Ulysse sans Ithaque

31. Biarritz. La roue tourne, Chéri!

 Qu'est-ce que tu comptais donc me laisser après toi, ma Nounoune, quand tu m'as renvoyé ? Tu as fait de la grandeur d'âme à bon compte, tu savais ce que c'était qu'un Chéri, tu ne risquais pas grand-chose. Mais, toi de naître si longtemps avant moi, moi de t'aimer au-dessus des autres femmes, nous en avons été bien punis : te voilà finie et consolée que c'en est une honte, et moi... Moi, tandis que les gens disent : Il y a eu la guerre,  je peux dire : Il y a eu Léa, la guerre... Je croyais que je ne songeais pas plus à l'une qu'à l'autre, c'est l'une et l'autre pourtant qui m'ont poussé hors de ce temps-ci. Désormais, je n'occuperai partout que la moitié d'une place..

Tu n'as été unique que... pendant un temps ~ Colette, La Fin de Chéri, 1926

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Maurice Goudeket, le troisième époux de Colette, raconte qu'elle relisait inlassablement Balzac et Proust. Et qu'elle aimait Zola. Colette - comme Balzac, Zola et Proust - aurait été un psychopathologue exquis. Capable d'apercevoir le réel qu'on vit, mais qui nous échappe, qu'on nous cache, qui se cache, ou que nous nous cachons....

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Lord Kenneth Clark, about Rodin, but above all, about Balzac: 

Balzac had been dead for many years when Rodin received the commission, and the commemorative figure had to be an ideal likeness - a serious obstacle to him, as he always worked direct from nature. All he had to go on was the knowledge that Balzac was short and fat and worked in his dressing-gown. Yet he had also to make Balzac look immense -the dominating imagination of his age, and yet transcending his age. He set about the problem in a peculiar way: he made five or six figures of a fat naked man to satisfy his sense of Balzac's physical reality; and after contemplating them for several months, he chose one of them, which he covered with a cast of drapery indicative of the famous dressing-gown. In this way he contrived to give the figure both monumentality and movement.

The result is to my mind the greatest piece of sculpture of the nineteenth century - indeed the greatest since Michelangelo. 

But this is not the way in which it struck Rodin's contemporaries when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1898. They were horrified. Rodin was a hoax, a swindler. They even raised the cry of la patrie en danger, which shows how seriously the French take art. The crowds surging round it, insulting it and threatening it with their fists, were unanimous on one point of criticism: that the attitude was impossible and that no body could exist under such draperies. Rodin, sitting nearby, knew that he had only to strike the figure with a hammer, and the draperies would fall off, leaving the body visible. Hostile critics said that it was like a snowman, a dolmen, an owl and a heathen god - all quite true, but we no longer regard them as terms of abuse. 

Balzac's body has the timelessness of a druidical stone, and his head has the voracity of an owl. The real reason why he made people so angry is the feeling that he could gobble them up, and doesn't care a damn for their opinions. Balzac, with his prodigious understanding of human motives, scorns conventional values, defies fashionable opinion, as Beethoven did, and should inspire us to defy all those forces that threaten to impair our humanity: lies, tanks, tear-gas, ideologies, opinion polls, mechanisation, planners, computers -the whole lot.

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