“Everything began to smile on me.”1 He announced to Beauvoir, still convalescing in the south, that Gallimard had decided to publish his novel Nausea after all.2 “Today, I walk the streets like an author.” One of his short stories was going to appear in the summer issue of Gallimard’s prestigious journal, the Nouvelle Revue Française. And he had landed a new teaching post. After eight years of exile in different towns—eight years of hanging about on railway platforms—he and Beauvoir would finally both be in Paris. In the summer, they spent six weeks in Greece, three of those weeks with Bost. They slept in the open. Sartre and Bost raced each other down the marble steps of the Acropolis. They traveled to the Cyclades islands on decrepit old boats. (In the choppy seas, Beauvoir invariably heaved her guts up, and Sartre would accuse her of self-indulgence.) Beauvoir planned exhausting excursions, to which Sartre mostly good-naturedly concurred. (When he did not, she admits she was capable of shedding “tears of pure rage.”3) On the island of Santorini, they set off on their longest walk, one they would never forget.
