A strange literary coincidence occurred in Paris exactly 40 years ago, on 14 April, 1986. 

In the small hours of the morning, Jean Genet, enfant terrible of French literature, tripped on a step leading to the toilet in his tiny Left Bank hotel room. He fell forward and fatally smashed his head on the tile floor. Several hours later, feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir expired in a Paris hospital only a few blocks away.

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Two French literary legends were dead. They had died within hours of each other in the same district of Paris. 

Jean Genet and Simone de Beauvoir were bonded by more than the dramatic unity of their final act. They had been close friends for more than four decades. Their connection was Jean-Paul Sartre. In the 1940s, Sartre had discovered Genet’s early work, written in a prison where he was banged up on multiple theft convictions. Sartre proclaimed Genet’s genius to the world. He also successfully petitioned, along with Jean Cocteau, to secure a pardon for Genet and have him released from jail.

Jean Genet was a perfect literary fetish for the Sartre-Beauvoir couple. His novels and plays about the underworld of male prostitutes, pimps, transvestites and con artists resonated with their revolt against bourgeois morality. In 1947, Sartre’s book about........

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