Abstract: Sartre’s fascination with the Fall and divine condemnation is a recurring feature of existentialist biographies. In the cases of Baudelaire, Genet, and Flaubert, it allows him to deploy a certain relation to time, and to continue a reflection on the mysteries of writing that had been interrupted—this is connected to his relation to his childhood, with its rejection of History and its neurosis. The rejection of a nostalgia for a lost Eden therefore appears to support a general representation of literature.
