Foreign News: Existentialist Murder?

In a crude wooden hut 20 miles from Paris, agents of the Paris police studied a fantastic corpse. It was the bloated body of a white man, but it had turned a ghastly, gleaming black. On each side of the torso, from rib to groin, the flesh had apparently been burned by a powerful chemical.

The police knew who the dead man was, and who owned the hut. Both were Existentialists—followers of the morbid postwar philosophy which holds that man is nothing but the sum of his experience and that all experience is inexplicable and tragic (TIME, Jan. 28). Was this...