She rejected marriage so completely that she sat on a bench outside the Louvre and proposed a two-year lease on a relationship. Decades after her death, her private letters revealed the rest: hidden romances, fierce jealousies, and manipulative love triangles that her carefully curated memoirs had erased. This episode examines Simone de Beauvoir as she actually was, a mind that laid the groundwork for modern feminism while stumbling through the very human traps her philosophy was supposed to transcend. Born to a fallen bourgeois family in a freezing Paris apartment, caught between a devoutly Catholic mother and a father who bragged she had "a man's brain," she abandoned faith at 14, concluding that belief itself was an evasion of responsibility.

At 21 she became the youngest person ever to pass France's brutal agrégation exam, placing secon ...