odeur de grandeur

In the current New Yorker a review of a biography of Malraux ends with Yet there is something about him for which only the word “noble” will do. Malraux was the hero of a tragicomic battle that nearly all of us know and most of us lose: “man’s struggle,” as he calls it, “against humiliation.” One of my old heroes that in his old age sacrified his art on de Gaulle's church of grandeur. In his last years he was displaying the humility of a pope...

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