Free Travelers' Tales Paris by James O'Reilly Page A

square—and recognize Sartre; or to see Simone Signoret and Yves Montand having a drink with friends at the Flore. But if the stars appeared occasionally, those in supporting roles—writers and poets of various nationalities living in Paris, actors and film-stars, chanteurs and impresarios—were regular visitors, and you could count on seeing them if you went to the cafés at certain times of the day, or at night after the shows.
    All this was enough to attract intellectual tourism, and put prices up beyond the reach of students, who increasingly favoured the less expensive establishments further down the Boulevard St-Michel. By the 60s many of the small food shops had become boutiques, the run-down hotels where impecunious writers and artists had lived were refurbished into three-star hotels, and the apartments had been bought up and restored—yet another twist in the fortunes of a district which had fluctuated from commercial prosperity in the Middle Ages to dilapidation at the beginning of this century, when its derelict buildings had become the abode of students from the Beaux Arts and other university annexes. Yet despite it all, the area retained something of its village atmosphere, as it still does, with crowded street-markets, food-stands and flower-sellers suffusing the air with varied fragrances, antiques and exotica shops, while the presence of important cultural institutions such as the Institute and the Academy, and of major publishing houses ensures its continued intellectual prestige.
    But St-Germain was a mental space far more than just a geographical district, for it symbolized the triumph of France’s spirit after collapse on the battlefield. Germany had aimed its guns against culture, and lost; France had used culture as its weapon and won, wiping out the shame of military defeat. Jean-Paul Sartre (whose name more than any other was associated with the district) was one of a group of extraordinary French men and women in the forefront of European thought, who shaped their epoch: Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Aron, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Simone Weil, Albert Camus....
    Out of their writings here, in St-Germain, was born the philosophy of Existentialism, a philosophy popularized above all by Sartre’s fiction. Each generation of students has its particular vocabulary, based on the prevalent ideas of its time. Ours was compounds of Existentialism, Marxism, Psychoanalysis.... At that time in Paris the majority of young people who called themselves “Existentialists” had no more read Sartre and Camus than most Communists had read Marx, but the ideas were in the air, and the post-war climate propitious for their spread.
    I was given Sartre’s lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” and later ploughed through numerous volumes of Sartre, as well as Camus. Philosophical choices depend on temperament and circumstance, and at the time Existentialism, as I understood it, suited mine: it was an expression of exile. It proposed that man is alone, “abandoned” in the universe; and free, and that the price of his freedom is perpetual anxiety; that there is no predetermined destiny, since we choose what we wish to be and thereby make our own destinies; that life has no meaning save what we give it; and that art and literature can redeem existence, which is fundamentally absurd. Most people, it says, refuse their freedom and take refuge in fantasy and self-deception, which leads them to “bad-faith” and “inauthenticity.” But freedom is exercised within a “situation” which can change by “action” (notably political action), and this makes commitment unavoidable.
    I like Sartre’s face. Some say it is ugly. It cannot be ugly: his intelligence irradiates his features. Hidden ugliness is the most repulsive; Sartre’s face has the candor of an erupting volcano. When he enters the Dôme or La Coupole, he is like a suppressed bull