Kantorowicz

Stories of a Historian

Alain Boureau
TRANSLATED BY

Stephen G. Nichols and Gabrielle M. Spiegel

FOREWORD BY

Martin jay

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore and London
Originally published as Histoires d'un Historien:
Kantorowicz
© fditions G allimard , 1990
English translation © 2001 The Johns Hopkins
Univers ity Press
All righ ts reserved. Published 2001
Printed in the United States of America on ac i d - free paper
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I

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Library o[Congr�ss Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bo ureau, Al ain .
[Hisroires d'un hisrorien: Kanrorowicz. English]
Kantorowicz : stories of a historian I Alain Boureau ;
translated by Stephen G. Nichols and Gabrielle M. Spiegel ;
foreword by Martin Jay.
p. em.- (Parallax)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN o-8018-6623-5 (alk. paper)
1. Kantorowicz, Ernst Hartwig, 1895-1963.
2. Historians-Germany-Biography. 3· Germany­
Politics and government-1918-1933· 4· Germany­
Politics and government-1933-1945· 5· Jews-Germany
-Biography. I. Tide. II. Parallax (Baltimore, Md.)
oo86.7.K3 s6813 2001
, ,
943 .007 2022- DC21 00-011214

A catalog record for this book is available from the

British Library.
 Contents

Foreword, by Martin jay VII

Prefoc� to th� American Translation Xlll

I Visiting the Monument Known as E.K. I

2 The Hidden Body 9

3 Incorpora tion 29

4 The Lost Bodr 44

5 Foreign Body 70

6 Two Bodies 92

BibliDp'ap_hical Notes III

 Foreword

The dozen or so years of the ill fated Weimar Republic continue to

-

haunt th e imagination of anyone who seeks to understand the bewil­

dering century that has just passed into history. No period seems to
encapsulate the mixture of desperate hope and looming catastrophe,
experimental ebullience and cynical disillu sion m ent, utopian futurism

and wistful nostalgia characteristic of the twentieth century as vividly as

do the years preceding the onset of the Nazi seizure of power. No mo­
ment seems as supercharged with the explosive, untamed, even apoca­
lyptic energies that would so often erupt in violent and disastrous ways.
Struggling to accommodate these oppositions in a dialectic that
would avoid the reconciling consolations of its Hegelian predecessor,
the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, soon to be forced into the exile
that awaited many G erman Jewish intellectuals, introduced the con­
-

cept of Ungkichzeitigktit (non-contemporaneity) to charac terize the

unsublatable contradictions of his era. Histo ry, he wrote in 1930,
" "

"is no entity advancing along a single line, in which capitalism for in­
stance, as the final stage, has resolved all previous ones; but it is a
polyrhythmic and multi spatial entity, with enough unmastered and
-

as yet by no means revealed and resolved corners."1 Even what seemed

most reactionary, Bloch insisted, might harbor the potential to turn
into its opposite. Non contemporaneous wildness and demonic
" -

mythicizing also exist and possibly have a dialectical hook, are at least
in strange 'contradiction' to capital and the spirit of capital; this con­
tradiction must be helped along.,2

1. Ernst Bloch, Hmtllgt of Our Ttm�, trans. Nevill� Plaic� and Stephen Plaice (Berke­
ley, 1991), 62.
1. Ibid., 63.

Vll
Foreword

Even those unconvinced by Bloch's Marxist utopianism, with its

insistence on seeing ciphers of redemption in the most unlikely
places, can appreciate the power of his general argument, which helps
us resist the naive assumption that every Zeit has a single, uniform
Geist. Perhaps no better confirmation of his insight can be offered
than the career of one of his most fascinating contemporaries (born
in 1895, ten years after Bloch), the great historian of medieval Europe
Ernst Kantorowicz, who is the subject of Alain Boureau's remarkable
biography. At first glance, it may seem strange to juxtapose these two
names, especially when one registers the radical difference in their
political allegiances; Kantorowicz, after all, was a rabid supporter of
the German cause in World War I, while Bloch went to Switzerland
to protest it, and they were on the opposite sides of the barriers in the
Spartacist uprising at its end. Indeed, the Bloch most often paired
with Kantorowicz is the great French medievalist, Marc, whereas the
Kantorowicz perhaps closest to Ernst Bloch would be the Commu­
nist literary critic Alfred. And yet, in certain respects, the two shared
more than their German-Jewish background and flight into Ameri­
can exile.
For what Ernst Kantorowicz exemplifies in his own remarkable
life as scholar, warrior, mythmaker, and political activist malgri lui, is
precisely the kind of non-contemporaneity and spatial displacement
that Bloch saw as the signature of their age. As Boureau shows, his
youth in the border city of Poznan as a Jew in a land disputed by
Germans and Poles prepared him for a lifetime of diasporic wander­
ing. When his compensatory attempt to fashion himself into a purer­
than-thou German nationalist foundered on the refusal of the new
regime in 1933 to see him as anything but Jewish, he came to under­
stand, indeed to experience, what Bloch would have called the unre­
,
alized, "not yet' status of his yearning for a secure place in the world,
that Heimat (the German word whose resonances extend well beyond
our simple "home") to be found nowhere in modernity.
But despite his disillusionment with the volkisch nationalism and
charismatic hero worship of his Weimar years, when he had been in

Vlll
 Foreword

the thrall of the poet-mystagogue Stefan George, Kantorowicz never

entirely relinquished its utopian spirit.3 Indeed, it returned in unex­
pected ways during the early 1950s, when he resigned his position
at the University of California, Berkeley, in protest against the
McCarthyite demand to sign a loyalty oath. As Boureau shrewdly ob­
serves, his defiance reflected an exalted image of the university as a
community-indeed, a kind of sacred body or clerisy-of scholars
whose allegiance was to ideals far higher than mere careerist promo­
tion and self-interest. "A patriot without a country," Boureau calls
Kantorowicz, and he never abandoned the quest to find one, even if
in symbolic terms.
What, of course, makes so quixotic a desire worth our attention
today is that it informed in subtle but palpable ways the scholarly
work of a great historian, whose legacy continues to have ramifica­
tions beyond the borders of medieval studies narrowly construed.
Boureau modestly eschews a single grand narrative in his reconstruc­
tion of Kantorowicz's life and work, one that would pretend to dis­
cern a unifying figure in the carpet. He prefers instead to tell us of the
multiple stories that survive the historian's death. When the evidence
is thin, especially for Kantorowicz's early years, he resorts to imagina­
tive analogies from literary examples, knowing full well the specula­
tive nature of his method. But out of his account there does emerge
at least a suggestion that to make sense of Kantorowicz's abiding in­
tellectual preoccupations-most notably those informing his master­
work of 19 5 7, The Kings Two Bodi�s: Essay on Political Theology in the
Middk Ages-some attention has to be paid to Kantorowicz's sensi­
tivity to the non-synchronicity of historical time and the unrecon­
ciled dialectic of sacred and profane.
The metaphor whose pervasive power Kantorowicz discerned at
the heart of early modern political theorizing yoked together the tern-

3· The relationship with George is explored in Eckhardt Grunewald, ErnJt IW11toro­

wicz unJ Skfon &orgt (Wicsbaden, 1982). In Wtimar Culturt: Tht Outsidn aJ lnsidn (New
York, 1968), Peter Gay also considers the imponance of Kantorowicz,s Kais" Frittlrich tbr
II in the context of the George circle's quest for a ���secret Germany" (sec 49-51).

IX
Foreword

poralities of the eternal and the ephemeral, the undying body of the
figural king and the vulnerable body of its literal counterpart. Al­
though framed in the religious rhetoric of co-presence derived from
the Incarnation and the Eucharist, the unsublatable distinction be­
tween the two bodies introduced an element of distantiation and de­
lay that meant the full and realized unity was, as Ernst Bloch would
have put it, "not yet., Immortal institutions and mortal human sub­
jects could join in a linguistic economy of sameness and difference
that subtended a flexible political theology, whose mysterious power
extended well into the modern era of apparent secularization.4
Boureau's sensitive reconstruction of Kantorowicz's biography illumi­
nates the complex interaction between his personal quest for the firm
identity that history denied him and his brilliant insight about the
ontological doubleness of medieval political theory. And it helps us to
understand its potential to be turned in a restorative, frankly reac­
tionary direction, expressed most explicitly when Kantorowicz was
besotted with George mythagoguery, as well as in a critical, more pro­
gressive one, evident during the loyalty oath controversy of the 1950s.
One way to explain this latter transformation is to see it as part of
a larger movement of demythicization that Kantorowicz embraced,
somewhat belatedly, after his eyes were opened by the Nazi refusal to
allow him to share their myth. Hans Blumenberg has noted a general
pattern that neatly repeated itself in the period Kantorowicz studied
and the one he lived through: "Anyone who prefers not to consider
the crisis symptoms of the late Middle Ages in the increased meta­
phorization of theological dogmatics can study this avoidance of dif­
ficulties in the repetition of metaphorization in our own century [the
literalist return to the Bible of the early Weimar theologian Karl

4· For a discussion of its continuing power in nineteenth-century Germany, see War­

ren Breckman, Marx, Tht Young Htgtlians, and tht Origins ofRadical Social Thtory (Cam­
bridge, 1999). He shows the persistence of the personalist residue in political theology
through the radical social theory of the Young Hegelians. Elsewhere, to be sure. the story
was different. For a recent account that discusses the ways in which colonial American po­
litical theory had to wean itself of the Icing's two bodies metaphor, Stt Jim Egan, Authoriz­
ing Expm�nct: &figurations oftht Body Politic in Stv�ntttnth-Cmtury N� England Writ­
ing (Princeton, 1999).

X
 Foreword

Barth]. Demythicizacion is in large measure nothing more than re­

metaphorization. "5
Boureau concludes by noting that Kantorowicz's strange mixture
of vast erudition and scrupulous scholarship, on the one hand, and
obsessive yearning for a redemptive community he could call his
own, on the other, produced no real heirs in the narrow sense of a
school or methodological tradition. Yet by alerting us to the power of
latent metaphoric configurations and conjunctures of seemingly un­
related phenomena, he provides a model of historical inquiry even in
an arena that would doubtless have appalled the resolutely elitist and
high-minded European Kulturmensch: American popular culture.
Witness the inspired borrowing in a recent description of Elvis Pres­
ley's transfiguration from a rebellious transgressor to a vulgar cultural
icon : "The King had, so to speak, two bodies which can perhaps be
read as allegories for two different 'Americas': the brash sexy body of
his youth, which broke down the racial segregation of musical styles,
and the bloated corpse found on the floor of Graceland. "6 We have
come a long way indeed from the lofty, hieratic atmosphere of the
George circle and the heroization of a thirteenth-century Hohen­
staufen emperor to such musings on the royalty of rock and roll. But
it is perhaps a measure of the continued presence of the non-contem­
poraneous in our homogenizing world of galloping globalization that
the metaphor still has power to convey cultural meaning. Alain
Boureau's exercise in retrieving a figure seemingly remote in time and
place thus helps us to understand the residues of the past and poten­
tials of the future that may lurk in the debris of toppled monuments,
human or other.

Martin Jay
Department of History
University of California, Berkeley

s. Hans Blumenberg, .. Prospect for a Theory ofNonconceptuality," in Shipw"clt with

Sp�ctator: Paradigm ofa M�taphorfor Exist�nc�, trans. Stephen Rundell (Cambridge, Mass.,
1997), 94·
6. Samir Gandesha, "Punk Multiculturalism," in Po�tics/Politics: Rmlical Anthttics for
tht Classroom, ed. Amirava Kumar (N� York, 1999), 2.45-59·

XI
 Preface to the
American Translation

I am delighted to have my essay on Kantorowicz translated in the

United States and honored that two eminent medievalists, Gabrielle
Spiegel and Stephen Nichols, initiated the proj ect and undertook the
task of translation.
Ten years after its appearance in France, one might well ask
whether this essay remains cogent in light of the increase in the num­
ber of works on Kantorowicz since the time of its writing , when the
b ibliography on the subject was extremely thin.1 The history of his­
torical writing has been widely practiced for some time now and, to
some extent, throughout the world. But a historiographical study was
not exactly my goal in writing this modest essay, which, however tan­
gential to my main work as a medievalist, I intended as homage to an
oeuvre I con tin ue to admire and whose heuristic power I have else­
where sought to demonstrate.2
The study was not conceived as the product of historical research,
properly speaking, but rather as a very free biographical sketch. It was
prompted by a request from the psychoanalyst J. B. Pontalis, at that
time director of the Nouvelle &vue de Psychanalyst and editor of sev­
eral collections of psychoanalytic literature published by Gallimard.

1. The sole exception being the imponant work of Eckhardt Grunewald, Ernst Kanto­
rowicz unJ Stifan G�org�: B�itriigt zur Biographit tks Historikm bis zum jahre 1938 und zu
stinmz Jugtndwn"k Kaisn- Friedrich tkr Zweitt (Wiesbaden, 198 1) .
1. Alain Boureau, "lntroduzine" ro Kantorowicz, I dw corpi tbl &, in L ltka di rrga/ita

nella ttologla politica mtdiroak (Turin, 1 989), xiii-xxvii; idem, "L'imagc comme piegc a
enonds: La l�on de Kantorowicz," in S. Diimmchcn and M. Nerli ch eds., Tat-lmagt:
Biki- Tat (Berlin, 1990), 107-14; idem, "Kantorowicz et Chrisrus-Fiscus: La m�taphore
comme sujet de l'histoire," in D. Milo and A. Boureau, eds., Altn--Histoirt Essais J'histoirt
ncpbimtlltak (Paris, 1991), 127-38.

Xlll
Preface

Pontalis had just inaugurated a non-scholarly series, with no specific

psychoanalytic connection, which he called "L'un et l'autre" (One
and the Other). The series envisaged short biographical essays in
which the author was charged with creating and expressing a sense of
personal connection with his subject, on which he would reflect or
project his own feelings. When J. B. Pontalis proposed that I write
one of these volumes, I immediately thought of Kantorowicz, al­
though I rejected the idea of any personal reflection or projection as
regards Kantorowicz, since I considered it inappropriate in his case.
Instead, I wanted to address professional issues rather than the kind
of personal questions raised by the usual narrative of a life. My con­
cern was not the status of biography in general (a problem on which
there already exists a good deal of reflection), but the more specific
questions generated by the life of a man whose singular destiny offers
scope for narrative experimentation.
A standard objection often made about biography is its tendency
to place its subject in the center of an image of the times, varying
more or less the distance and thus the importance of the historical
landscape against which the figure looms. In the case of Kantorowicz,
the primary characteristic of his life-which led from Poznan to
Princeton, with crucial phases lived in Weimar Germany and Berke­
ley during the McCarthy era-was precisely its rupture with its his­
torical context. Kantorowicz was by turns an effective World War I
combatant, a self-taught medievalist, an essayist turned scholar, a re­
actionary volunteer in the Free Corps, who later mixed with Ameri­
can liberals and Communists in resisting McCarthyism. Moreover,
here was a man, doubtless more aloof than discrete, who tried to ef­
face all traces of his life and who never sought to explain or comment
on its peculiar twists and turns. Although I agreed with the critics of
what Pierre Bourdieu has called "the biographical illusion,"3 none­
theless I wanted to preserve the benefits derived from a life narrative.4

3· Pierre Bourdieu, "Lillusion biographique," Act� tk R�chn-cht �n Sdmc�s Sociaks no.

62-63 (1986): 69-72.
4· See Giovanni Levi, "us usages de Ia biographie," Anrwks E.S. C 44 (1989).

XIV
 Preface

To avoid centering my subject in the historical landscape, and

thereby falling into facile psychologizing, I sought to construct paral­
lel lives, by introducing what seemed possible alongside what was
real, to undermine privileging the individual by inserting a prolifera­
tion of personages , all borrowed from contemporary contexts and
events, both historical and fictional.
I will return in a moment to the use of fiction in this book. The
principle of parallel lives has classical precedents, particularly in
Plutarch. In relating Kantorowicz to Toller, von Salomon, Scholem,
and others, I thought to remove the individual from an artificial iso­
lation, without at the same time situating him in a crowd of contem-
poraries. Each microparallel life introduced aims at suggesting a con­
nection between the world and my historical subject. The enterprise
could be taken still further, if one wished. Since my book was first
published, Roger Chartier has shown me how thoroughly the career
of Norbert Elias resembled that of Kantorowicz, from their birth as
Jews in the East (Breslau for Elias} to the University of Frankfurt,
which they attended together. Elias's grand theme of an opposition
between Kultur and Civilization is certainly related to Kantorowicz's
period as a member of the George circle. My colleague Gilles Vein­
stien has drawn my attention to Paul Wittek (1894-1978), a master of
Ottoman studies; of Austrian origin, he became, at the same time as
Kantorowicz, an active disciple of Stefan George. Related to Kanto­
rowicz's brother-in-law, Arthur Salz, and to his cousin Gertrud, he
doubtless played a part in Kantorowicz's own Ottoman orientation.
Further, Wittek's reputation as a historian was enormously enhanced
after the lectures he gave in 1937 in London on Mohammed II, whose
portrait presents analogies with that painted by Kantorowicz.
Such parallels could be extended almost indefinitely; for example,
with the great Romanist Ernst Robert Curtius, or with the Marxist
Georg Lukacs.s A Hungarian Jew, Lulclcs also studied at Heidelberg
several years before Kantorowicz matriculated, and, like Kantorowicz,

S· See Arpad Kadarkay, G�org Lukacs: Lift, Thought and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.,
1991).

XV
Preface

Lukacs was fascinated by Stefan George. Through his struggle to

come to grips with Marxism, Lulcics managed to crystallize George's
obsession with inclusive Iexclusive "community," in a manner remi­
niscent of Kantorowicz's own preoccupations. These are but a few
possible examples, from a potentially endless proliferation, which
would reconstitute a panorama of German cultural history between
the two world wars and would also recreate the idea of a totalizing
context against which to distribute individual personalities.
Given all the possible interlacing trails to pursue, the reader will
doubtless be surprised at the absence of footnotes in the main body
of this work, which contains only some brief references at the end of
the volume. Despite the lack of notes, I did not restrict myself to an
"internalist" rereading of Kantorowicz's works. Indeed, I hope that I
have been able to situate more precisely the sociopolitical context of
the life of a Jewish family in Poznan thanks to certain documents
and, in addition, to have discovered some little-known circumstances
of Kantorowicz's actions and commitments before the end of World
War I. It was not merely the demands of the collection in which the
book originally appeared that kept me, on the occasion of this trans­
lation, from embellishing my text with a scholarly apparatus, which
it would have been easy to restore or complete . Nor was it the weari­
ness or disaffection that sometimes afflicts scholars at the end of writ­
ing learned works. On the contrary, I believe that in scholarly writing
it is often our notes, and the texts we publish, which outlive our
analyses, all too vulnerable to the passage of time. At the moment, I
spend about one third of my research time on editing sources; in­
deed, my last book, which is appearing in France as I write these
lines,6 concludes with a plea in favor of scholarly research, the dis­
covery of new sources, at a time when the multiplication of models
and theories has removed all dangers of a simplistic return to the pos­
itivism of the last century. On the other hand, we may also run the
risk of missing the exciting vitality of our sources by constricting the
paths along which they flow or by mistrusting their purity.

6. Thtologit, sdtnc� �� ctnsurt au IJ' si�clt: Lt Cas tk J�an Ptckham (Paris, 1999).

XVI
 Prefoct

At the period when I was writing this essay, I had different goals,
and the deliberate absence of notes was meant to signal my distance
from traditional narrative biography. Daniel Milo and I were then
engaged in an undertaking that we called "experimental history."7 We
sought to advocate and to practice an alienation 4fict (the term was
borrowed from the Russian formalists and from Brecht), in relation
to historical sources and norms of explanation. For us, it was a ques­
tion of intervening in documents and historical objects. For this rea­
son, we claimed the status of experimentation, derived as much from
science as from art. Historical explanation is based essentially on cor­
relation; and correlations have a tendency to present themselves au­
tomatically to the historian by virtue of their proximity in the sources
themselves or as a result of cultural or guild habits. By proposing to
risk a new set of correlations, generated by chance, from an en­
counter or a systematic and playful disturbance of habitual practices,
we hoped to free ourselves of such automatic responses. But this am­
bition only made sense because we believed firmly in the reality of
historical phenomena. The experience would be gratuitous and
poindess if it did not produce results that could be compared to oth­
ers and confronted with sources. In the essay on Kantorowicz, then,
my use of fiction is willfully experimental: it aims at undermining a
prevailing notion of context not by denying it but by amplifying it,
thus rendering it visible, open to monitoring, as it were.
I have maintained throughout a desire to seek the "truth" of Kan ­
torowicz; I feel no affinity with relativist tendencies in contemporary
historiography that emphasize the inaccessibility or radicaJ alterity of
the past. It is important to me to know what happened and what
forces acted u pon Kantorowicz in 1919, a t the time of the suppression
of the Republic of Councils in Munich. Now this significant reality
escapes reconstruction both by chance and by nature. That is to say,
what did Kantorowicz specifically do at this time? What unit did he
belong to? When? What historical actions did he participate in? And

1· Daniel Milo and AJain Boureau, eds., Altn-Histoirt Essais d'histoirt �bim�ntal�
(Paris, 1991).

XVIl
Preface

what was his rank? Our complete ignorance of such facts is far from
accidental. It stems directly from his refusal to evoke his past; from
the destruction of personal documents and records by Kantorowicz;
and from the absence of witnesses. This first kind of ignorance is not
definitive, at least theoretically; one can always imagine previously
unknown documents turning up. But the second kind of ignorance
is more fundamental. It arises from the sheer impossibility of plumb­
ing the hearts and minds of humans; and it is as true for the great
men of the past as for our contemporaries or even those closest to us.
The refusal of relativism is not necessarily accompanied by a turn to
psychologism, intended to restore some kind of generalized verisimil­
itude according to crude tables of elementary character traits.
Faced with this double aporia, I turned to fiction. It was not my
intention to fill in the gaps in documentation with bits and pieces
dredged up God knows where, nor still less to illustrate a given mo­
ment by means of scenarios based on analogy. Instead, I wanted to
suggest hypothetical explanations, which their very mode of con­
struction, the novelistic form, would render explicit. In sum, I sought
to move from equivocation or ignorance to a controlled uncertainty.
The novelistic component configures possible hypotheses without
masking its own artifice. Thus, when I wanted to explore the rela­
tions between Kantorowicz and the Jewish milieu of his birth, I had
little to draw on; Kantorowicz himself says very little about it. I had
only a handful of facts about his family (place of origin and birth:
Poznan; socioprofessional situation of his paternal family: manage­
ment of a liquor business founded by the grandfather). I could re­
construct the context of the life of a Jewish family assimilated to Ger­
man culture in a province recently acquired by Prussia. But among
these elements, I could not establish their exact connections. More­
over, I was suspicious of the circularity inherent in contextual expla­
nations where events supposedly form a context, which is then called
upon to explain the events. The use of novels allowed me to put the
context in perspective, to distance it, as it were, without having it dis­
appear altogether. For example, I make use of a novella by the writer

XV111
 Preface

Ungar, Th� Win� Saksman, in order to create a fantastic and dream­

like configuration, at once real and symbolic, which links Judaism,
the state, and the situation-at once ancestral and modern-of
liquor merchants. Similarly, to account for Kantorowicz's wartime
and partisan experiences between 1914 and 1919, I used a figure cre­
ated by von Salomon in The Outcasts; through analogy and differ­
ence, I proposed approximate explanations. In short, I use fiction as
a way of calibrating biographical hypotheses.
This experimental transformation of one person into another also
allows me to read in certain of Kantorowicz's scholarly texts traces of
symptoms or tendencies that I perceive in (or extrapolate from) his
life. My goal is an explicit probabilism, one that takes truth seriously,
while not rejecting the virtual embedded in the possible. I hope to
have added something of substance to the known reality of Kantoro­
wicz by proposing supplementary microcontexts. But one cannot
speak of the "truth" of Kantorowicz without presupposing a hierar­
chy of correlations between the real, the possible, and the probable.
Here again, explanation continues to elude one's grasp. This is but
one more example of the limits of an expository mode dependent on
the arbitrary nature of encounters and associations. I remain, how­
ever, persuaded of the benefits of experimentation, understood as the
controlled disordering of historical objects.
But the idea was not simply to play methodological games. I reaHy
did want to discover meaning in the sinuous trajectory of Kantoro­
wicz's life, taking as my starting point not the meager facts of his bi­
ography but the very real substance of his writings. This goal was not
dissimilar, in one sense, to the literary-critical efforts, during the
1950s and 196os, of a Georges Poulet or a Jean-Pierre Richard.8 They
sought to discover, in the thread of texts, a dominant existential
scheme, to seek the secret, the enigma implied by the text; in short,
to explore the recesses of a life. This explains the silence of my book
concerning Kantorowicz,s homosexuality. I make only a brief allusion

8. Jean-Pierre Richard, Univm imaginairt tk Maliarmt (Paris, 1961).

XIX