« N’était-ce donc que cela ? »

A rare pamphlet in which Malraux records the feelings that overwhelmed him upon reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom by Thomas Edward Lawrence. Malraux had been fascinated by Lawrence of Arabia since the late 1920s; here, admiration is combined with an intimate closeness to this writer-adventurer obsessed with his own work, its versions, its destructions, its regrets.

This brief text, contemporary with Les Noyers de l’Altenburg and the great abandoned project Le Démon de l’absolu, is essential reading for understanding how Malraux projected onto Lawrence his own “crisis of writing”: distrust of biography, lost or destroyed manuscripts, doubt about the value of his own books, and a reluctance to offer them to the public.