Photo of the Week – March 29, 2013

I came across this photograph while searching for images for Ashlee Girdner’s upcoming article Jean Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir: An Existential Love Affair. De Beauvoir and Sartre are buried side by side at the Cimetière du Montparnasse. As this photo shows, visiters to the couple’s gravesite sometimes leave metro tickets held down by small stones. The reasoning? Some say it refers to Sartre’s support of the French Maoists who, in response to a raise in metro fare, stole tickets and distributed them to French workers.

photo by Evan O’Neil from New York, NY, U.S.A. (Flickr) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons