  Marcel often emphasised the extent to which music had played a significant role in his philosophical inspiration. He was famous for his improvisations on classical 19th century poems, which his wife noted after the Second World War. We saw earlier that Sartre in a famous passage of Nausea had described an encounter with jazz music in a café as a sublime experience in which the beautiful inner coherence of the musical flow transcended for a moment the nauseating meaninglessness of the material world. And note also de Beauvoir’s late enthusiasm for music (in Francis and Gontier 1979, 67).