The guest on last Tuesday's L'humeur vagabonde was Claude-Catherine Kiejman who just published Clara Malraux l'aventureuse.
He apparently told her that she would be better off marrying him than becoming a second-rate writer. "That didn't really encourage me," she said. Her daughter gave her a book about Zelda Fitzgerald where she found a similar phrase and where it was made clear that this attitude was what drove Zelda insane. Clara Malraux said she sympathized, but she simply didn't have the time for that: the events in Indochina, poverty, The Spanish Civil War, World War II, being Jewish, fighting in the Resistance, bringing up here child, left her no time to go crazy.
She stayed with André for 15 years and learned this:
- « Aimer une femme, pour un homme, c’est peut-être la vouloir semblable à l’image qu’il s’est fait d’elle. Aimer, pour une femme, c’est vouloir que l’homme choisi ressemble à l’image qu’il s’est fait de lui-même, et souvent, plus simplement encore, à être ce qu’il est ».
- ("Loving a woman, for a man, is perhaps wanting her to resemble the image that he himself has of her. Loving, for a woman, is wanting the chosen man to resemble the image that he has of himself, and often, even more simply, to be what he is.")
