Simone de Beauvoir

Beauvoir came second in the national philosophy examination in 1929, behind Sartre, at twenty-one — the youngest person ever to pass it. Twenty years later she published "The Second Sex", nearly a thousand pages arguing that woman is not born but made, which the Vatican put on its index of forbidden books.

She wrote novels, four volumes of memoir, and reporting on the Algerian war. She and Sartre shared fifty-one years and never married or lived together. They lie in the same grave at Montparnasse, where readers still leave metro tickets and notes.