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

By early summer of 1944, as Allied forces moved towards Paris, everyone knew that freedom was near. The growing emotion was hard to take, as Beauvoir noted; it was like the painful tingling that comes when sensation returns after numbness.