Far Out to Jail

With Andre Malraux, France's Minister of Culture, adoration of art knows no bounds. He has put Marc Chagall's lovers on the ceiling of the Paris Opera, Maillol bronzes in the Tuileries gardens, Masson's abstracts in the dome of the Comedie Franc,aise. He has washed the face of Paris from a dingy grey to honey-colored sandstone, and his art history, Voices of Silence, was a monument to a world he saw as "a museum without walls."

Nearly forgotten nowadays is the fact that Malraux's passion for art once led him to commit an act of downright thievery that got him arrested. The incident, a cause celebre in 1923, has popped up again with the publication in France of the memoirs of his ex-wife Clara, and a biography by Walter Langlois subtitled Indochina Adventure.

Without a Sou. At the time of the adventure, Malraux was a 22-year-old cubist poet. He and Clara were very broke, following a highly unartistic attempt to make a killing on the Bourse. Intrigued by archaeology, especially by a little-known Cambodian temple called Banteay Srei on the way to Angkor Vat, Malraux got permission from the French colonial administration to explore. Off they went first-class--without a sou for the return trip. When they finally found Banteay Srei, says Clara, "It was a kind of Trianon in the jungle."

They set about some minor demolition, using saws they had brought from France. These broke, recalls Clara, but it turned out that ropes were all it took to topple the uncemented, nearly life-size devatas, or guardian goddesses, from their niches. The statuary was then smuggled back to Pnom Penh by riverboat. Malraux was met by curious inspectors who had been tipped off. He was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison.

While Malraux sweltered, awaiting a hearing on his appeal, Clara hurried back to Paris where she got a petition from impressionable intellectuals urging the French colonial government to spare him. The signatures included Andre Gide, Franc,ois Mauriac, Andre Maurois, Louis Aragon, Andre Breton and old Anatole France. The upshot was a reduction of Malraux's sentence to one year, which colonial authorities quietly did not bother to enforce.

Dreamy Fiction. Malraux himself gave a dreamily fictional account of his brush with the law in his 1930 adventure novel, The Royal Way. There, his hero Claude takes it all with existential calm: "Thanks to the fallen stone, he was suddenly in harmony with the forest and the temple. He pictured the three stones as they had been, one above the other; the two dancing girls were some of the purest work he had ever seen. Well, the next thing was to load them onto the carts."

Neither latter-day account of the Cambodia caper is written in spite. Langlois cites the run-in with the laws of French colonial bureaucracy as the start of Malraux's fervent anticolonialism. Indeed, he did return to Indochina to start an independence movement, beginning his long flirtation with revolutionaries that led him to fight in China during the 1920s and Spain in the 1930s. Clara is hardly bitter; she even seeks to justify the theft. "Love," says she, "gives one rights."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.