Malraux's Drawings

Madeleine Malraux, the plucky, 95-year-old second wife and widow of the author of La Condition humaine, has just published a book of previously unknown drawings by her husband. Thierry Clermont published an article (Madeleine Malraux, la dame d'espoir, October 8) in Le Figaro about it (my translation):

Mischievous cats, funny devils, an Ubu-esque man, other clawed beasts -- André Malraux, between writing, speeches, and tours of Asia, always in good company, loved to take up a pencil to sketch what would eventually make up an entire paper bestiary of poetic fantasy. What's more, he liked to leave these scrawled papers on Madeleine's piano. "It was like a joke between us," she recalls. Madeleine Malraux, much less famous than Clara, Louise de Vilmore, or Josette Clotis, shared Malraux's life for a quarter-century. She has decided to release about one hundred of these unknown drawings under the title L'Univers farfelu d'André Malraux (The weird universe of André Malraux, published by Chêne), co-written with Marie-Josèphe Guers. She has even taken up a pen to author, with her son Alain (author of Les Marronniers de Boulogne), a preface to the book: "He had a cat's evasive nature, that way of being enigmatic, secret." And that's without mentioning the claw marks...

Madeleine Malraux also continues to have an international career as a pianist.

L'Univers farfelu d'André Malraux