Paul Claudel

Paul Claudel was a major French poet and dramatist and a career ambassador, and he left his sister Camille in an asylum for thirty years. He had a religious conversion at eighteen behind a pillar in Notre-Dame on Christmas Day 1886 and spent the rest of his life a militant Catholic; the plays - Tete d'Or, Partage de midi, Le Soulier de satin - are enormous, difficult, verse-driven works about grace and sexual renunciation, and Le Soulier de satin runs eleven hours uncut. He entered the diplomatic service and served in China for fourteen years, then Brazil, Denmark, Japan, the United States and Belgium, writing at night. His poetry took the verset, a long breath-length line derived from the Vulgate, and it is among the strongest things in French of the period; Honegger set his Jeanne d'Arc au bucher. The private record is harder. He signed the papers to commit Camille in 1913 with the rest of the family, visited perhaps a dozen times in thirty years, and did not intervene when doctors repeatedly wrote that she could be released. He wrote about her work with real understanding afterwards, which some readers find worse rather than better. He was elected to the Academie francaise in 1946 and given a state funeral. His reputation now travels with hers. His conversion took place while listening to the Magnificat at vespers. He negotiated for France in Washington during the depression. Camille s letters pleading to be released survive in the family papers he preserved, which is part of why the case can be reconstructed at all.

• Lived: 1868 CE – 1955 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: writer, politician