The
Prison*
ANDRE MALRAUX
THE
LIBRARY
at Altenburg was impressive. A central column pushed
the Roman arches high up into the shadows where the book-shelves
disappeared, for the room was lit only by electric lamps set at eye–
level. The night entered through a vast stained glass window. Here
and there were a few gothic sculptures, photographs of Tolstoi and
Nietzsche, a glass show-case containing letters from the latter to
Uncle Walter, a portrait of Montaigne, the death-masks of Pascal
and Beethoven (those members of the family, my father thought).
In a large alcove, his uncle was waiting for
him
behind a desk that
looked like a kitchen table, deliberately isolated - set on a wooden
stand a step high, which permitted him to dominate his interlocutor:
from just such ostentatious penury did Philip II in his cell look down
disdainfully on the nave of the Escurial.
When the train had stopped my father had seen him on the
platform: though he didn't know him, he knew his crutches. Standing
very straight, with two retainers beside him, his uncle watched his
approach with the curious immobility in which he cloaked
his
infir–
mity; a very high collar and a little black tie were visible under the
light byronic cape that reached below his knees; gold-rimmed glasses
rested on the broken nose of Michelangelo-Michelangelo at the
end of a long academic career.... A formal welcome in the best
manner had been immediately followed by:
"We rise at eight."
To my father's astonishment they had set off on foot. The
retainers followed; the solemn outlines of the spruce trees under the
*
This is a chapter from
La Lutte avec L'Ange,
the first volume of Malraux's
new long novel. The novel is written in the first person, and begins with the
hero's capture by the Germans in the Battle of France in 1940. In a prison–
camp, he sets out to tell the story of his father's life, which is to afford certain
illuminating parallels with his own. The present episode takes place before
World War
I.
The hero's father, Vincent Berger, of a Franco-German family,
has been a professor at Constantinople; he is summoned home by the news that
his father, Dietrich Berger (the hero's grandfather), has committed suicide. He
is met at the family's country home at Altenburg (in Alsace) by 'his uncle, Walter
Berger, brother of the suicide.
