Word: malraux
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Writing. Every morning Malraux tears up the previous day's page from his appointment calendar. "Why go back?" he says. "The torn page is no longer there." In the same manner, he abjures birthday celebrations, and there were none last week. Still, Malraux has reached a degree of eminence at which there is universal agreement on his importance, if virtually none on his foremost achievement. Some believe that Malraux will be remembered largely for his writing. "A very great writer," says Pierre Viansson-Ponté, political editor of Le Monde. "With their backgrounds of the Far East, Spain...
Poet Laureate. Malraux has always seemed to be where history was being made-revolutionary China, Spain during the Civil War, France during the Resistance. From novelist to reporter, revolutionary to Resistance fighter, adventurer to Cabinet Minister, he often seemed to be history's chosen witness. "There is no question," writes Pierre Galante in Malraux, his recent biography, "that of all Malraux's work, the most vivid, the most tragic, the richest adventure has been the story of his own life." A French journalist and editor of Paris-Match, Galante gleaned a wealth of new detail on the "intimate...
...Despite Malraux's early sympathy for militant Trotskyism, it was his relationship with Charles de Gaulle-a relationship that Le Monde's Viansson-Ponté likens to that of "sovereign and poet laureate"-that gave lasting political direction to his career. The French President considered his handsome Culture Minister "my brilliant friend" and "incomparable witness." As Malraux saw it, De Gaulle gave the French a consciousness of their own greatness...
...village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises to pay homage to the French President, soldiers prevented all but the official funeral procession from following the body to the cemetery. As Galante recounts it, an old peasant woman began to cry out: "He said everyone could be here! He said everyone!" Malraux stopped and took her by the arm. "Let her through," he said to one of the soldiers lining the road. "She speaks for France." The soldier stepped aside...
Love. One of the most charming anecdotes in Galante's book concerns Malraux's 1933 meeting with Louise de Vilmorin, an infectiously gay and witty writer. Over lunch one day, Malraux announced: "It is with you that I shall end my life." Despite that airy prediction, the two drifted apart after a brief affair, and they did not meet again until 1967. Malraux, then separated from his wife Madeleine, determined to keep his prophecy. He moved into the Vilmorin château at Verières-le-Buisson. not far from Paris, beginning a period of almost carefree...