Art but no artists

René Maria Rilke, one of the most intense of German-language poets and considered by some to be a founder of modernist poetry, was born 150 years ago today. During a two year period - when he was in love with the married Russian-born Lou Andreas-Salomé and then meeting his future wife Clara Westhoff - he kept a series of diaries. The editors of the English edition of these diaries claim they span a crucial period in the artistic growth of the young poet.

Rilke was born in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, on 4 December 1875. His father worked as a railway official having retired from the military, and his mother was considered socially ambitious. René’s childhood was not especially happy, and he was sent to military academy for five years until 1891. He left on account of ill health, only to find his parents had separated. He was tutored for university entrance, and then began studying philosophy at Charles-Ferdinand University. But, by this time, he had already published a first volume of poetry, Leben und Lieder, and was intent on a literary career. Disenchanted with his academic studies, he left, travelling to Munich to study art. There he mixed with artistic types, managed to get some of his plays produced, and published more poetry.

In 1897, Rilke fell in love with the much-travelled Lou Andreas-Salomé, a married woman many years his senior. She appears to have had a major influence over the still-young Rilke, persuading him to change his first name to Rainer, and introducing him to the ideas of psychoanalysis (she had studied with Freud). After a brief stay in Florence, he twice travelled to Russia with Salomé in 1899 and 1900, meeting Leo Tolstoy in 1898, and Leonid Pasternak (the painter and father of Boris Pasternak) and Spiridon Drozhzhin, a peasant poet, in 1899. The following year, Rilke stayed at the artists’ colony at Worpswede, where he met Clara Westhoff. They married early in 1900, and had one daughter, Ruth, in late 1901.

In 1902, Rilke travelled to Paris, where he would stay for much of the rest of the decade. Clara left Ruth with her parents and joined him there. He became fascinated by Rodin, writing and lecturing on the sculptor, and even acting as his secretary for a period, and later by Cezanne. Apart from two or three more collections of poetry, he also completed his only novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. In the early 1910s he visited Ronda in Spain and Duino/Trieste in Italy, but the outbreak of WWI found him in Germany and unable to return to Paris. He managed to avoid active service, with the help of influential friends, by being assigned to the War Records Office.

AIn Switzerland he completed the Duino Elegies and, in a burst of 1922 inspiration, wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus. He died of leukemia late in 1926, highly respected in literary and artistic spheres but barely known by the general public. The Poetry Foundation provides this modern assessment: ‘Widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets, Rainer Maria Rilke was unique in his efforts to expand the realm of poetry through new uses of syntax and imagery and in the philosophy that his poems explored.’ While Encyclopaedia Britannica (1979 edition) calls him ‘a major Austro-German poet regarded as one of the founders and giants of modern literature.’ Further information can be found at Wikipedia, the Academy of American Poets, The Atlantic, or Picture Poems. For samples of Rilke’s poems see All Poetry.

Between April 1898 and December 1900, Rilke kept three diaries. The first of these, while in Florence, was probably written for or inspired by Salomé, since it is known that her own mental regimen included keeping a diary, and she is said to have asked Rilke to bring her back a diary. Biographers suggest the second diary, kept after his return to Schmargendorf, might also have been written with her in mind. The third diary was written during his sojourn at Worpswede. (However, it is worth noting that despite the diary names, Rilke visited Worpswede during the time of the Schmargendorf diary, and stayed at Schmargendorf during the time of the Worpswede diary.) They were first edited and published in German in 1942 by Ruth and her husband Carl Sieber.

A first English edition, translated and annotated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler, was published by W. W. Norton & Co in 1997 - Rainer Maria Rilke - Diaries of a Young Poet. In their introduction, Snow and Winkler explain: ‘Rilke’s diaries do maintain a certain chronological flow, albeit one with breaks and longer interruptions, but they are not directly the immediate account of a specific time; it is not their intent to record the minutiae of day-to-day life. For this reason they have not become identified by their chronology. Rather, they are usually titled after three places where Rilke lived and, at least for a time, felt at home: Florence (and the Tuscan countryside), the village of Schmargendorf just outside Berlin, and Worpswede, an artists’ colony in the moors near Bremen.’

The editors claim that the diary period spans a crucial period in Rilke’s artistic growth: ‘At the beginning of this phase the young poet had perfected, if not yet exhausted the rhetorical techniques and mannerisms of his early, impressionistic style. His verse was still prone to the gossamer and was given more to a flirtation than a sustained artistic engagement with the exquisite and the delicate. [. . . He] had come to realise only too well that he needed to constrain his busy games of make-believe and learn how to control his ingenious lyricism. This made it necessary, most of all, to free himself from the rapturous self-indulgence that could spin mellifluous lines and intricate rhymes with prolific ease. He had to submit himself to the kind of self-discipline that comes with the ascetic solitude of regular, arduous work. Rilke’s three early diaries reflect this search for a language that might capture the specificity of things natural and crafted and at the same time convey their intrinsic spirituality. They chronicle, in other words, the emergence of the “sachliche Sagen,” the objective and visually precise language that will come to characterise his “poetry of things.” ’

Although diary entries - many dated but not all - do predominate in Diaries of a Young Poet, there is also a good deal of poetry as well as some letters. The book can be previewed online at Google Books. Here, though, is one extract from each diary.

17 May 1898 [Florence diary]
‘No human being can raise so much beauty out of himself that it will cover him over completely. A part of himself will always gaze out from behind it. But in the peak times of art a few have erected before themselves, in addition to their own beauty, so much noble heritage, that the work no longer needs them. The curiosity and custom of the public will seek and of course find their personality; but that misses the point. In such times there is an art, but there are no artists.

There is an ever-recurring cycle of three generations. One finds the god, the second arches the narrow temple over him and in doing so fetters him, while the third slides into poverty and takes stone after stone from the sanctuary in order to build meagre and makeshift huts. And then comes one which must seek god again; and to such a generation these belonged: Dante and Botticelli and Fra Bartolommeo.

The element of reconciliation and loveliness that one treasures in the works of Raphael is a triumph that only seldom occurs; it signifies a high point of art, but not a high point of the artist.

Pre-Raphaelites: simply a caprice. Tired of smooth beauty, one seeks the effortful - not so? How facile a proposition! Tired of art, one seeks the artist, and in each work looks for the deed that elevated the man, the triumph over something within him, and the longing for himself.

In notes jotted down day after day vis-à-vis the paintings of the quattrocento, I could have offered nothing more than the tourists’ handbooks do. For they have formulated with unsurpassable cogency the measure of abstract beauty that inheres in the things. So much so that in fleeting consideration one employs quite unconsciously those infamous half-scientific terms that, once sharp and pregnant, have through so many mindless uses become dull and vacuous.

A handbook on Italy, if it wanted to teach pleasure, would have in it but one single word and one single piece of advice. Look! Whoever has a certain culture in him must make do with this guidance. He will not acquire pearls of knowledge and it will scarcely occur to him to ask whether this work is from the late period of an artist or whether in that work “the broad manner of the master” holds sway. But he will recognize an abundance of will and power that came from longing and from apprehension, and this revelation will make him better, greater, more thankful.’

11 September 1900 [Schmargendorf diary]
‘A fine evening at the Overbecks’. The blond painter was with me for the length of the twilight; I showed her some Russian books, the pictures of Nadson and Garshin, Droshin’s portraits, and other mementos. In the evening she sat next to me, and there was much conversation between us. The table was nicely set; small chamomiles slanted to one side framed the simple white runner, which was accented by blue-and-red-embroidered signatures of guests who had preceded us. Dr. Hauptmann and I added our names to this roll. Hauptmann was in rare form, made many cutting remarks regarding the temper of our time, always in the most charmingly ingenuous way. [. . .]

Clara Westhoff had come on her bicycle, But she walked almost the whole way back to Westerwede, since while we were talking I had passed by my gate and continued on at her side. It was about two hours past midnight. The skies were gray, quiet, and the landscape could be seen, completely without color, stretching far in the distance . . . The birch trees stood like candles beside long trails. The only thing white was a white cat, which would appear from behind the bushes in silent leaps, then vanish in the mistless meadows. It was a melancholy cat that staged a solitary dance. In the garden everything green was a shade darker. Almost black, the full bushes leaned against the white railing of the forecourt. Around the urns there was depth and air.’

14 December 1900 [Worpswede diary]
‘Sometimes I remember in exact detail things and epochs that never existed. I see every gesture of people who never lived a life and feel the swaying cadence of their never-spoken works. And a never-smiled smiling shines. Those who were never born die. And those who never died lie with their hands folded, repeated in beautiful stone, on long level sarcophagi in the halflight of churches no one built. Bells that never rang, that are still uncast metal and undiscovered ore in mountains, ring. Will ring: for what never existed is what is on its way, on its way over to us, something in the future, new. And perhaps I’m remembering distant futures when what never existed rises up in me and speaks.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 4 December 2015.

The father of neurology

‘The floor is made of tile mosaics as are the walls - no seat - only a hole which seems narrow to me at ground level. One has to be agile - but the Arabs certainly are in this respect. They do everything squatting. It is perfect, a paradise for the sense of sight and smell.’ This is Jean-Martin Charcot, born two centuries ago today, the great physician of France’s early Belle Epoque, the so-called ‘father of neurology’ and/or the ‘Napoleon of the neuroses’, writing about a Moroccan toilet in his one and only significant diary.

Charcot was born in Paris on 29 November 1825 into a modest artisan family. He seems to have been a gifted school child, mastering several languages, and was selected by his father as the one child to receive a higher education and enter medical school. He received his M.D. from the University of Paris in 1853 with a dissertation on arthritis. In 1860, he was named associate professor in medicine, and two years later, he was appointed head of a hospital service at Salpêtrière, a complex in the 13th arrondissement near the Seine. Aged 39, he married Augustine-Victoire Durvis, a young widow, with whom he had two children.

Charcot began to publish many books and articles on infectious illnesses, geriatrics, diseases of the internal organs. And, in 1872, he was elected to the Paris Medical Faculty as professor of pathological anatomy. During the 1870s, he turned increasingly to the new discipline of neurology, becoming one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject, publishing on a wide range of neurological conditions, MS, Parkinson’s disease, Tourette’s, aphasia etc. He was the first to describe several conditions, including multiple sclerosis and the disintegration of ligaments and joint surfaces (Charcot’s disease, or Charcot’s joint) caused by locomotor ataxia and related diseases or injuries. In particular, he was known for his work on hysteria, and he developed the practice of using hypnosis as a means to study his patients, often using the technique in public demonstrations.

This - the early years of the Belle Epoque - was a heyday for the medical profession in France, as a group  progressive physician-scientists - among whom Charcot was the most famous - sought to modernise medicine more in line with scientific understanding. Apart from his medical discoveries, he also pioneered the art and science of medical photography. Charcot’s second-to-none reputation as a teacher attracted students from all over the world, not least, in 1885, Sigmund Freud.

Meanwhile, in their grand home on the boulevard Saint-Germain, the Charcots would give lavish parties, attracting the cream of Parisian society, politicians, artists, writers and, of course, other physicians. In 1882, Charcot was named Chair for the diseases of the nervous system, the first such professorial post in the world. Financing followed his fame, with the government resourcing a new neuropathological institute at Salpêtrière. Charcot died, relatively young, in 1893. Further information is available at Wikipedia, National Center for Biotechnology Information, Science Museum, and inside Medical Muses: Hysteria in 19th-Century Paris by Asti Hustvedt (some pages of which about Charcot are viewable at Googlebooks).

Charcot was not a diarist, though he did occasionally keep note-books when on holiday or travelling. One such note-book so stood out from the rest for Toby Gelfland (Department of History, University of Ottawa) that he decided to translate, edit and publish it - as Charcot in Morocco (University of Ottawa Press, 2012). In July 1887, Charcot went south to Spain for his annual summer holiday, but, on this occasion, concluded the voyage with a week in Morocco, and while there kept a detailed personal diary, amounting to 14,000 words, 95 manuscript pages, and various sketches, maps and watercolours.

The journal is a unique document, says Gelfand, because of its sheer length and detail but also because of ‘the intimate, relaxed, colorful, at times frankly exuberant quality of a first-person narrative written primarily for oneself, even if it were later to be shared with family and friends’. Furthermore: ‘The journal offers rare access to an otherwise elusive figure who said little of a spontaneous nature in public. [. . .] Historians, following most contemporary accounts, tend to portray Charcot as an authoritarian and rather austere medical leader, a “grand patron” who was at once intimidating and shy, if not secretive. The Moroccan journals reveals a less pretentious figure possessed of a rough and ready sense of humor, someone who did not always take himself or others so seriously.’

10 August 1887
‘Soon we reach the 1st Moroccan doorway, a square house, which sits atop a high hill. Two Moors of the Emperor who are to accompany us emerge; one carries a gun, the other a bag. These 2 do not join in with our group. Sometimes they approach, then at other times they disappear - only to reappear a little afterwards at a turn in the way . . . they are definitely strange; as well they have a rather unhealthy look about them with their caped robes that seem to be soaked with sweat.

We have been walking perhaps 2 hours when suddenly the plain widens out. In the middle we see a castle in ruins covered with ivy - not far off, some stones are piled up in a way that marks off an oval shape of earth. It is a tomb. There are many others. On a few of the tombs, red rags hang from sticks planted in the ground, rags now faded which must have formerly had a beautiful red color. They mark the tomb of a chieftain, more or less canonized and elevated to the level of a saint. It was here that the battle against the Moroccans took place which led to the march on Tetuan. More than 20 years ago, all that. The name Prim returns to mind. We walk on and keep on walking. From time to time I look at my watch. We’re going to get to the Moor’s place soon, no doubt! By this time hunger and thirst have set in. But where is this the devil of a house of the Moor? We don’t see it. Here are a few trees and rocks. We have lost sight of the sea. Anxiously, we walk on for nearly an hour; devil of a house gone astray. We begin to berate the Moors of the Emperor who led us down this wrong path. At last, there it is, a hut scarcely above the ground, hidden among the underbrush and tall cactus. [. . .]

I get up and rejoin the group drinking water, who are sharing a watermelon. On the mound where they are sitting, there is no more space. One of the Moors of the King noticed; he goes up to my son and, tapping him gently on the shoulder, says to him, in Spanish, “Your father is not seated.” My son gets up and I sit down in his place. An example of Arab manners that is in sum very edifying and which demonstrates that, even if we are among the people of Barbary, we are not with barbarians.’

11 August 1887
‘Soon we arrive at one of our “wealthy Moors”. [. . .] The young ladies go into the women’s quarters. Employing a searching gaze, we look into everything open to us. I think they were expecting us; most certainly, they were waiting for us. However a flurry of emotion, doubtless feigned, a pretended surprise, took place when we entered. A lady of mature years, who appeared beautiful to me, quickly fled, but not before showing us her face. That left 4 or 5 negresses, who shamelessly stayed where they were. Moreover, they were very beautiful, their arms and legs nude, their bodies lightly clothed in a clear fabric. They certainly do not belong to the religion whose acolytes cover up. As always, the first floor with balcony is just about the same as the lower floor. But it seems we cannot visit since the private living quarters are there. I look everywhere for a certain spot which interests me from a hygienic perspective. Instinct guides me. Here water flows on the ground - one certainly cannot go in without clogs. The floor is made of tile mosaics as are the walls - no seat - only a hole which seems narrow to me at ground level. One has to be agile - but the Arabs certainly are in this respect. They do everything squatting. It is perfect, a paradise for the sense of sight and smell.’

12 August 1887
‘It is agreed that I will give a few medical consultations; they implored me to do so. A few people have been referred by the consul, or by M. Alvans, the military envoy, who never tires of being helpful.

Here come the patients, 5 or 6 of them, all Jews. They file into the patio. I sketch one who presents a beautiful case of Parkinson’s. Nothing very interesting from the point of view of diagnosis. But all are nervous cases. Yesterday, on the square, they showed me a Jew who remained mute, so they say, during his entire childhood but who eventually began to speak. Was he a case of hysteria?

The consultation is over. I must see the town some more so as to take with me an indelible visual impression. Along the way, on one of the most densely inhabited streets, we hear in the distance a sort of chanting, mixed and monotonous at the same time: the voices of men. They appear in a cortege of about a hundred persons; they are walking quickly, they seem to be in a hurry. “The dead go quickly.” In fact it is a burial. The deceased is carried on a kind of cot, nude in a white shroud which hides him completely, the head too. It seems to me that no one stirs nor extends greetings. We don’t either: that is not the custom here. We let the cortege pass, we will meet it again momentarily, in the cemetery.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 29 November 2015.

Found mine field with Bosch notice

‘Started forward at 6 a.m. H plus ½ hour. Heavy fog. Found men coming back and took them along with me. Heavy fire all around from m.g. Found mine field with Bosch notice on it. Got to R.R. cut near Cheppy sent pigeon message. Was fired on heavily and 35 Div came back on the run.’ This is from the First World War diaries of George Smith Patton Jr, born 140 years ago today. He was a natural soldier who would become a US Army General in the Second World War, one admired for his leadership and strategic genius.

Patton was born on 11 November 1885 in San Gabriel, California, into a prosperous family steeped in military tradition. Educated by tutors, he struggled with dyslexia but excelled in physical pursuits and displayed an early fascination with warfare. After attending the Virginia Military Institute for one year, he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1909. The following year he married Beatrice Banning Ayer, daughter of Boston industrialist Frederick Ayer, with whom he had three children.

Patton’s early army career was marked by his talent for horsemanship and discipline. He represented the United States at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics in the modern pentathlon and later became aide-de-camp to General John J. Pershing during the 1916 Mexican Expedition. In the First World War he commanded the newly formed U.S. Tank Corps and led the first American tank attack at Saint-Mihiel. Between the wars he emerged as one of the army’s leading advocates of mechanised warfare, publishing studies on mobility, discipline, and leadership.

During the Second World War, Patton commanded US forces in North Africa, Sicily, and later France and Germany, his Third Army achieving one of the fastest and most decisive advances in modern military history. His leadership during the relief of Bastogne in December 1944 became legendary. Known for his harsh discipline and fiery rhetoric as much as his strategic brilliance, he was both feared and revered by subordinates. He died on 21 December 1945 in Heidelberg, Germany, following an automobile accident. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, or the Warfare History Network.

Patton began keeping diaries as a young officer, developing the habit during his early cavalry years and maintaining it without interruption until the end of his life. His first surviving notebooks date from 1910 and include accounts of his honeymoon travels and early postings in the United States and Mexico. By 1916-1917, during the Punitive Expedition against Pancho Villa, his entries had become more detailed and self-analytical, mixing operational notes with personal reflection. From this period onward, Patton viewed diary-keeping as both a professional record and a means of self-discipline, using it to refine his thoughts on leadership, courage, and the psychology of command.

Throughout the First World War and the inter-war years, Patton’s diaries were largely handwritten in small leather notebooks, often accompanied by operational maps, sketches, and lists of orders. His First World War volumes describe his training of the Tank Corps in France, his wounding at Saint-Mihiel, and his meetings with Pershing and other senior officers. 

Between 1919 and 1939 his diary entries turned to professional studies - tactics, mobility, weapons - and his personal frustrations at the slow pace of promotion. When war came again in 1939-1945, his habit of daily recording became an intense discipline. The World War Two diaries are said to be among the most complete of any senior Allied commander, describing every major campaign in North Africa, Sicily, France, and Germany, and offering a rare inside view of command at army level.

After Patton’s death in December 1945, his diaries - over forty notebooks and typescripts - were preserved by his family and later deposited in the Library of Congress as part of the George S. Patton Papers. The complete diaries run from 1910 to 1945. Edited extracts first reached the public through Martin Blumenson’s two-volume The Patton Papers (1972 and 1974), which combined diary entries, correspondence, and official memoranda. These editions shaped much of Patton’s posthumous reputation. Later historians and archivists produced full transcripts of the original notebooks, revealing that Patton often revised his entries, added clarifying notes, and occasionally softened his tone for posterity. Also at the Library of Congress can be found images of many pages from the original diaries. 

The following extracts are all from The Patton Papers (which is freely available to read online at Internet Archive). 

31 July 1917

‘Gen. P, Col Harbord, Col de Chambrun, and I left office at 2:50 in Hotchkiss and Packard to St. Dizier. We passed for miles along scene of battle of the Marne, the road marking almost exactly last French line of battle. Many graves along road. ‘Where hospitals were, large squair inclosures full of crosses. Just north of the road is where Napoleon fought first half of campaign of 1814. Reached St. Dizier at 8 p.m. Pershing and Harbord at hotel, Chambrun and I bilited with private family.’

1 August 1917

‘Left St. Dizier 8:10 a.m., to Vittel and Grand Hotel, where good supper. Inspected American troops and were disappointed. Men did not look smart, officers were lazy, troops lacked equipment and training, were listless.’

2 August 1917

‘Through Neufchateau to Chaumont, lunch at Hotel de France. Left 3 p.m. by way of Troyes, reached Paris 10 p.m.’

4 August 1917

‘Lunch and dinner with K, Beatrice’s sister, and her husband, Keith, who was with the State Department in London.’

7 September 1917

‘Engaged laundress in morning; drilled 160 clerks in evening. “They did not like it much but it is necessary as they look like soldiers and must act like them.” Shallenberger became Provost Marshal, Collins attached to the General Staff, Mars still Pershing’s aide, ‘and I am nothing but hired flunkey. I shall be glad to get back to the line [with troops] again and will try to do so in the spring.’

17 March 1918

‘Had Elsie Janis [the favorite American singer and entertainer of troops in France] and her mother to lunch. She is not pretty but quite amusing though common in her pronunciation. She wore an artificial Lepord skin coat. Met Secretary [of War Newton] Baker and went around with him for a while. Seemed interested and intelligent.’

18 March 1918

‘Got telephone connected and office and mess running. Expect to be shelled at 9:30 now 10:05 and nothing has happened but they [the Germans] are shelling Paris to the west.’

19 September 1918

‘Went to Front line and found trenches not very wide. And ground rather better than I had expected.’

23 September 1918

‘Got all 345 Tanks unloaded by daylight under shell fire but no casualties. Got lot of mail from home. Five letters from B. Rained all day and a lot of shelling over us at Clermont. Cussed out Brett & Compton for carelessness etc.’

24 September 1918

‘Got Corps Plan. Wrote field order & memo. Gen R called. We are in pretty good shape but we are to be shelled or something to night. The Bosch took pictures of us so I guess we shall be shelled or something to night. Wrote B & Mama.’

25 September 1918

‘Inspected battalions at 9 a.m. 345th very dirty, ordered correction. 344th better but could stand improvement. Gen R called. Went to corps to get H-hour and D-day, also passes for gasoline trucks. Went to meeting at 35th Division. One of my trucks full of runners was hit by a shell 6:15 p.m. Near Neuvilly, no movement yet. Had big dinner. Will start soon. Wrote B.’

26 September 1918

‘Started forward at 6 a.m. H plus ½ hour. Heavy fog. Found men coming back and took them along with me. Heavy fire all around from m.g. Found mine field with Bosch notice on it. Got to R.R. cut near Cheppy sent pigeon message. Was fired on heavily and 35 Div came back on the run. Moved back about 200 m. [meters] Heavy m.g. [machine gun] & Art. [Artillery] fire. Lots of Dough Boys hit. [Captain] English & I got tanks forward. 20 men hit. Tried to make inft charge and got shot. Lay in shell hole an hour. Could hear bosch talk. Went to hospital and was operated on by Dr. Elliot of N.Y.’

27 September 1918

‘Woke up to find Capt Semmes on my right. Capt. Gilfillen on my left. Both wounded. Slept a lot. Wrote Beat. Tried to wire but could not.’

Burning at the heart

François Mauriac, a French novelist and Nobel Prize winner barely read in the English world, was born 130 years ago today. As an old man emerging from the Second World War, he was a strong supporter of Charles De Gaulle; indeed, Mauriac’s son worked for the president. For some of his life, Mauriac kept diaries, but these - like most of his novels - have not been translated into English. One extract, though, in Robert Speaight’s biography, tells of him struggling to find the balance in his writing so that ‘the young saint, my hero, is burning at the heart of the furnace.’

Mauriac was born on 11 October 1885 in Bordeaux, France. His father died soon after, leaving his mother to raise five children, of which he was the youngest. He studied at the University of Bordeaux and then at the École Nationale des Chartes, Paris, but soon left to pursue a career in literature. He managed to publish his first work, a collection of poems - Les Mains jointes - in 1909. But, it was to novels that he soon turned, publishing L’Enfant chargé de chaînes and La Robe prétexte in 1913-1914. In 1913, he married Jeanne Lafon and, between 1914 and 1924, they had four children. In 1923, Le Baiser au lépreux (The Kiss to the Leper) made him famous in France, and established his literary reputation.

Further novels followed, including Le Noeud de vipères in 1932, a marital drama often considered Mauriac’s masterpiece. The following year, he was elected to the Académie Française. As the decade progressed, he wrote more novels, but also plays. He took a strong stance against totalitarianism, and denounced Fascism in Italy and Spain. During the war he lived in occupied territory, and worked with writers of the Resistance. After the war, he was a great supporter of Charles De Gaulle, who made him Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour. From the mid-1950s, he wrote a popular weekly newspaper column, Bloc-Notes.

Mauriac was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1952. Though his fame did not spread far outside France, some consider him the country’s greatest writer after Marcel Proust. He died in 1970. One of his sons, Claude, was a writer and also worked as personal secretary to Charles de Gaulle. And, through a daughter, he was the grandfather of Anne Wiazemsky, actress and novelist who married Jean-Luc Godard. Further biographical information is available in English at Wikipedia (a fuller bio can be found at the French Wikipedia), the Nobel Prize website, Encyclopædia Britannica or Authors’ Calendar. 

Very few of Mauriac’s novels appear to have been translated into English, so it is no surprise to find that there are no diaries published in English either. However, it seems, he did keep a diary. In 1948, he published Journal d’un homme de trente ans: (extraits); and, from 1950 on, I believe, the French publisher Gallimard, began publishing his complete works. One volume, published in 1952, contains a series of his journals - see the British Library holding. But the only diary extracts I can find that have been translated into English are in Robert Speaight’s biography - François Mauriac: A study of the writer and the man (Chatto & Windus, 1976) - as per the following:

9 June 1916
‘Paris. Temptations. Passions go on velvet feet in the jungle. Huge beasts. Perfume of sensuality.’

18 July 1916
‘Must free our body of desire.’

28 January 1917
‘My son Claude to keep me pure.’

2 March 1917
‘Paris is disgusting.  “Great Ladies”, pederasts, lesbians, everyone is procuring for somebody else.’

1918
‘The war is ending on a picture postcard where we see the French re-entering Metz and Strasbourg . . . Frightening absence of God in the triumphal cries of Clemenceau.’

Undated
‘Perhaps it is always enough that a creature we love should live beside us, not perhaps that we should love them less, but that we should no longer realise that we love them.’

1934
‘Still, after many years, to have so much to say to one another, from the most trivial to the most serious, without any desire to astonish or to be admired - what a wonderful thing that is!. No more need of lies; man and wife have become so transparent to each other that lying can no longer be of any use. This is the only love that cherishes immobility, that feeds on the habitual and daily round.’

29 July 1953
‘At my age, the conflict between the Christian and the novelist has moved on to another plane. It’s much less a question of the Jansenist scruples that used to trouble me in describing the passions than a kind of disenchantment with everything to do with art in general, and with my own art in particular. A feeling that art is literally an idol, that it has its martyrs and its prophets, and that for many people it is a substitute for God. And not art alone, but the word - the word that has not been made flesh. [. . . Having resumed work on a new novel, L’Agneau, he is determined not to put it aside] ‘until I have found the balance that I’m looking for, and the young saint, my hero, is burning at the heart of the furnace.’

Undated
[Whatever the motives of General de Gaulle’s withdrawal from power in February 1946, Speaight says, Mauriac could only look back on a great dream that was dead:] ‘All the Resistance tightly gathered round its leader; the C.N.R. as the nucleus of the new Assembly; prompt punishment for traitors and assassins by regular court martial, whose impartiality was beyond suspicion - a punishment followed, after a few months, and in despite of all the complaints, by a total amnesty for those whom the legality of Vichy . . . had led astray; the prisons reserved for crime, and adolescents rescued from their corruption; and finally reforms, at once bold and proportionate to the needs of a country which has been drained of its blood, and is covered with graves and ruins.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 11 October 2015.

An embarrassing incident

On a hot August afternoon in 1871, the Reverend Canon Arthur Charles Copeman and his brother-in-law trudged from Mont Dol to St Malo, their clerical coats ill-suited to the summer sun. Copeman, already known in Norwich as vicar of St Andrew’s and a meticulous keeper of journals, carried with him the habit of noting each day’s encounters. Three of his diaries have now entered the British Library, one of which is the focus of an Untold Tales blog - A Victorian holiday embarrassment.

Copeman was born in 1824 at Coltishall in Norfolk, the son of Edward Breese Copeman and his wife Elizabeth. He studied medicine before deciding on a career in the church. After ordination he served in Norfolk and was appointed vicar of St Andrew’s, Norwich, a position he retained for the rest of his life. He was made an honorary canon of Norwich Cathedral and acted for a time as rural dean. 

In his parish, Copeman was an active figure, overseeing improvements to the church and dedicating a stained glass window in 1869. He married and had children, the best known being Sydney Monckton Copeman, later a leading figure in public health and a fellow of the Royal Society. Arthur Copeman died at the St Andrew’s parsonage in Norwich in 1896. There is very little further information online about Copeman other than at Wikitree, and in three of his diaries, recently added to the British Library’s collections - see A Victorian holiday embarrassment in the British Library’s Untold Lives collection.

Two of the diaries describe the daily life of an English clergyman, recording the rhythm of parish work, family duties and social engagements in Norwich during the mid- and late-Victorian decades. The third is different in tone and scope, ‘a month-long tour around Brittany with his brother-in-law, seeing the sights.’

The holiday diary, written in the summer of 1871, gives a candid picture of middle-class travel in France just after the Franco-Prussian War. Copeman recorded the practicalities of inns, meals and transport alongside sharp observations of landscape and people. Two weeks into the trip the pair walked from Mont Dol to the town of St Malo. I will let the narrative in the Untold Lives piece take up the story (with direct quotes from Copeman’s diary embedded). 

‘ “We found a congeries of little wooden cells ranged on the sea-ward side of a gentle slope which was thronged with ye ladies & gentlemen of S. Malo with whom it appears the favourite and fashionable promenade - and an office for the issue of bathing tickets which was beset with applicants.”

Having secured a bathing ticket, the pair were pleasantly surprised to find it entitled them to temporary possession of two of the beach huts, together with towels and bathing costumes.

The Reverend was particularly taken with the available attire, enthusing it was “of the simplest construction but of imposing & indescribable effect”. Once within this pair of loose blue shorts and sleeved “gaberdine” top, he thought he would have been unrecognisable to even his closest friends.  However, Copeman believed he and his companion attracted “the admiring inspection of the promenade” as [they] made their way down to the sea.

And yet, their favoured bathing suits would prove to be their undoing.

“When emerging after a delightful bathe, we found our wondrous costume clinging everywhere tenaciously to the skin & bringing out in strong relief every irregularity of a development somewhat obtrusively bony.”

Shocked by the betrayal of their previously modest attire, the pair “took fright & with a leap & a run we regained our dressing houses whence were heard roars of convulsive laughter till we re-appeared in civilised attire”.’

Strapped to this journal

‘I’m strapped to this journal. Grunt. Heave. Impression that the ship is going down. The furniture slides, the table legs wobble …’ This is from the diary of Félix Guattari, a French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and activist who died 33 years ago today. Although not a diarist by nature, a collection of diary-like writings from his notebooks were published posthumously.

Guattari was born in 1930 in Villeneuve-les-Sablons, Oise, France, into a modest family background - his father was a metal worker and his mother a secretary. He attended secondary school in Enghien-les-Bains before moving on to Paris, where he became involved in student political circles. In his youth he developed a strong interest in philosophy and psychoanalysis. He trained with Jacques Lacan in the late 1940s and early 1950s, though he soon began to distance himself from Lacanian orthodoxy, pursuing a more experimental and collective approach to therapy.

In 1953, Guattari began working at the experimental La Borde Clinic near Blois, founded and directed by Jean Oury. La Borde became central to both his personal and professional life; he lived and worked there for much of the rest of his career. The clinic’s practice of institutional psychotherapy sought to dismantle rigid hierarchies by involving both patients and staff in the daily running of the institution, fostering collective forms of responsibility and therapeutic community. This practical experience deeply informed Guattari’s theoretical work, as he attempted to interweave psychoanalysis, politics, and philosophy.

Beyond his clinical activity, Guattari was heavily involved in left-wing activism. During the 1960s, he participated in far-left groups, supported anti-colonial struggles in Algeria and Vietnam, and was an active presence in the events of May 1968. Around this period, he began his celebrated collaboration with philosopher Gilles Deleuze, then teaching at the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes. Their joint publications, Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), were later collected under the common title Capitalism and Schizophrenia. These works critiqued both Freudian psychoanalysis and orthodox Marxism, offering instead a radical exploration of desire, subjectivity, and social assemblages. They became central texts in contemporary Continental philosophy and cultural theory.

In addition to these collaborative works, Guattari published influential texts of his own, including Molecular Revolution (1977), Chaosmosis (1992), and the posthumously collected Soft Subversions. These writings continued his exploration of subjectivity, ecology, and collective enunciation.

Guattari married Nadine Charbonnel in 1961, with whom he had three children. Despite his involvement in international intellectual and political movements, he remained grounded at La Borde, where personal, professional, and political worlds often overlapped. He continued to write, teach, and practice therapy until his sudden death from a heart attack at La Borde on 29 August 1992, at the age of sixty-two. Further information is available from Wikipedia.

After his death, several collections of his unpublished writings appeared, notably The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2006), which contains diary entries and working notes from 1969 to 1973. They present a more personal and unguarded side of his thought - urgent, confessional, and exploratory - recording his creative struggles during the development of Anti-Oedipus as well as his conflicts with Lacan and his work at La Borde. A few pages can be sampled at Amazon. Back in 2015, The Paris Review published this extract from The Anti-Oedipus Papers, as translated by Stéphane Nadaud.

10 June 1972

‘I’m strapped to this journal. Grunt. Heave. Impression that the ship is going down. The furniture slides, the table legs wobble …

Writing so that I won’t die. Or so that I die otherwise. Sentences breaking up. Panting like for what. [. . .]

You can explain everything away. I explain myself away. But to whom? You know … The question of the other. The other and time. I’m home kind of fucking around. Listening to my own words. Redundancy. Peepee poopoo. Things are so fucking weird! [. . .]

Have to be accountable. Yield to arguments. What I feel like is just fucking around. Publish this diary for example. Say stupid shit. Barf out the fucking-around-o-maniacal schizo flow. Barter whatever for whoever wants to read it. Now that I’m turning into a salable name I can find an editor for sure [. . .] Work the feed-back; write right into the real. But not just the professional readers’ real, “Quinzaine polemical” style. The close, hostile real. People around. Fuck shit up. The stakes greater than the oeuvre or they don’t attain it [. . .]

Just setting up the terms of this project makes me feel better. My breathing is freed up by one notch. Intensities. A literary-desiring machine. [. . .]

When it works I have a ton to spare, I don’t give a shit, I lose it as fast as it comes, and I get more. Active forgetting! What matters is interceding when it doesn’t work, when it spins off course, and the sentences are fucked up, and the words disintegrate, and the spelling is total mayhem. Strange feeling, when I was small, with some words. Their meaning would disappear all of a sudden. Panic. And I have to make a text out of that mess and it has to hold up: that is my fundamental schizo-analytic project. Reconstruct myself in the artifice of the text. Among other things, escape the multiple incessant dependencies on images incarnating the “that’s how it goes!”

Writing for nobody? Impossible. You fumble, you stop. I don’t even take the trouble of expressing myself so that when I reread myself I can understand whatever it was I was trying to say. Gilles will figure it out, he’ll work it through. [. . .]

I tell myself I can’t take the plunge and leave this shit for publication because that would inconvenience Gilles. But really, though? I just need to cross out the passages he’s directly involved in. I’m hiding behind this argument so that I can let myself go again and just fucking float along. Even though when it comes to writing an article, I start over like twenty-five times!!

And this dance of anxiety …’

A scholar of the Orient

‘His Excellency’s brother was, accompanied by some gentlemen, to visit the Baile of Venice, whom he found very badly housed at the foot of a minaret, exposed to the importunate cry of the Muezzin. He complained wrongly that the Bachas had asked him, some for soaps, others for glasses and Venetian mirrors, to which honesty wanted him to give satisfaction, without daring nevertheless civilly to take the money that was offered to him.’ This is from the diaries of Antoine Galland, a French orientalist, archaeologist and translator, who died 310 years ago today. He is best remembered for introducing One Thousand and One Nights to the European world.

Galland was born on 1646, in Rollot, a small village in the province of Picardy, France. His father, a labourer, died when Antoine was young. Despite financial hardships, Galland showed academic promise, which led to his education at the Collège de Noyon and later the Collège de Plessis in Paris. His aptitude for languages was recognised early, and he developed a strong proficiency in Latin and Greek before expanding his studies to Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. His passion for the East was further nurtured by professor Pierre-Daniel Huet, an influential orientalist who guided Galland’s studies in philology and antiquities.

Galland’s career took shape when he was appointed as an assistant to the French ambassador in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1670. This opportunity allowed him to travel extensively through the Ottoman Empire, Syria, and the Levant, collecting manuscripts, coins, and other artefacts. His deep engagement with Middle Eastern culture and literature distinguished him as a scholar of the Orient. Upon returning to France, he worked as an interpreter and librarian, earning a position as a royal antiquary under Jean-Baptiste Colbert. He was responsible for cataloging and studying Eastern manuscripts, particularly those housed in the Bibliothèque Royale (now the National Library of France).

In 1704, Galland published the first volume of Les Mille et Une Nuits, based on Arabic manuscripts and oral sources. The translation captivated European audiences, introducing them to famous tales such as Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. These stories were not present in the known Arabic manuscripts and were likely added from oral traditions Galland encountered. His translation, completed in 1717, shaped how One Thousand and One Nights was perceived in Europe, blending Eastern storytelling with French literary tastes. It remains one of the most influential works of world literature.

There is little evidence that Galland married or had children. His life was largely devoted to scholarship and translation. He died on 17 February 1715, in Paris. Further information is available from Wikipedia, University of Kent or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Galland did keep personal diaries but all and any extracts from them have only been published in French. The most significant of the published diaries, I believe (my French being rather poor), is Journal d’Antoine Galland pendant son séjour a Constantinople (1672-1673) as edited by Charles Shefer and published by Ernest Leroux in 1881. This is readily available - in two tomes - to read at Internet Archive. There are also four volumes dating from the Parisian period in the last decade of his life, 1708-1715. Further publication details are available at the British Library website and at the Boswell Book Company.

For a flavour of these diaries, I have taken a few random extracts from the Constantinople period, and employed Google Translate to render them crudely into English, as follows.

14 April 1672

‘His Excellency’s brother was, accompanied by some gentlemen, to visit the Baile of Venice, whom he found very badly housed at the foot of a minaret, exposed to the importunate cry of the Muezzin. He complained wrongly that the Bachas had asked him, some for soaps, others for glasses and Venetian mirrors, to which honesty wanted him to give satisfaction, without daring nevertheless civilly to take the money that was offered to him.

A person said that he had been assured that the Venetians paid fifteen hundred ducats of tribute to the Grand Sgr, for the islands of Zante and Cephalonia.

I saw the ceremony of the blessing of the oil being performed, in the church of the Greeks and I heard part of the mass, of which the gospel was extremely long. It was taken from St. Matthew and began from the preparation of the Last Supper until the condemnation of Our Lady of Sorrow by Pilate. In a sermon by a Damascene Studite named for the day of Holy Saturday, I noticed at the end a little exhortation to prepare oneself to make a good and fruitful communion, for this reason that Jesus Christ is received therein entirely. It was among several others in the vulgar language by the same author for the whole year.’

19 April 1672

‘Mr. Panaioti came to see Mr. Ambassador on behalf of the Visir. Before he arrived, he sent one of his men to announce that he was coming. He came accompanied by five or six people on horseback; besides his harness, his also carried the sabre and the mace, and another of his retinue was loaded with a carpet, in the fashion of the great men of the country who use it to say their prayers when they are on the road, or to rest. It is to be believed that Mr. Panaioti did not wear it for the first reason, but for grandeur only and to rest in case he dismounted on the road. He did not wear a calpac but a Bey’s turban, by permission of the Visir, to serve as a safeguard and to protect him from all kinds of insults. He was quite a long time with His Excellency and Mr. d’Ervietix. He was treated to the usual wine and sorbet.’

21 April 1672

‘Mr. Ambassador received letters from Cairo, by which the Consul sent to His Excellency a certificate from the Patriarch of the Coptic, which was in Arabic, and another from the Patriarch of the Armenians with a report of the troops that were being sent to Mecca, both by sea and by land, to the number of three thousand men. What it contained in particular was that formerly in the country of Iemen, which is surrounded by mountains and which borders on Persia, the Grand Seigneur had a Bacha whom he sent there; but that for about twenty years one of them had revolted, having, to secure himself in his rebellion, persuaded the inhabitants that Mahomet and Hali were false prophets and having at the same time proposed to them another, for the religion of which they are ready to defend him vigorously. This report also assured His Excellency that around the month of February, there had fallen in Cairo such a heavy rain that people imagined it was the end of the world and that it should be noted as a very extraordinary accident in this country.’

22 July 1672

‘The Janissary that His Excellency had sent to the Porte arrived this day. He brought a command for the ship and four others for the four merchant ships; but the response to the letter that Mr. the Ambassador had sent was addressed to Caymacam. A Chiaoux sent from Caymacam came to testify to Mr. the Ambassador the part he took in the joy that His Excellency had for the birth of Mr. the Duke of Anjou and the victories of His Majesty. But it seems that he found fault with the noise and the brilliance with which she had appeared, saying that less could be done; but Mr. the Ambassador responded very vigorously.’

Ampère falling in love

André-Marie Ampère, dubbed the father of electrodynamics, was born 250 years ago today. A child of the enlightenment and Rousseau’s education principles, he became a great scientist without formal training. He left behind one youthful diary, a naive and charming account of his love and courtship of the woman who became his wife, but then died just four years later.

Ampère was born in Lyon, France, on 20 January 1775. His father was a prosperous businessman who admired the teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In line with Rousseau’s education ideas, he left his son to educate himself at the family home - with a well-stocked library - at Poleymieux-au-Mont-d’Or near Lyon. Although his father came to be called into public service by the new revolutionary government, he was guillotined in 1793 as part of the so-called Jacobin purges. Ampère, himself, found regular work as a maths teacher in 1799. This gave him enough income to marry his sweetheart, Julie Carron.

In 1802, Ampère was appointed a professor of physics and chemistry at the École Centrale in Bourg-en-Bresse, which meant leaving Julie, by then a sick woman, and his son in Lyon. In Bourg, he produced his first treatise on mathematical probability - Considerations on the Mathematical Theory of Games, which he sent to the Paris Academy of Sciences. Following the death of Julie, he moved to the capital and began teaching at the new École Polytechnique, where, in 1809, he was appointed professor of mathematics.

As well as holding positions at the École Polytechnique through to 1828, Ampère also taught philosophy and astronomy at the University of Paris for a while, and in 1824 was elected to the chair in experimental physics at the Collège de France. He engaged in all kinds of scientific enquiry, but, from 1820, when hearing of a Danish discovery which showed how a magnetic needle can be deflected by an electric current, he began developing theories to understand the relationship between electricity and magnetism.

It is for his work in understanding electromagnetism that Ampère is best remembered. He developed a physical account of electromagnetic phenomena, empirically demonstrable and mathematically predictive, and in 1827 published his major work, Memoir on the Mathematical Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena, Uniquely Deduced from Experience. This work coined the name of a new science, electrodynamics, while Ampère also gave his name, in time, to Ampère’s Law, and the SI unit of electric current, the ampere, often shortened to amp. He died in 1836. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, NNBD, Encyclopaedia Britannica. James R. Hofmann’s biography - André-Marie Ampère: Enlightenment an Electrodynamics - can also be previewed at Googlebooks.

Although Ampère is not known as a diarist, he did leave behind one published diary, a record of his courtship with his future wife. This was first published, in French, in 1869, as Journal et Correspondance de André-Marie Ampère (freely available in French at Internet Archive or Gallica). An 1875 English review of the book can be found in The North American Review (Vol. 121, No. 249, Oct., 1875), viewable online at JSTOR. The reviewer, T. S. Perry, says the volume is ‘idyllic’ and ‘charming’, and though Ampère was ‘far from being a fool, he certainly shows how foolish an intelligent man can be in the privacy of his diary’. And Perry adds: ‘Although Ampère’s letters and diary lack the historical value of Pepys’s they have a far higher interest in the light they throw upon the private life and character of a great and good man.’ High praise indeed.

An English translation was published by R. Bentley & Son, a few years later, in 1873, with the title The Story of his Love: being the journal and early correspondence of of André-Marie Ampère with his family circle during the First Republic, 1793-1804. The full text of the English version can be read online at Googlebooks.

10 April 1796
‘I saw her for the first time.’

10 August 1796
‘I went to her house, and they lent me ‘Le Nouvelle Morali di Soave’.’

3 September 1796
‘M. Coupier had left the day before. I went to return ‘Le Nouvelle’ and they allowed me to select a volume from the library. I took Mme. Deshoulières. I was a few moments alone with her.’

4 September 1796
‘I accompanied the two sisters after mass. I brought away the first volume of Benardin. She told me that she should be alone, as her mother and sister were leaving on Wednesday.’

9 September 1796
‘I went there, and only Elise.’

14 September 1796
‘I returned the second volume of Bernardin, and had some conversation both her and Jenny. I promised to bring some comedies on the following day.’

17 September 1796
‘I took them, and began to open my heart.’

27 January 1797
‘At length she has arrived from Lyons; her mother did not come into the room at once. Apparently for the sake of looking at some vignettes, I knelt by her side; her mother came in and made me sit down by her.’

9 June 1797
‘I was prevented from giving a lesson on account my cough; I went away rather early, taking with Gresset, and the third volume of the Histoire de France. Julie shows me the trick of solitaire, which I had guessed the evening before; I seated myself near Julie, and remained by her till the end.

Incidentally, referring to some airs and songs, I left C’est en vain que la nature on the table. I ate a cherry she had let fall, and kissed a rose which she had smelt; in the walk I twice gave her my hand to get over a stile, her mother made room for me on the seat between herself and Julia; in returning I told her that it was long since I had passed so happy a day, but that it was the contemplation of nature which had charmed me the most; she spoke to me the whole day with much kindness.’

21 May 1803
‘Walk in the garden. Julie very ill.’

9 July 1803
‘Julie very ill in the morning. I begged M. Mollet to take my place at the Lyceum. M. Pelotin continued the same treatment, in spite of the new symptom.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 20 January 2015.

Most somber events

‘For weeks I have been tormented by witnessing these most somber events of our century (and perhaps of my whole life); it enrages me to belong to a nation that is so powerless today. . . There are moments - when one reflects upon Hitler’s flag flying over the Acropolis - of doubt that we shall ever see the victory so longed for by all free spirits. Yet there have been centuries in history when evil triumphed, when independent thinking was asleep, when moral and material progress were halted. So it is possible that Europe is now on the eve of such an age of obscurantism and misery.’ This is from the chilling diary of Raymond-Raoul Lambert, born 130 years ago today,  a prominent Jewish leader during the Vichy regime. 

Lambert was born on 10 August 1894 in Montmorency, near Paris. He fought in WWI (and later in WW2). During the 1930s, he participated in several organisations helping refugees leaving Germany, and acted as secretary-general of the Comité d’Assistance aux Réfugiés, becoming chief editor of Univers Israélite. In 1941 he was nominated director-general of the Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF) in the then unoccupied zone. Subsequently, he became chief of UGIF for the whole of France. 

Despite his official roles, Lambert clandestinely connected with Jewish underground resistance groups and Catholic circles that assisted Jews in evading persecution. His resistance activities included protesting against the confiscation of Jewish property by the Nazis. In August 1943, Lambert and his family - wife Simone Lambert and four children - were arrested and deported to Auschwitz where they were gassed on arrival. A little further information on Lambert’s life is available at Encyclopaedia.com.

However a more comprehensive source is the published diary of Lambert himself: Diary of a Witness 1940-1943, as translated from the French by Isabel Best, and as edited by Richard I. Cohen (published by Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, in association with The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1985). This can be read freely online at Internet Archive (with log-in), and a review can be read in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Oxford Academic. NB: Lambert is known to have kept diaries during earlier periods of his life but these seem to have been lost.

According to the publisher at the time of publication, Lambert’s diary had been among the most important untranslated records of the experience of French Jews in the Holocaust. Lambert, was, in the words of the historian Michael Marrus, ‘arguably the most important Jewish official in contact with the Vichy government and the Germans.’ National Catholic Reporter says: ‘Lambert was a complex and flawed man who was asked to take on grave responsibilities. His decisions have been, and will be, judged by history, but readers of [his diary] will emerge with respect for his courage in wrestling with the idolatry of loyalty as the reality of the Vichy regime undermines the “humane culture” of France.’

The editor of the diary, Best, states: ‘Lambert has left behind a candid, humane document of a man who firmly believed in a vision of service to his country and his co-religionists. A man of letters and action, his diary illuminates the destiny of a French Jew who struggled to make sense of a dramatically changing world while he held firm to the legacy of 150 years of emancipation.’

Here is another extract from the Best’s introduction followed by several extracts from the diary itself.

‘Written by a man who from his youth was actively engaged in the affairs of his country and the destiny of his co-religionists, the diary has no humor or levity, maintaining throughout a rhythm of seriousness and intensity. It transmits Lambert’s internal conflict and struggle to understand how his vision of France could withstand the ideological revolution of Vichy, and evokes his pain and revulsion at efforts to turn the Jews into pariahs of the society he so cherished. The diary also captures Lambert’s inability to accept this new status as it reveals his deep attachment to French literature and traditions, to the writings of Stendhal, Romain Rolland, André Gide, Maurice Barres, and so many others. Indeed, his world of associations and cultural habits was shaped almost exclusively by French writers and thinkers and only minimally by Jewish sources. Yet he felt a continuing sense of loyalty to and identification with both worlds and failed to see any point of conflict between them. Suddenly confronted with the French about-face, Lambert was left reeling and searching for answers. Thus the relatively minor role the Nazis play in his diary. For him the shattered universe he confronts is that of the historic relationship between France and French Jewry, nurtured over generations and sealed in endless forms of dedication to the common cause. Diary of a Witness is riveted with these preoccupations, making it a seminal document for the study of French Jewry in modern times in general and during the Holocaust in particular.’

12 July 1940
‘After the past four weeks, which have seen unfold the most tragic events in our history, and for me the most terrible anxieties I have ever known, I am trying to recover my intellectual balance, to regain my awareness of the passage of time. So naturally I thought of the notebooks, which, during the Great War, saved me from inertia and despair.

As an officer assigned to a central administrative unit, I was not directly involved in the fighting, but I have witnessed the disarray and paralysis of my country’s central nervous systems. I have been most dreadfully worried about the fate of my wife and our three sons, who are my whole life and my only reasons now to go on living and struggling - for even though the real danger is gone, at least for the moment, the future will bring serious problems.

I should begin by putting down matter-of-factly, as well as I can remember clearly, the details of my odyssey from Paris to Nîmes; as I owed it to myself to be during that time, I am aware of having been lucid, energetic, and concerned to do my duty. 

Until June 10: Still in the technical section of the Colonial Troops, captain tor a month now (and very happy about it), stationed at the Hotel des Invalides. On May 19 I decided to have Simone and the children evacuated to Bellac, more because ot the danger of air raids than the strategic situation. Left alone in Paris, I waited. Several alarms.

Monday, June 3: At 1:30 P.M., aerial bombardment of Paris, targeting the Citroën factory, which was hit; some bombs in my Auteuil neighborhood, in Coussin Street where Lionel has been going to school. . . So the evacuation is justified and I accept the separation. One official statement after another announces disaster in overly enigmatic terms.

June 10: At 11 a.m. I go with my superior, Commandant Pascot, to the Eighth Department office of the ministry under which we work. . .  They are moving out, without letting us know. They were just going to forget about us. The General Headquarters staff has already left Paris, during the night. Destination: Candé, near Blois. It’s up to us to find transportation: a dump truck belonging to one of my noncommissioned officers -he deals in fertilizer; the cars of two of our secretaries. The commandant goes to Ribérac this evening to kiss his wife, then catch up with us at Candé. I am to leave in the morning with the office things and the files.

By evening Paris is emptying out, its public buildings are dead. The winds of defeat are already blowing. At street corners women sit on bundles, waiting for the taxis, all of which are gone. At St. Lazare train station, floods of refugees. “They” have reached Pontoise and Nantes. I go on calmly arranging our departure. We [are to] meet at 8:30 A.M., unless there are suspicious noises during the night.

June 11: I awake to one of the most horrible sensations of my life, a feeling of being smothered, of dying all alone. The maid rouses me at 6 A.M.: gas attack! I open the window. Paris is drowning in a black, stifling fog that is plunging the sky and the streets into mourning. . . It smells of oil and soot, but it’s not a gas attack. It is oil fumes from the storage tanks that have been set on fire from Rouen to Bonnières, along with smoke with which the Boche [the Germans] are screening their crossing of the Seine. . . It feels like being crushed by something sinister, and I truly sense that Paris will never be the same again. This deep gloom is our defeat. In the street people's faces have black spots from the soot and eyes outlined in black. The few souls still passing by are running like crazy toward the train stations.

We leave Invalides at 10:30. I requisition gasoline from the military school. We head for Candé by the Orleans highway, which I know well. . . The spectacle there is dumbfounding, a whole people in flight. The road is hopelessly jammed: workers fleeing on bicycles, on foot, pushing wheelbarrows, cars full to bursting. . . With my lieutenant I go ahead on foot to restore some order and make a way through, but there are no longer any police or any authority that people recognize, and of course no priority possible for the military either. Lunch is in a ditch where we are forced to wait for an hour coming out of Longjumeau. By evening we are at Étampes. My second-in-command and my men sleep in the vehicles, which I have parked off the highway on a dead-end road, since it would be dangerous to keep going at night. I take the responsibility for this; we will get there when we can, and we are more than seventy kilometers [forty-five miles] beyond the enemy’s reach on the ground. For myself, in a nearby house I am able to find a free bed on which to stretch out. My experience of the previous war is serving me well; the filling station on the square in Étampes is overwhelmed but is obliged to give me gasoline to continue my journey. Senator Breton, traveling in his Bugatti, is sleeping in the open air, and there is no more bread to be found. . . I scrape together what I can for dinner with my men.’

2 October 1940
‘One of the most depressing memories of my life. This morning I read in the newspaper: “The Council of Ministers continued study and finalization of the Statut on the Jews. . .” So it is possible that within a few days I shall see my citizenship reduced, and that my sons, who are French by birth, culture, and faith, will find themselves brutally and cruelly cast out of the French community. . . Is this possible? I cannot believe it. France is no longer France. I repeat to myself that Germany is in charge here, trying still to excuse this offense against an entire history - but I cannot yet realize that it is true.’

9 October 1940
‘I am in Luchon on an assignment for the refugee committee, since I have again taken up social work in order to earn my children’s daily bread.

Here I found about a thousand unfortunate Jews from Holland and Belgium, in poverty and anguish, but the future for them looks even more fearful than the present.

The papers this morning published the decree, signed by Pétain, that has abrogated the Crémieux Decree. The Jews of Algeria are no longer French citizens. . . The Marshal has dishonored himself. What shame and what infamy! In Algeria a father who lost his son in the war is no longer a French citizen, because he is Jewish. . . So this is the armistice with honor. I am incapable of realizing that such an injustice is done, I am so ashamed of my country. Ah! if I didn’t have a wife, three sons, and graves to care for on this soil that is still French, how well I would know the way to action, to revolt and struggle for what makes life precious!’

10 May 1941
‘For weeks I have been tormented by witnessing these most somber events of our century (and perhaps of my whole life); it enrages me to belong to a nation that is so powerless today. . . There are moments - when one reflects upon Hitler’s flag flying over the Acropolis - of doubt that we shall ever see the victory so longed for by all free spirits. Yet there have been centuries in history when evil triumphed, when independent thinking was asleep, when moral and material progress were halted. So it is possible that Europe is now on the eve of such an age of obscurantism and misery. It seems that nothing on land is capable of standing up to the mechanized strength of the Reich. What then? The decision will only come on the sea or in the air, when the time comes that the United States and the British Empire can bombard the industrial centers of central Europe, day and night, until its peoples beg for mercy. I don’t see any such possibility for at least two years. And I tell myself, without being pessimistic, that it is not an absolute certainty.

The old world will not be reborn. Perhaps the victory of the evil forces will give birth, after a long time, to a new world. Can the tiny cell that my family represents survive that long, in the midst of chaos?

So I fear for the future of my children, and my fears are particularly those of a Frenchman, a French Jew. Fortunately my sons are not yet adults. What means should they be given to defend themselves in four or five years? I accept this suffering for myself, because I hope in spite of all to sec the dawn of freedom once again, but for them - I don’t want them to suffer, and I just assume they will not face debasement and discrimination. It’s a problem - such grievous cruelty that I refuse to be resigned to it for the moment. I’m either an optimist or a coward.

In view of the persecutions being initiated by the new order in France, against foreigners in general and foreign Jews in particular, in light of what has happened elsewhere, in view of racist laws and the “Commission on Jewish Affairs” being run in Vichy from Berlin, I wonder whether this collaboration won’t bring about a yet more rigorous Statut. A history of racism in France from 1939 to 194? will have to be written. . . There are days when I don’t dare listen to the official bulletins on the radio; they wound me, because I still feel French and call myself a Frenchman. If I didn't have my wife and my three sons, I should be sorry not to have “died honorably in action,” or sorry to have survived my mother.’

People wounded and dying

‘We went this afternoon to the Louvre, [. . .] Some of Canaletto’s views of Venice we admired very much; many of the subjects are not agreeable, particularly amongst the French paintings, no end to people wounded and dying’. This is from the travel journal of Emily Jane (nee Birch) Glyn who died 170 years ago today. There is very little information about Emily online, but the Epsom and Ewell History Explorer, where the journal can be found, describes her as ‘A typical, rather sheltered, Victorian lady.’ 

Emily was born in St Petersburg in 1816 to a Mancunian merchant working there. She married Revd. Sir George Lewen Glyn in 1838 at All Saints Church, Marylebone, London, and they had four children although one died in infancy. She died on 26 July 1854. As far as a I can tell, there is almost no further information about her online.

However, during the 19th century several members of the Glyn family - including Emily - travelled overseas and recorded their travels in journals. These journals form part of the large family archive held, I think, by the Surrey History Centre, but it is thanks to the Epsom and Ewell History Explorer that some of these diaries are freely available online. in particular Emily’s 1945 journal of a holiday in Normandy and Paris in 1845.

The website provides the following information about this journey and journal: ‘Emily travelled to Paris in 1845 with what appears to be a large family group, although presumably without her husband, as he is not mentioned. The group included Mama and Papa, and at least one uncle and aunt, and Charlie (brother?). The party travelled by steamer from Shoreham, via Brighton, to Dieppe, and then on by train to Paris. Emily Jane would have been thirty years old at the time, and had one child, George, aged four, who was presumably left behind in the nursery. Emily appears to have been a very conventional Victorian lady of rather limited outlook. She reacted to the ritual of mass, in a side chapel of the Madeleine, with shock and disdain, and was not very impressed by some of the pictures in the Louvre, of which she said: “Many of the subjects are not agreeable, particularly amongst the French paintings, no end to people wounded and dying”. She did like some of the Canalettos though. The party went to the Sèvres factory near St. Cloud, but apparently were not impressed with the china on display. The tapestries at the Gobelin factory met with more approval.

This visit to Paris was before Baron Haussmann transformed the city and created the grand boulevards, but the party visited most of the same sites and places that tourists visit today, and we really do not get a picture of the very different city that it must have been then, with narrow cramped streets unchanged since medieval times. They did climb the Arc de Triomphe, which had been completed around ten years earlier by the king Louis Philippe, although it was originally commissioned in 1806 by Napoleon following Austerlitz. [. . .]

Emily Jane’s account is quite impersonal. She recounts the facts about the places she visits, but does not really give us much of a reaction, other than saying a view or picture is ‘very pretty’, or ‘dreadful’, as she describes the orange trees in the Tuileries gardens. Neither does she give us any idea of what other individual members of the party may think at any time. She does seem particularly interested in the royal family, and in the tragic death of the Duc d’Orleans, the heir to the throne who had been killed in a carriage accident in 1842, aged 31. Her description of the memorial chapel, and the painting therein of his death, is the most animated of the journal, but the impression of the diary on the whole, is of a rather dutiful account by a typical, rather sheltered, Victorian lady.’

Here are severel of Emily’s journal entries.

3 July 1845
‘At 10 o’clock we all started in an omnibus for the station and left Brighton by the Shoreham train at 25 minutes past ten. At a quarter to 11 we got out at Kingston and walked to the steamer, which was close. The Steamer was the Menai, Capt. Goodburn, and was rather a small one, there were a good many passengers; we left Shoreham at 12 1⁄2 and reached Brighton Pier in about half an hour. Luggage without end was brought on board there, we were very glad that we had gone to Shoreham for we much enjoyed our Railway trip and also our steamer to Brighton. We left the pier at 1 1⁄2, we had a very bright day with not much wind, it rose however about 3 o’clock but soon sank again; we went along the coast as far as Beachy Head, this was the last English land we saw. We steered S.S.E. nearly the whole way, we saw the English coast for four or five hours. About six we came in sight of the French coast, it much resembled that of England, there being high cliffs. We entered a kind of bay having land on both sides of us. About 9 o’clock we entered the harbour of Dieppe; you see the town to the right as you enter. The entrance of the harbour is very narrow, it is formed by the embouchure of the little river Arques. We wound about for some time and then got into a large basin of water surrounded by houses on three sides. We stopped on the right side exactly opposite the Customs House, it was dark when we arrived and the lights of the shops and houses looked very pretty reflected in the water.

Everyone from the steamer went straight to the Douane, the door of which was guarded by two gens d’armes; the room into which we went was not very large, in one part there sat two or three men at a desk, one had on a cocked hat and looked very fierce. Immediately before them there was a railing and about a yard beyond another, between these two railings. Papa [Josiah Birch, a merchant from Manchester who lived and worked in St. Petersburg] was called and all of us who were down in his passport, the passport was most carefully examined as to the number of persons and who they were. When that was finished we walked a few paces towards their right and were met by another man who opened two doors, one on each side, turning the ladies into one and the gentlemen into the other. The room into which we went was very small and might have done very well for the Black Hole. Two French women were in it, when we got in they shut up the doors and I thought they were going to search our persons, but they did not. They first seized hold of Mama’s basket, put in their hands and pulled out her work box which they insisted upon opening; they soon finished with her and the rest of our party and let them out and began searching other people’s things. I thought they had forgotten me; I had charge of Charlie’s dressing case. I said to one of them ‘Voulez vous chercher cette boite’. I opened it, she looked at the top and shut it immediately, saying ‘Tres bien’. I now thought I might be released and made for the door when the other woman stopped me and asked if I had been ‘visitée’. Hearing that I had she let me out; I found our party waiting for me. Mama now could not be found but we soon discovered her in the crowd. Being all assembled we walked up to the Hotel Royal, we went along the Quai and then turned up a street towards the right which took us up to the Hotel. We got very nice rooms and found everything very comfortable. The Hotel faces the sea. As soon as our rooms were settled Uncle Robert and Charlie set off for the Douane to get through our carpet bags. They asked Charlie to declare that he had nothing contrabande in his box and said something about ‘pour declarer’, he only heard ‘clarer’ and thought they were asking him if he had any claret in his box; he answered ‘non’ but soon found out his mistake. When he and uncle came back to the Hotel, we had tea, it was nearly twelve when we finished.’

7 July 1845
‘We went this afternoon to the Louvre, it is behind the Tuileries, the Place du Carrousel being between them. We entered the southern side of the Louvre, the passports were looked at and all the umbrellas kept below, for which we were obliged to pay 2 sous each. We only had time to look at one picture gallery, it contained many paintings by the best masters; first were those of the French school, then followed Dutch, German, Spanish and Italian. Some of Canaletto’s views of Venice we admired very much; many of the subjects are not agreeable, particularly amongst the French paintings, no end to people wounded and dying. Everything almost in Paris is closed at 4 o’clock, we were obliged to leave the Louvre at that hour.

In the morning I went with the gentlemen to see the Bourse, it is in the direction of the Palais Royal and is a very handsome building, surrounded by Corinthian pillars, the ceiling inside is covered with monochrome paintings which are so much like bas-reliefs that people are often deceived; they are chiefly allegorical, France receiving the tribute of the four quarters of the globe, the City of Paris delivering the keys to the God of Commerce and inviting Commercial Justice to enter the walls, the Union of Commerce and the Arts giving birth to the prosperity of the State and Paris receiving from the nymph of the Seine and the Genius of the [.........] the productions of abundance. There were also representations of the four quarters of the globe and of all the commercial cities of Europe. In the evening we dined at the Café de l’Europe in the Place Royal.’

9 July 1845
‘Today we went first to the Pantheon, it was formerly the church of St. Genevieve. Over the cornice is now written ‘Aux grands hommes à la patrie reconnaissante’. It is a beautiful building, the portico is supported by Corinthian columns, in the middle is a large dome, the highest in Paris. The building is nearly in the form of a Greek cross. On the walls are inscribed the names of those who were killed in the revolution of July [the 1830 revolution resulting in the enthronement of Louis-Philippe]. In the dome is a fine painting by Gros, representing St. Genevieve etc. and the monarchs whose reigns have formed epochs in the history of the country. We went downstairs and passed through a series of vaults, in some of the passages there is a very loud echo; here are buried in opposite vaults Voltaire and Rousseau, also many other people whose names I do not remember. From the Pantheon we went to the Gobelin manufactury, it is situated in the outskirts of Paris towards the S.E. We saw the whole process and afterwards the Salle d’exposition; the Gobelins were very beautiful, we could hardly tell them from paintings. There were several of the King and others of the royal family, in one place carpets were being made for the King, the pieces take from two to six years to complete.

We went next to the Jardin des Plantes, it is a kind of Zoological Garden. We were too late to see the large animals, we saw quantities of deer and of large birds. Many medicinal plants are cultivated here; there are green houses, hot houses, galleries, an amphitheatre with laboratories, but we did not see them. On our way home we passed the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the Hotel Dieu, both situated on an island. Soon after we passed on our left the Mint and the Institute of France, we crossed the Seine by the Pont Neuf, in the midst of the bridge is a statue of Henri 4. We went to the Palais Royal where we dined.’

27 July 1845
‘We went this morning to Mr. Lovett’s Chapel, he did not preach. It was given out that there would be service in the Chapel next Sunday for the last time, we do not know why the Chapel is going to be given up. We walked home. This was the first day of the fête, many more amusements were going on in the Champs Elysées than usual. In the afternoon we went to the Ambassador’s Chapel and heard a very nice sermon from the Bishop. After dinner we went to see the Statue of the Duke of Orleans which has today been put up in the Quadrangle of the Louvre. We went through the Tuilleries, across the Place du Carravell (Carrousel?), and under the western side of the Louvre, we thought the statue very bad, both horse and man are out of proportion and very stiff.’