Word: malraux
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...Malraux cannot, though all his life long he has wistfully acknowledged its power for others. "Certainly there is a higher faith: that proclaimed by all the village crosses," he wrote. "It is love, and peace is in it. I will never accept it; I will never bow to ask of it the peace to which my weakness beckons...
...Malraux found man's greatness to be defiance of man's fate. The real defeat was "having to accept one's destiny, one's place in the world, to feel shut up in a life there's no escaping, like a dog in a kennel." The drive to "at last attain something beyond, something outside himself" is Malraux's "warrant for release from man's estate." "If man is not ready to risk his life, where is his dignity?" demands Malraux...
Turning Life to Account. Originally Flemish, the Malraux family were for 300 years shipbuilders at Dunkirk. André Malraux's grandfather was a fierce little man who for 22 years attended Mass kneeling on the ground outside, in rain or wind, because of a quarrel with the church authorities. He had a prejudice against insurance, and when a storm sank his whole fishing fleet off Newfoundland, the Malraux family fortune was wiped out. André was brought up by his mother, who ran a small grocery shop in a Paris suburb...
Though legend has it that he attended two "institutes," the institutes have no record of him. Malraux, ever willing to foster the legend of himself, has always refused to supply detailed data on his personal life. But somehow he acquired a vast knowledge of archaeology, art and ancient cultures. Already, he had begun to chafe at the bourgeoisie's world of "fact, ordered by no transcendence, and subjecting them to nothing," and yearned to "leave a scar on the face of the earth...
...Khmer statues still lay undiscovered along the ancient Royal Way to Angkor Vat. In 1923, he and his first wife, Clara Goldschmidt, plunged into Cambodia's jungles, found the statues, and lugged them out on oxcarts. The French colonial authorities promptly impounded them as historical monuments, and put Malraux on trial for trying to remove them. His wife rushed back to France, succeeded in getting an impressive list of important writers to protest his arrest. His trial was dropped, and the saturnine young man returned to France as the dashing hero of a cause...