Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [182]
The next day, alone, I went to the nearby Louvre, then still flanked by the gigantic wedding-cake of the monument to Gambetta, which did not survive the holocaust of (mainly Republican) statuary during the German occupation and since the war. I was impressed by the size of the Venus de Milo and, more sincerely, by the Victory of Samothrace and doubtless stopped before the Mona Lisa. But she did not speak my language. Another picture did, Manet’s Olympia. Perhaps it was natural that a virgin boy of fifteen should be transfixed by the cool, adult gaze of that astonishing image of a naked woman, glorying in luxe and calme, and for the moment visibly uninterested in volupté. And yet, what made my first encounter with this masterpiece so unforgettable was not the sensuality – after all, the Louvre is full of sexy nudes – but the sense that this wonderful painter was not interested in the incidental emotion but in ‘the truth’; in the stumbling words of a later generation of adolescents in ‘telling it like it is’. The Olympia is what I remember from my first visit to Paris. If I needed converting to France, Manet was the right missionary.
I was in need of information rather than conversion. For the next three years, obliged to pass examinations in French for the first time, it came from books and schoolmasters, including a French intellectual preparing agrégation or thèse, who naturally assumed he was at the cutting edge of French culture. He assured me that there were only three serious contemporary writers, namely the three Gs – André śGide, Jean Giono and Jean Giraudoux. I do not know why he favoured this selection rather than, say, Gide, Céline and Malraux. I tried them all conscientiously, and found Gide boring as, I confess, I still do. I already knew about Jean Giono, from the Vossische Zeitung in Berlin, which had published in instalments a translation of one of his rhapsodies of peasant life in upper Provence. I was so deeply moved by his casserole of sun, soil, passion and rural brutalism, that some years later on a hitchhike to the Mediterranean I made a special detour to visit Manosque in the Basses Alpes, where he lived, to pay my homage to the author – he was not there – and to dip briefly into the rushing icy waters of the river Durance, witness to his human dramas. I found that at least one other admirer had made the same pilgrimage, a not very attractive young woman of Polish immigrant parents, equally knocked out by his searing eloquence, and we compared notes chastely in the Provençal night. I still have the cheap editions of his novels of the period, but I have not had the courage to re-read them since.
On the other hand, even today I find myself from time to time re-reading the elegant Jean Giraudoux, who was then known to a wider French public chiefly as a very successful playwright of intellectual inclinations, performed by the great actor-manager Louis Jouvet. His La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu (The Trojan War will not take place), which demonstrated a melancholy conviction that another world war was utterly inevitable, remains a major text for students of the French establishment in the 1930s. I admired him for his soliloquies in the form of novels, especially the wonderful fireworks display of Siegfried et le Limousin, written shortly after the First World War and devoted to demonstrating both the