Paris Pages — Fin

Sartre's birthday lunch, cemeteries, and catacombs

Jean Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir at a Paris Cafe

Dear Friends,

Happy Saturday. I hope this email finds you rested, well, and perhaps doing something a little bit indulgent. As I type this to you, I am in a favorite coffee shop, having just finished half a blueberry Danish and working on the dregs of an oat milk latte. Today I wish to share with you my final Paris Pages, memories and scenes from my month in Paris. Today I wish to share with you a few scenes from one of my favorite days, which I did not write about at the time. Thus, this week’s pages are the work of a more distant memory, and woven in with those memories, some reflections on mortality and my next book.

One of my favorite days in Paris was June 21^st, which happens to be the birthday of the existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. Sartre and his lifelong partner Simone de Beauvoir (the author of the landmark feminist text The Second Sex) lived out most of their days in the sixth arrondissement of Paris near the Montparnasse area. Like many other artists and authors of the post war Parisian society, Beauvoir and Sartre spent many an afternoon sitting outside cafes on the Left Bank like Cafe de Flore and its neighbor Les Deux Magots, drinking their espresso or wine, smoking like a chimney (in Sartre’s case) and writing. In fact, some of Sartre’s most well known philosophical anecdotes draws on scenes from cafes. We visited several literary cafes on other days (word to the wise: Café de Flore is to be avoided at all costs, but Les Deux Magots is nice). But on the 21^st we stopped by a favorite restaurant of Sartre and Beauvoir: Le Dome. (Which apparently also features in the Anne Hathaway cougar movie, The Idea of You…)