On the one hand, tragedy – always in the plural – that which innervates the great novels (
The Conquerors,
The Human Condition
, Hope
) anchored in the bloody history of the century;
on the other, the intimate dramas, the family dramas, which marked the life of André Malraux, from the suicide of his father, in 1930, until the accidental death of his two young sons, in 1961, ten- seven years after the disappearance of their mother, Josette Clotis, companion of the writer between 1933 and 1944.
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As we know, Malraux rarely spoke about his private or intimate life, castigating in his
Antimémoires
(1967) those who give away their
“miserable little pile of secrets”
.
The formula is known, but is not worth this other confidence:
“It is accepted that a man's truth is first and foremost what he hides.”
For someone who admits to having known a
“bloody and vain life”
, where fiction ensures the salvation of reality, it is more than an admission.
A cursed life.
François Mauriac was right:
“Malraux’s authenticity lies in this contemplation of nothingness from which adventure does not deliver him.”
At the heart of this nothingness, like a hidden center of gravity, there is Josette Clotis.
Most of the novelist's biographers have either carefully dismissed it, or denigrated it, on the air...
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