A Dangerous Liaison by Carole Seymour-Jones
Arrow Books, 320pp, £8.99

Simone de Beauvoir and John-Paul Sartre's lives are among the most exhaustively catalogued of the 20th century. Beauvoir's several volumes of memoirs were designed to construct a legend around their relationship. They wanted to live by their philosophical theories and form a new kind of relationship which would allow them both complete freedom. They would be each other's "necessary" love, while other lovers would be merely "contingent", and they would avoid "bad faith" by being completely honest with each other, narrating every last detail of their other sexual encounters.

Since their deaths in the 1980s, biographers have been revealing the rather sordid reality that lay behind this highly idealistic and much-feted arrangement. Carole Seymour-Jones is the latest, and goes the furthest yet in digging up the dirt.

She views the pair as an existentialist version of the cruel former lovers in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, who play games with young women for their own amusement, and exposes their attempt to live authentically as the very embodiment of bad faith.

In the attempt to banish jealousy and find a new more honest way of conducting relationships, they fell into some of the worst clichés of the bourgeois marriage they sought to avoid, with endless deception, jealousy and a string of discarded mistresses.

Seymour-Jones tells an entertaining story, but the amount of prurient detail leaves the reader feeling as voyeuristic as its subjects. She relies too heavily on reading their novels as thinly disguised autobiography - even Sartre and Beauvoir, who notoriously drew on their tangled lives for fiction, must be allowed some creative imagination.
Hannah Stone