Her Lover Read Free

immediate intimations of his own mortality. It was not until 1967 that he submitted a 'monstrous' manuscript to Gallimard, who insisted on substantial cuts. Cohen reluctantly agreed, and the adventures of the Valiant which had originally followed chapter 11 appeared separately in 1969 as Les Valeureux.
    When Belle du Seigneur was published, in 1968, it was hailed as a masterpiece of sustained invention and baroque power. Cohen was lionized by the press, and there was talk of the Nobel Prize. But, wary of the publicity machine, he jealously guarded his privacy until, in 1977, he was interviewed for the television literary magazine Apostrophes, which made him an unlikely star. His mixture of teasing guile, frailty and shrewdness appealed to a wide audience. But his last book, Carnets 1978, made no concessions to popular taste. He returned to his major preoccupations - death, the difficulty of faith, the eternal cruelty of man to man - but the bleakness was relieved by a gleam if not of hope then of wisdom. If the enjoinder to brotherly love has failed, we should look elsewhere and accept the "universal irresponsibility' of men, who are what they are: not simply fallible, but mortal. Still waiting for a sign from the God he revered but could not believe in, Albert Cohen died in 1981, still keeping faith with the commonwealth of brotherly pity.
    Belle du Seigneur is the longest episode of a single work which evolved slowly over four decades. The first instalment, Solal, is by far the most eventful. The story begins in about 1910, in Cephalonia, and tells how the thirteen-year-old Solal of the Solals, son of the island's unbending, patriarchal Chief Rabbi, resolves to escape the ghetto and fulfil his high destiny. When he is sixteen, he defies his father and elopes impetuously with Adrienne de Valdonne, the young wife of the French consul. The adventure does not last, but it widens his horizons and sets his feet on the road to the success which seems his by right. Solal has every quality: he is one of nature's aristocrats, as handsome as he is clever. But he is also driven by a sense of mission which he does not fully understand. When still in his early twenties, he is immensely rich, married to Aude de Maussane, who loves him, and is Minister of Labour in a French socialist government. Yet he senses that his success is built on the rejection of his Jewish roots -that is, of a whole area of human diversity. He tries to make amends -he fills the cellar of a mansion with needy Jews - but neither good works nor the love of Aude can redeem him. He begins to act erratically and descends into poverty and obscurity. Clutching his baby son, he kills himself, only to be mysteriously resurrected - to fight another day, perhaps, or because the fates have not done with him yet. 'The sun lit the tears, the defiant smile of the bleeding lordwho now, overflowing with a lunatic love of earth and crowned in beauty, strode into the future, went forth to meet the miracle of his defeat.'
    For Solal, Cohen has the same mix of affection and ridicule which Stendhal showed for Julien Sorel. His hero is also a restless, reckless spirit in search of the absolute. But while Julien is in love with love, Solal is in love with a god he cannot accept, and views himself as a Messianic figure pledged to making a world which has room for loyalty, love, Christians, Jews and all who are born to die. Cohen, whose own idealism was permanently undermined by an incapacity for faith, both shared this sense of mission and mocked it - and his jokes are very good indeed. For against the sombre history of the rise and fall of Solal must be set the Valiant', an unlikely quintet of middle-aged, garrulous, squabbling, picturesque cousins who, prefiguring Snow White's dwarves and the Marx Brothers, cut a considerable dash as comic musketeers.
    Cohen was extremely fond of them, and introduced them to new readers on a number of occasions: he does so again in chapter 12 of Belle du