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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Could one of Renoir's most iconic paintings conceal one of the most astonishing true stories of scandal and tragedy in Golden Age Paris? On today's episode, Catherine Ostler, writer and historian, joins James McAuley, journalist and author, to discuss Catherine's new book, the Renoir Girls. In it, Catherine explores the untold story behind Renoir's pink and blue, a portrait that captures both the glamour of Belle Epoque, Paris, and the deeper currents of family identity and upheaval beneath the surface. Let's join our host, James McCauley, now with more.
- [00:41]
B
My name is James McCauley, and I have the immense pleasure today of interviewing journalist, author and historian Katherine Ostler about her brilliant new book, the Renoir Girls. This is an arresting read from start to finish, and it is so many things all at once. But most of all, it is a. A haunting family story that really takes us into the dark heart of Europe's 20th century. And it sits at the intersection of French history, Jewish history, British history, and perhaps most of all, art, which turns out to be a language of beauty and anguish in this period. And it is a real pleasure for me to be able to sit down and talk with Catherine about her true achievement with this book, which is a real masterpiece of research and also of narrative. So, Catherine, thank you so much for joining me today.
- [01:38]
C
Oh, thank you so much, James. It's a sort of world that we both know very well because I'm a great fan of your brilliant book, the House of Fragile Things. And I think when we've met, through being, this obsession with this sort of family and this topic, and we've sort of discussed why it is that this family is sort of mesmerizing. And I think it's because they are a kind of very decorative, you called it Downton Abbey style, but way into, as you say, a sort of dark world that starts off with such hope and such beauty and creativity and ends in the sort of worst period of the 20th century.
- [02:23]
B
So I guess for those of us, or for those joining us today who have yet to read Catherine's book, which you must do, the family that we are talking about are called the Quin d'. Anvers. And I mean, maybe, Catherine, you could start by telling us just a little bit about the family, where they come from, and then when we meet them at the beginning of the book in the Paris of the fin de siec.
- [02:46]
C
Sure. So the Cayennes, as they originally were, before they added The Anvers of Antwerp, which was a sort of aristocratic style affectation, really, were born, were from Bonn. The family lived in the former ghetto there, which was right by the river. It was very crowded. They became sort of sugar traders in Antwerp. And eventually, in about 1848, there's this great movement after the revolutions across Europe towards Paris, the home of equality and civil rights for the Jews and sort of represented hope and economic opportunity, really. So they arrive in Paris and they become the Cayennes of Antwerp, the Cayenne d'. Alwas, and they start establishing themselves. And one of the sons of this family, Louis, marries a bride from Trieste from a sort of Italianized Jewish family called the Morpurgos. And this couple, it's a sort of semi arranged marriage, really, have these five children. And that's where we. Where the book goes back, but that's where it begins, because These children, the three girls, will be painted by Renoir in the 1880s when they are 4, 6 and 8. So I suppose I start the book through the paintings. This is how I came across it in Eben Duval's o' Hare With Amber Eyes. He mentions that this beautiful. These two beautiful paintings by Renoir. So we've got three sisters. Irene, the oldest, is painted in 1880 in the garden of their townhouse, and the two younger sisters are painted the following year. And the pictures are. Renoir is introduced to the family by the mother's lover, who's the art critic,
- [04:57]
B
Charles ofrussi, who, of course, is the. Who, of course, is the subject of Ed Men's book, the Hair with Amber Eyes, the kind of. The main character of that. I think many of our listeners joining us today might have read the Hair With Amber Eyes or a number of the other books that have very interestingly popped up in recent years about this specific family and this specific topic. But what I love about yours is that you've taken these two, as you said, these very beautiful symbolic portraits of three young women, but also of an era truly. It is the world of Proust, the world of the sort of glittering salons of Paris on the cusp of catastrophe, really. And through the book that you've written. And again, I cannot express enough my admiration for your research. You've really followed these three women through an amazing kind of epochal transformation. And starting from the same place, which is this sort of gilded townhouse in the Rue Bassano, they end up in wildly different places. And I think that that is a real achievement of what you've written, is that through them you have taken us into the sort of the tumult of the European 20th century. We get through each of the young women, we get wildly different experiences and we get. And I was hoping we could talk a little bit about that.
- [06:37]
C
Yes, I suppose when you look at history, a family in history, it's always a combination of, isn't it? What's going to happen to them? What is going on in their country, their city in Europe, in the world? And what choices are they going to make? How are they going to deal with their fate or their destiny? And what are the paths, what are the options that we could all have taken in any moment in time? And, you know, nothing. It's very easy in history to try and sort of reverse fit. Everything is inevitable and he never is. So then it's quite interesting, I think, to put oneself almost in the shoes of these women and try and work out what it is they were thinking and where they were.
- [07:21]
B
Absolutely. And I think it just bears repeating for our audience, just like how much tumult they lived through. So at the start of the book, we are in the aftermath of the Franco Prussian War, which was a hugely traumatic event for France. And then you have the establishment of the Third Republic in the aftermath of that humiliating defeat for the French government. And then over the long decades of the Third Republic, you have so many sort of internal social psychodramas, for lack of a better word. I mean, we have, not too long after that, we have the Dreyfus affair before the Second World War, certainly the greatest anti Semitic scandal in modern European history, in which the Jewish military captain is wrongfully accused of treason for spying for Germany. Ultimately, Dreyfus is vindicated by the Republic, but only after 12 years of insane polarization and kind of this dormant anti Semitic invective infecting every aspect of public life. And then, of course, we have perhaps the greatest eruption of all, which is the First World War, which sort of puts an end. And you write about this very meaningful, very, very beautifully in your book. But it's sort of the death now of this aristocratic era of salons and painters and writers and bankers all gathered around tables. And then in the aftermath of the First World War, we have the economic uncertainty of the aftermath. We have the 1920s. Then we have sort of the clouds begin to gather, begin to gather in the 1930s. And then we have the war. And of course for this family, this Jewish family that is. That is the real end in some ways. And it's just amazing how these three women have very different experiences from that or very different afterlives from that common experience. And so I mean you, the Renoir girls, you know, you've got Alice, Elizabeth and Irene and I was wondering, I mean if you could maybe take us just a little bit with each one sort of how they kind of come out of Paris and where they end up.
- [09:46]
C
That was a beautifully done timeline by the way. I want to frame it. That was really, that was really great. So I think if we go. I mean, I'm sure everybody knows this but I'm always fascinated by how France has lost and the German Empire has been born but the initial reaction is to have a fight with itself. So you've got sort of Paris, the Paris Commune, Paris sort of at war with France. So there's this inbuilt tension I think through French history and sort of in this book of like who's on whose side? Are you Republican, are you Catholic, are you Jewish? Do you think the state, should there be a monarchy should. You know, everybody's sort of all at sea with their allegiances and their lines. It's something we know well now in England and America about this. But the sort of polarisations which are never as neat as one might hope. It's not even A against B, it's kind of A with a bit of B is also not sure about C sort of thing anyway, so you've got that. So they're born into this. Well actually the first child, Robert, a boy is born in London because the parents escape France for the Franco Russian War and they go and live with some friends in London and then they come back and then Irene is born and she's the oldest daughter and she's the first to be painted but she is just before the Dreyfus affair kicks off she's married just like her mother in a kind of arranged marriage in the Jewish banking network to the Comte de Kommando. And she is sort of very young, she's not yet 20, he's much older, he is a great lover of the 18th century like her parents but he is her parents friend. He's sort of halfway between their ages and his. But it's very much an arranged match, it's not a love marriage and they will have, they will go on to have two children but it will all collapse when she falls in love with his horse trainer who is a very dashing roguish Italian, sort of semi self styled count. So first of all she does exactly what is expected of her and then the Dreyfus affair grows up and what I find particularly interesting about these women is that they were Jewish. The devastating effect of Dreyfus in Paris in that, well in France was that it was so divisive that these women who had been painted by Renoir, who lived in these beautiful houses, their mother, as you mentioned, had a salon, they knew everybody. And Proust writes about this, I think better than anyone about the social kaleidoscope where suddenly doors shut, everything is divided. The Ancien regiment, not all of them, but quite a lot of them, turn anti Semitic. We cannot believe. They think that the French army has set someone up and lied. And to suggest this is an act of betrayal to France and they sort of group together all the Jews as guilty of this sort of, kind of non existent crime. And the status of these young women as very marriageable heiresses is sort of affected by the Dreyfus affair. And because they're women, they have the opportunity to reinvent themselves. Different religions, different names, husbands from.
- [13:24]
B
That's one of the. For me, as a fellow traveler of this story, but also as one of your readers, I mean, I think it's so interesting, the shifting of identity in this period, so to speak. So, you know, you mentioned that there was this traumatic experience of Dreyfus. There was among the elite in general in those years. Well, maybe not everybody, but there was a rising tendency to sort of leave behind religion in general. But I mean, specifically for many kind of prominent and assimilationist Jewish families, Judaism itself. And that would become more complicated when the Nazis invade and have this sort of racialized definition of Judaism and Jewishness that sort of threatens the fluidity that these women cultivated because they become Iran becomes Catholic. There's Alice in Britain. I mean, it's not just the religion, it's also the passport thing. I mean, that is very interesting. And you had this. This European elite with the ability to move beyond these categories that define one's identity and in some ways transcend them. And I think it's interesting that you say that that's in a way it's a life path that at this time was particularly open to women, given the ability of marriage, et cetera. But I mean, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about that because it is such a women's story in this book in a very meaningful and moving way. But you. There was that liberty to transcend identities and categories. But then also there was a lot of limitation as well. Of course, you know, the forced marriage or the arranged marriages, the social expectations. And I always had the sense in my own time with this family that some of the women were really struggling with that. At the same time, like Iran, for instance, she seems like she wants to be free, free of what was expected of her, while also sort of juggling the obligation to fulfill those expectations. I don't know how you see that.
- [15:46]
C
Yes, I do see it just like that. I mean, you know, I say they've got freedom, as you say, to change their names and adopt a different identity. But as you rightly say, that only goes so far because how is everybody else going to see them and is anybody going to believe it? So Iran, you know, particularly had this, marries and then feels so trapped and leaves him, and then is divorced and marries the Italian horse trainer Charles Sampieri. So in many senses, she's now the wife of an Italian count and she does sort of adopt this other identity, but under the heat of sort of Parisian disapproval because she's left the father of her two children and he gets custody of the children and then she has another child. And it's all sort of heartbreaking. And of the other two parts, it's always said that Alice, who takes another route out, as it were, marries a very traditional by birth. He's not traditional at all as a person. But Charles Townshend, who is an English soldier, becomes a general in the First World War. Couldn't be, you know, is everybody's idea of a player in the great game. And she becomes Lady Townsend, and she thinks she's going to be Marchioness Townsend of Raynham Hall. So when they marry, he is the heir to a great marquisate of Norfolk. It couldn't be more sort of British establishment if it tried. Actually, it doesn't happen for various strange reasons. And she's described as this quintessential English woman. Later on, when I went to Norfolk, Marchioness Townsend said that the villagers used to refer to her as the little jeweler's daughter. So in many ways, some people thought she was very English, even in, you know, let's not pretend anti Semitism was an entirely French problem. Other people saw her through different eyes. I was so struck by that. I was like, oh, okay. So it wasn't quite as seamless a transition as it appeared. And then Elizabeth almost rather had two French husbands. First of all, she went like her cousins, the French aristocracy route. So she married Conjean de Forceville, she's Comtesse de Forceville, you know, with a chateau in the north of France, and then, well, later in the Seine and, you know, very landed ancient Picardy family that falls apart. He turns out to be A sort of gold digger, basically. And then she finds another gold digger. You know, she has this terrible run, but she becomes a monarchist. So her ideal becomes the sort of values of old France. So again, but as. But tragically, and this is what led me to the story, was the contrast between the A to Z, the Renoir, and the fact that one of these women dies in Auschwitz was. She thought she had become as French as the French. She was a comtesse. She was, you know, a woman who'd become Catholic, but by race, not religion, in the eyes of the Vichy government. She was Jewish.
- [19:13]
B
Still, it really is. I mean, the portrait of those two girls, the Alice and Elizabeth together, is so arresting because you have little Alice in pink, who ends up in Norfolk, as you say, and then you have Elizabeth in blue, who, at a very old age, infirm and ill, is still murdered in Auschwitz. And it is this, like, haunting reflection about what that moment in Europe meant. And then, of course, there's the story of Iren and her portrait and its own as an object itself, its own experience of the war and what happens to Irene's daughter, Beatrice de Camondo, who's also murdered in Auschwitz with her estranged husband and two children. And it leads into something I was going to ask you next, which is that the paintings, which are your starting point and the sort of red thread throughout the book are these beautiful ideals of kind of feminine ideals of what women as art objects. These are quite literally objects that are meant to adorn the living rooms of their family's homes, but then they are material objects that experience the same horrible moment that claims the lives of their sitters and owners. And that is fascinating, too. So the trajectory of the painting as both an expression of a sort of social more and ideal at a given moment in time, but also, as you know, an object that went through the European 20th century, too.
- [20:59]
C
Yeah, well, as you say, a portrait in itself is a statement of identity. I mean, they're children, so it's a statement identity of the parents. Like, who are we? What do we represent? So, and, you know, Irene is in a garden and there's a blue ribbon in her hair and the rippling hair. And then Alice and Elizabeth are inside. But it's a very sort of Gilded Age picture in that, you know, the carpets are behind them and you can see the gold furniture. And Alice, later in life, gave an interview where she remembered she was so bored, but she was so thrilled to be wearing this new lace dress, this exquisite dress with the pink underlay and, you know, the Little sister, the big sister holding her hand. But. And as you say, these portraits in themselves become part of history because they go on this extraordinary journey. When I was very interested, when I went to Sao Paulo to see this picture of Alice and Elizabeth because it's now in the museum there, I asked two of the curators, it's the most popular painting in the whole museum, beautiful museum, masked in Sao Paulo. And I said, why do people love it so much? And one of them said, because they can't believe what happened. They look at it, it's so beautiful, it's so innocent. And Elizabeth dies and Auschwitz and nobody looking at it can compute. And the other one said, I don't think it's that. I don't think people even know the story of it. They just love the picture because it is a picture of childhood innocence. The way their little feet cross, the way they're holding their hands, the way they stand. There's something so touching about it. So, you know, you can look at it in even the actual picture in many ways. But as you say, these paintings went through the trauma of the 20th century themselves. I mean, I can. Shall I tell the story of what happened to them a little?
- [22:55]
B
Yes, yeah, I think you should, yeah.
- [22:57]
C
So Irens went on an extraordinary journey. It's her poor daughter Beatrice had the picture of her mother which was given to her by her grandmother. And I always think, I always feel that she was trying to give her her mother back in a way because
- [23:15]
B
she'd lost, there'd been a divorce and.
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C
Yeah, possibly the collapse of the relationship. I mean, this is where we get into territories that people sort of might want to dispute in that some historians don't imagine this relationship as I think we do, which is it wasn't a very satisfactory mother daughter relationship as far as I can make out. And I think you would agree with that.
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B
Yeah, I would, from what I could find too.
- [23:43]
C
So this painting goes to the chateau jambord for storage and basically ends up in the hands of Goring's men in the Second World War, at which point Irene's son in law tries to get it back. And this alerts them to the authorities, possibly, and they get a rested anyway. Goering doesn't particularly like this picture. He swaps it for someone else. It is saved at the end of the war by the Monuments Men as played by George Clooney. And it comes back to France where it's put on display and Arend sees it and then has a sort of big legal argument to try and get it back where, you know, another layer of trauma starts is that she sells it to Emil Boehler and it becomes part of the Kunsthaus collection in Zurich. But Emil Boer was an arms dealer and he sold arms to the Nazis. So we're in this extraordinary situation where a woman whose sister, daughter and grandchildren died in Auschwitz, sold her own portrait to a man who'd supplied weapons. And there it is still in the center of a storm in Zurich, because Switzerland is sort of re examining its own supposed neutrality in the war. And the wonderful director at the Kunsthaus is in the middle of a storm there. Meanwhile, Alice and Elizabeth, a portrait that the parents didn't love for reasons that we can speculate about, this ends up being being owned by one of Renoir's dealers. And it ends up in the personal collection of Gaston Bernheim de Villiers. And just before war, it goes on a tour. It's led to a wonderful exhibition of sort of French art that goes on a tour of north and South America. So 1938, and then war breaks out and the American government realized they can't send all these wonders back to France. There's amazing, there's Delacroix, because the Nazis have by now, France has fallen. And the art, I always think of it, it goes into storage. And I always think of it, it goes into hiding. This picture gets wrapped up and it sits in a New York storehouse for nearly 10 years before it gets sold to Brazilian tycoon. And now it's in Sao Paulo. So both, as you say, both pictures have their own war stories. They are sort of displaced objects of France.
- [26:27]
B
Yeah. And exiled in the same way that their sitters are from the world that they came from, which I was always so struck by when looking at them. You know, Irene sits in Zurich today, Alice and Elizabeth are in Sao Paulo. And, you know, it's sort of doubly gut wrenching to kind of consider what that means and what it, what it tells us.
- [26:51]
C
Yeah. And that in a sense is part of the power of art, isn't it? Is that it's the people and it's the object. And you're looking at this, these particularly portraits, you're looking at them and thinking, who did your parents think you were? Can we see your character in your face? And also there it physically is in another country.
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D
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- [28:36]
E
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- [29:04]
C
K Pop Demon Hunters Haja Boys Breakfast Meal and Hunt Tricks Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans.
- [29:11]
E
What do you say to that, Rumi?
- [29:12]
C
It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
- [29:18]
B
It is an honor to share.
- [29:20]
C
No, it's our honor.
- [29:21]
B
It is our larger honor.
- [29:23]
C
No, really stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side.
- [29:30]
B
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- [29:42]
C
So what's next?
- [29:43]
E
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C
We're gonna take this city back over
- [29:47]
B
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- [29:51]
C
They're hunting us.
- [29:53]
E
It's time we started hunting them.
- [29:55]
B
I can work with them. This should be tons of fun. Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again now streaming only on Disney plus. One of the scenes. One of the Scenes in your book that I found the most moving is when you have. You bring the reader to the Tate in, I think, the mid-1950s, when the portrait of Alice and Elizabeth comes to London and the real Alice goes with her granddaughter to the gallery and then just sort of sits there and tells people that, you know, this was me. And, you know, it's just. It's very sweet, but it's also sort of heartbreaking because, you know, London in 1954, you know, we've been through the Second World War, we've been through the Blitz. You know, this is a sort of diminished imperial capital at that time. This woman who came from this sort of gilded, sumptuous world of Paris has been. You know, she's moved to Britain, she's left all that behind. She is not necessarily the girl in the picture anymore, and yet she still is. And just the disconnect between the past and the present is really poignant, I thought. And it just. It sort of speaks to what's at the heart of the book. The sort of the divergence between the idealism and the optimism of the portraits, and then the cruelty of the reality that the sitters faced.
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C
Yes. The cruelty of the passing of time. Yes. Because my great. One of my great sources and contacts of the book was Alice's granddaughter, Marina, who now lives in London and is in her 90s. And she, for a while after the war, lived with her grandmother in Paris and. Yes. And she told me about this exhibition at the Tate. I know. And I was also intrigued by the fact that Alice would stand there saying, it's me, sort of seemingly quite happily, and then I sort of was thinking, but her sister died. You know, there she is with her sister, and her sister died in Auschwitz, and she is happily standing. And this seemed quite sort of strange to me. And then I realized, looking at my own family and, you know, the way to deal with trauma then was. And which I think this family did in many ways, is you just never mention it ever again. You can either, as we might do now, deal with it through therapy or think about it or try and analyze it, or you just sort of move on.
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B
Move on. Yeah. No, it's so common.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And, you know, I was going to ask you. You get into this a little bit in the book, but. So, like, in the mid-1950s, after the war, two of the three sisters are still alive. What do we know about the relationship between the two of them after the war?
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C
Well, that's interesting and complex, actually. On one level, they still saw each other Because Marina remembers having lunch in Paris. She remembers Irene coming to lunch and that being a huge deal. And Irene was still very much the older sister. I think everyone was a little bit scared, but, you know, it was that classic thing that we all know as siblings, where when Alice was four, Irene was eight and Elizabeth was six. That's when they were painted. But she was still the old sister, so they were in contact. On the other hand, Marina lived with her for three years in Paris after the war, and she only seems to remember the one meeting. But the Rothschild archive, which contains various letters from other members of the family, the brother and the sisters in law. They are very heavy and very disapproving of Irene and the daughter that she had with Sampieri. And you know, she survived the war in a very different way to Alice. So Alice was incredibly brave. She went to France, she's nearly 70. She decided that her grandchildren must get out. They slept. She went to both. Her daughter Audrey and her son in law are both working in Belgian intelligence. But the grandchildren are sort of floating around, two of them, Marina and Anu. So she takes them out of France after Dunkirk in this great operation called Operation Aerial. They sleep in a ditch for two nights. They got on a boat and eventually the boat comes to England. That's another sort of complicated story. It's not straightforward, but. And she then spends the rest of the war with her grandchildren in England, Iran, more mysteriously, given that she manages to get herself a sort of, what do you call it, certificate of exemption that says she's not Jewish. She says, my mother. My mother's parents weren't Jewish, which they were. And she gets this signed off and she stays in Paris, basically, and in France, and nobody, unlike her own child and grandchildren, she's not arrested. And the Dubonnays, who were her Pussy's husband's family, they were known collaborators. They had a suite in the Ritz, they had Goring to dinner. And it all gets a bit sort of murky then. And you can go two routes on this, can't you? Can sort of. You can either go as. I think the family felt that she and Pussy were kind of collaborators, had money changed hands. And then you can think, what would anyone do to survive at this point? What would they say? So relations with the rest of the family were soured, but she was still in contact with Alice. Alice probably felt it less, perhaps because she was in England for that whole period.
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B
No, it's such a. It's such a murky and complicated story after the war and you know, it's interesting that there was Edmund's book. There's your book, there's my book. I mean, many, many, many people have entered what you and I, for years now, have called the rabbit hole. And I wonder, what do you think that's all about? What is the interest in this particular family? And what brought you into the rabbit hole, so to speak?
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C
One understands world events in a different way through personal lives, right? We can. The more we read about people or read their letters or their diaries or look at their pictures, the more we imagine we know them and it becomes real. And you know what? It's. When you write about people, you can always see them so clearly. You can imagine them walking in through the door and then that it's how we sort of live through history. And this family both disappears and left tangible beauty behind in terms of shadows and art and china and the beautiful Clodion clock that's in the Frick collection. And so I think. And so many sort of connections. So we can sort of imagine their lives vividly, which means that we can more vividly imagine the disappearance, perhaps. What do you think?
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B
No, I mean, I think that's precisely it. And I think that, you know, I think you're absolutely right, that the extent of the destruction becomes somehow. It's not to say that these characters are more important than the millions and millions of others who were liquidated in those years, but I think you're right that there's something about the material that these very fortunate people left behind that highlights the extent of the destruction. And then there's that contrast between the absolute refinement and beauty of their lives and their collections, which do remain, and the absolute horrors that happened to them. And, you know, like the letters about Elizabeth being chased by the local authorities in France are just gutting. And I found those really hard to read. And, you know, you just. It's crazy to think that this. This beautiful portrait, you know, now in Brazil, you know, depicts a young woman who was really meant to have a very different life and then who ended up murdered because of state antisemitism. And it's really arresting in that way.
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C
And there's something about this sort of terrible sort of mismatch of sort of aim and expectation and result. Where, you know, impressionism is we will look at a world of light and beauty and sort of prettiness. And they were on this. Their parents were on this quest for beauty, hence the collection. And then this, you know, and as you say, the terrible destruction that will result. But they're the evidences of the quest. The evidence of the quest is left behind and there's no. There's no traces of the people in another scene. So there's that sort of mismatch between hope and result.
- [39:21]
B
I wanted to quote, as we sort of near the end of our conversation, a line from your introduction that I really think encapsulates so much of what you've achieved with this book. And you write that it may be that some works of history arise from an overpowering emotional pull mixed with the spirit of inquiry. And I think that that really describes your book. And it's really wonderful what you've done because there is. I keep going on about this, but I mean, your research is really formidable. You have found amazing details and wonderful new twists and turns. And I feel particularly qualified to point that out, having written a book on a very similar. On the same family myself. But in addition to the research and the amazing photographs that you have found that no one has seen scene before, I was really touched by the feeling that you bring to the topic. And I think that in the writing of history, of course the archives are paramount and of course the secondary literature is essential, but you really have to feel it. And you do an amazing job with treating all of your characters with compassion and you really bring them to life in all of their humanity, which includes the less noble parts of them. And I just. I was very impressed with that. So congratulations to you.
- [40:48]
C
Thank you so much. It was a very moving experience writing this and it became real to me through the relatives and the grandchildren. As you say, there's this big sort of twist at the end. And it was, it was an imaginable project. I can't. But I think, you know, the things that we choose to spend our time on are, aren't they. They can't be sort of dry subjects, really. Absolutely. It wasn't a purely academic exercise. It became real. And again, I think that's something to do with the art because the original Paul was an emotional one. It was about beauty. And as Renoir said, the pain passes and the beauty remains.
- [41:29]
B
Very true. And I cannot wait to see the final copy of the book. I will go and now pre order it right away.
- [41:39]
A
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Nia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings. You can become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and if you'd like to join us at future live events, you can join us in person@intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full program and buy tickets. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [42:22]
F
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E
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C
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E
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C
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