Many years ago, at the ass end of the Brezhnev era, I purchased a pair of Jean Paul Sartre's old spectacles from a vendeur de souvenirs existentialiste on the Left Bank, an Algerian pied-noir known as Raymond. They were tortoise shell frames with remarkably warped lenses, the result, Raymond told me, of being condemned to focus on Simone de Beauvoir's miserably depressing face for year after miserable year. This unusual defect was how I could be sure that the spectacles were genuine, he explained. There was also a large crack in the glass on the right side, he added, caused during a violent altercation involving Sartre, Alberto Moravia and Arthur Koestler when Sartre had been caught in the face by an arm clad in a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, possibly belonging to Freddie Ayer: an example of an international situation memorialised in optical damage, he joked.
I was hesitant to buy the spectacles at first, since most of my spending money had already been seized in a Montparnasse bookshop by a guilt-inducing, hunchbacked purveyor of several important-looking, Bible-heavy literary journals; impenetrable chronicles of ersatz Gallic navel-gazing that I was hoping to justify buying if I carried no other reading material with me on the plane flight home. Hell is other people with physical deformities making you feel intellectually inferior, I remember deciding at the time: a maxim that I find still holds true today, especially whenever I'm perusing the shelves at The Curious Worm in downtown Bindings, MS.
Nevertheless, the prospect of owning spectacles that had once balanced on the combative nose of the man who wrote Nausea was very tempting, even if they could no longer serve the purpose for which they were designed. Raymond could obviously tell that I was wavering. Just think how popular you will be with young ladies when you are wearing these glasses, he said. Sartre famously resembled a wizened old toad, yet the women flocked to him when his piggy little eyes were concealed by attractive eye-wear like this, so you will have no problem, my friend, particularly when you are charming them with your extensive knowledge of thermodynamicism in the cafes near the Sorbonne. Thermodynamics is a branch of science, I informed him, not of philosophy. But Raymond simply shrugged, as if such distinctions were merely different chapters in the same book on how to pick up girls. He had a good point, though, I had to admit.
If you give to me fifteen American dollars then these historical spectacles will belong to you, Raymond said flatly. It is a reasonable price. A beret worn by Andre Malraux when he was facing a Nazi firing squad will cost you twice this amount, he added, and it will smell bad too. I offered him twelve bucks in grubby traveller's checks, signed with the name Marshall B. Plann (a nom de plume I frequently employed when touring Europe in those days). That's all the money I have in my pockets, I explained, so you'll have to take it or leave it, unless, of course, you're willing to do a straight swap for the Levi-Strauss 501 denim jeans I currently have on?
A relentless, bitter wind blew across the Seine that day. Perhaps not the best weather for parading around those Parisian boulevards without any pants. Yet I was not bothered in the least: I carried a shopping bag crammed full of unreadable French gibberish: an ancient pair of Jean Paul Sartre's broken spectacles were clipped to the elasticated waistband of my boxer shorts; and it would be fair to say that my entire being was now embossed with the eradicable hallmark of the intellectual. I bade Raymond farewell and bonne chance, before sauntering off down the Rue Tit, deep in thought, bare legs glinting in the cold sunlight.
