asking a bit much.
At the end of the nineteenth century Camille Claudel had overwhelmed the great Auguste Rodin and created sculptures of singular beauty. She had dictated a contract to Rodin, forbidding him to have any other models but her, and obliged him to win her commissions and pay for her to have an Italian trip – and in return he could visit her four times a month in her studio. He complied. But then in 1893 she left him anyway.
From that moment things went steeply downhill for her. In 1913, twenty years later, she can think of nothing but him. She has grown fat and bloated in the meantime: unwashed, matted hair, confused expression. There is nothing now to recall the young sculptress forwhom first Rodin and then Claude Debussy fell head over heels. She is living in a cluttered ground-floor flat at 19 Quai Bourbon, deludedly destroying with accurate blows of her hammer all the works she has created; she feels persecuted by her family and by Rodin and by the rest of the world. She is convinced that Rodin, whom she last saw sixteen years ago, is shamelessly plagiarising her works.
Since she is firmly convinced that everyone is trying to poison her, she eats nothing but potatoes and drinks boiled water, and the shutters are kept closed so no one can spy on her. Her brother Paul Claudel visits her and then notes concisely in his diary: ‘In Paris. Camille insane, wallpaper hanging in long strips from the walls, one broken armchair, terrible dirt. She herself is fat and dirty and talks uninterruptedly in a monotonous and metallic voice.’
On 5 March, Dr Michaux issues a medical certificate that authorises Paul Claudel to have his sister committed to a closed institution. On Monday 10 March two beefy nurses break down the heavily bolted door to Camille Claudel’s studio and drag the screaming woman outside. She is forty-eight. On the same day she is brought to the Ville-Évrard mental hospital, where the psychiatrist in charge, Dr Truelle, confirms the diagnosis of serious paranoia. Every day she talks about Rodin. Every day she is worried that he wants to poison her, and that the nurses are his accomplices. It will go on like this for another thirty years. As yet no doctoral thesis has been written on ‘The Psychiatric Assessment of Camille Claudel’.
In March 1913 Albert Schweitzer graduates as a doctor of medicine. His thesis, ‘The Psychiatric Assessment of Jesus’, was unsettling but satisfactory. The next day he sells all his goods and chattels. Then on 21 March 1913 he takes his wife, Helene, and travels to Africa. In French Equatorial Africa, he founds the jungle hospital of Lambaréné, on the Ogooué.
Ernst Jünger too dreams of Africa. Under his desk at school he is constantly reading travel tales of Africa. ‘I was increasingly filled with the deadly poison of boredom’ – so it is clear for him that he must seek out the mysteries of Africa, the ‘lost gardens’ somewhere in the Upper Nile Delta or the Congo. Africa represents the epitome of all that is savage and primitive. He had to go there. But how? Let’s wait and see.
It’s the end of March. Marcel Proust pulls his fur over his night-shirt and goes back into the street in the middle of the night. Then he stares for two whole hours at the Saint Anne portal of the cathedral of Notre-Dame. The next morning he writes to Madame Strauss: ‘For eight centuries on that portal a much more charming humanity has been assembled than the one with which we rub shoulders.’ This is what is known, logically enough, as being In Search of Lost Time.
APRIL
On 20 April, Hitler celebrates his twenty-fourth birthday in a men’s boarding house on Meldemannstrasse in Vienna. Thomas Mann is thinking about
The Magic Mountain,
and his wife has gone to take the cure yet again. Lyonel Feininger discovers a tiny village church in Gelmeroda and turns it into the cathedral of Expressionism. Franz Kafka reports for voluntary service with a group of vegetable
At the end of the nineteenth century Camille Claudel had overwhelmed the great Auguste Rodin and created sculptures of singular beauty. She had dictated a contract to Rodin, forbidding him to have any other models but her, and obliged him to win her commissions and pay for her to have an Italian trip – and in return he could visit her four times a month in her studio. He complied. But then in 1893 she left him anyway.
From that moment things went steeply downhill for her. In 1913, twenty years later, she can think of nothing but him. She has grown fat and bloated in the meantime: unwashed, matted hair, confused expression. There is nothing now to recall the young sculptress forwhom first Rodin and then Claude Debussy fell head over heels. She is living in a cluttered ground-floor flat at 19 Quai Bourbon, deludedly destroying with accurate blows of her hammer all the works she has created; she feels persecuted by her family and by Rodin and by the rest of the world. She is convinced that Rodin, whom she last saw sixteen years ago, is shamelessly plagiarising her works.
Since she is firmly convinced that everyone is trying to poison her, she eats nothing but potatoes and drinks boiled water, and the shutters are kept closed so no one can spy on her. Her brother Paul Claudel visits her and then notes concisely in his diary: ‘In Paris. Camille insane, wallpaper hanging in long strips from the walls, one broken armchair, terrible dirt. She herself is fat and dirty and talks uninterruptedly in a monotonous and metallic voice.’
On 5 March, Dr Michaux issues a medical certificate that authorises Paul Claudel to have his sister committed to a closed institution. On Monday 10 March two beefy nurses break down the heavily bolted door to Camille Claudel’s studio and drag the screaming woman outside. She is forty-eight. On the same day she is brought to the Ville-Évrard mental hospital, where the psychiatrist in charge, Dr Truelle, confirms the diagnosis of serious paranoia. Every day she talks about Rodin. Every day she is worried that he wants to poison her, and that the nurses are his accomplices. It will go on like this for another thirty years. As yet no doctoral thesis has been written on ‘The Psychiatric Assessment of Camille Claudel’.
In March 1913 Albert Schweitzer graduates as a doctor of medicine. His thesis, ‘The Psychiatric Assessment of Jesus’, was unsettling but satisfactory. The next day he sells all his goods and chattels. Then on 21 March 1913 he takes his wife, Helene, and travels to Africa. In French Equatorial Africa, he founds the jungle hospital of Lambaréné, on the Ogooué.
Ernst Jünger too dreams of Africa. Under his desk at school he is constantly reading travel tales of Africa. ‘I was increasingly filled with the deadly poison of boredom’ – so it is clear for him that he must seek out the mysteries of Africa, the ‘lost gardens’ somewhere in the Upper Nile Delta or the Congo. Africa represents the epitome of all that is savage and primitive. He had to go there. But how? Let’s wait and see.
It’s the end of March. Marcel Proust pulls his fur over his night-shirt and goes back into the street in the middle of the night. Then he stares for two whole hours at the Saint Anne portal of the cathedral of Notre-Dame. The next morning he writes to Madame Strauss: ‘For eight centuries on that portal a much more charming humanity has been assembled than the one with which we rub shoulders.’ This is what is known, logically enough, as being In Search of Lost Time.
APRIL
On 20 April, Hitler celebrates his twenty-fourth birthday in a men’s boarding house on Meldemannstrasse in Vienna. Thomas Mann is thinking about
The Magic Mountain,
and his wife has gone to take the cure yet again. Lyonel Feininger discovers a tiny village church in Gelmeroda and turns it into the cathedral of Expressionism. Franz Kafka reports for voluntary service with a group of vegetable
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