduring love for Sartre seems to have been contingent on her living in hotels and not making a home with him, which in the 1950s was more radical than I believe even she realized. She remained committed to Sartre being the essential love of her life for fifty-one years, despite their other attachments. She knew she never wanted children or to serve his breakfast or run his errands or pretend she was not intellectually engaged with the world to make herself more loveable to him. She was appalled by middle age, in ways I did not completely understand. All the same, as she had written to the writer Nelson Algren, in the flush of their new love, ‘I want everything from life, I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and have loneliness, to work much and write good books and to travel and enjoy myself…’