258
PARTISAN REVIEW
The previous proprietor of the mansion had been the owner of the
National City Bank. We had found a large vault which I had asked
a team of ex-convicts to break into: it contained all sorts of silver–
ware, precious metals, even gold . . . . There was also a large recep–
tion room, or rather a large ballroom, with a painted ceiling and
intricate woodwork, copied from a Roman palazzo. I asked Le
Corbusier what to do with it. He answered, 'Don't touch it, it's a
fine piece of craftsmanship, let's respect that.' Since then, each time
I've moved into a new house with an old room or a weird kitchen,
I have kept it.
Among the political decisions Levi-Strauss had to make during those
years were the bridges he helped build between French and American
social sciences. Given the pitiful state of social sciences in France before
the war, Levi-Strauss set out to restructure this field by arranging high–
level meetings between French academics and the Rockefeller Founda–
tion. Throughout
1946
and
1947,
a number of exchanges took place
between Pierre Auger, the head of French Universities, Charles Moraze,
the secretary of the International Committee of Historical Sciences, and
several officers of the Rockefeller Foundation, to work on the develop–
ment of the social sciences in France. "In France.. .]. H. Willits, the
president of the Rockefeller Foundation, declared the problems to be
huge." Indeed, the Americans were convinced that France was "the
European country with the greatest opportunities for the Rockefeller
Foundation's work." Toward the end of
1949,
the Foundation had
voted to grant the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes thirty thousand dol–
lars for three years to establish a department of "social and economic
sciences." Through this grant, economics broke away from the law fac–
ulty, and sociology and history were no longer buried in the humanities.
The grant gathered together what would become France's first team of
young researchers in the social sciences.
While Levi-Strauss continued to take advantage of the opportunities
offered by the city, he was also expected to entertain a variety of distin–
guished visitors such as Roger Caillois, Albert Camus, Ie Cardinal Tis–
serand, and Jules Romains. "All these people felt compelled, out of
courtesy, to pay me a visit," he recalls with a smile. But he disliked the
many administrative tensions and political skirmishes that eventually
led him to resign:
There were difficulties between the cultural services of the embassy,
and Ambassador Bonnet and especially his wife. Unlike them, I was
