At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

by Sarah Bakewell

Sartre would later write, apropos Flaubert’s lack of love in childhood, that when love ‘is present, the dough of the spirits rises, when absent, it sinks’.