Les Jeux sont faits.

Les Jeux sont faits (1947), known in English as The Chips Are Down, began as a screenplay Sartre wrote for the director Jean Delannoy, whose film appeared the same year. It tells of Eve and Pierre, a woman and a man who never met in life and who, once dead, learn from the keepers of the afterworld that they had been destined for one another. Granted a single day to return to the living and secure the love they were denied, they find that the habits, loyalties, and circumstances of their earlier lives conspire against them. Cast as a modern fable of freedom and determinism, the work translates Sartre's existentialist conviction that existence precedes essence into a popular and affecting story, and remains among the most accessible expressions of his philosophy.