Word: claudels
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Perhaps the best way to understand is to enter the dim, vaulted portal of Notre Dame de Paris with young Paul Claudel at vespers time on Christmas...
...Latin vespers' chant rose majestic and sonorous. Notre Dame seemed every moment less a church of man, and more the infinite, spacious House of God. Then Paul Claudel was suddenly upon his knees. . . . "Alors se produisit," he has said, "I'événement qui domine tout ana vie. This, of all my life, was the dominant moment. My heart was touched. Je crus-I believed! . . . Blinding, ineffable, had come the revelation. I had realized the heart-rending innocence, the eternal childhood...
Three years more Paul Claudel waited, questioning himself, then he entered wholly, passionately the Roman Catholic Church. The perfume of censers and the deep thoughtful twilight of cathedrals began to mingle strangely with the keen and originally hated wit of this great young writer-for Paul Claudel rapidly became, and is still, one of the foremost poets and dramatists of France...
...Admired by some, detested by others, discussed by all," such was and is the fate of his genius. Germans discovered it early and compared M. Claudel to Goethe. Britons are coming to admit, at last, that Paul Claudel, though he is often as obscure as Shakespeare could be, has also some of the bard's creative imagination. Frenchmen are still of two minds about Claudel. "Ha!" snorted once, reputedly, M. Clemenceau, "he writes like a holy ghost-when did France ever have such an Ambassador...
Indeed the diplomatic career of Paul Claudel is totally anomalous. Who has heard before of a mystic-Vice Consul (New York, 1893; Boston, 1894), of a poet- Consul (Shanghai, Foochow, Tienstin, Prague, Frankfort-On-Main and Hamburg until 1914), finally who ever heard of an active play-wright† as Minister to Brazil (1916), to Denmark (1919) and finally Ambassador to Japan since 1921? The man is a reductio ad paradoxa...