Merleau-Ponty was an illegitimate child of a married professor’s long affair

Evidence

For years in La Rochelle, Madame Merleau-Ponty had supposedly been the mistress of a very well-known, highly respected professor who was also married. Sartre’s mother, who had also lived in La Rochelle told me that everyone there knew about it, and that it was a public scandal to see this man seated at dinner parties with his wife on one side and his mistress on the other. It was he who was the father of the other two children, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his sister, Monique. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 565

Categorization

• SHARE: A biographical detail about Merleau-Ponty’s hidden family situation that a phenomenology scholar would find gripping.