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"Your source for unusual and rare
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Paris, 1918: Amidst the cries of fanatic patriots bent on war, a tender relationship slowly develops between two young Parisians, beginning with a first shy encounter and growing into a passionate love that in the end falls victim to the psychological and physical destruction all around them. --- The great French writer Romain Rolland (1866-1944, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1915) wrote his famous tragic love story "Pierre and Luce" at the end of World War I. Its protagonists recall the lovers of classical antiquity as well as those of the Middle Ages. "The love of two teenagers against the background of a war touches upon many things. It shows how a pure feeling can blossom during hard times; how values can be reconsidered (referring to the male character telling his brother that when he gets drafted, he will not kill and him being indifferent to the arguing of his four friends); how even the young ones unconsciously realize that when the war is on, their happiness will not be long-lived; how under those circumstances the piety finds its dwelling in the lovers' soul (referring to the two main characters' decision to go to church in that fateful day) and how even little children are affected (referring to the little girl that the two lovers met on their way to the church and inside it). "Historically, this story was written
in response to the actual event. It was in 1918, while World War I was
taking place, when one of the Paris churches was hit by a German aircraft
bomb."
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(January 29, 1866 – December 30, 1944) was a French writer. His first book was published in 1902, when he was already 36 years old. Thirteen years later, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature 1915 "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings." His mind sculpted by a passion for music and discursive admiration for exceptional men, he sought a means of communion among men for his entire life. Because of his insistence upon justice and his humanist ideal, he looked for peace during and after the First World War in the works of the philosophers of India ("Conversations with Rabindranath Tagore", and Mohandas Gandhi), then in the new world that the Soviet Union had built. But he would not find peace except in writing his works. Romain Rolland was strongly influenced by the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism, and authored several books on the subject.
He became a history teacher at Lycée Henri IV, then at the Lycée Louis le Grand, and member of the École française de Rome, then a professor of the History of Music at the Sorbonne, and History Professor at the École Normale Supérieure. A demanding, yet timid, young man, he did not like teaching. Not that he was indifferent to the youth: Jean-Christophe, Olivier and their friends – the heroes of his novels – are young people. But with living youths, like adults, Rolland only maintained distant relationships. He was above all a writer. Assured that literature would provide him with a modest income, he resigned from the university in 1912. Romain Rolland was a lifelong pacifist. He protested against the first World War in Au-dessus de la Mêlée (1915), Above the Battle (Chicago, 1916). In 1924, his book on Gandhi contributed to the Indian nonviolent leader's reputation and the two men met in 1931. In 1928 he and Hungarian scholar, philosopher and natural living experimenter Edmund Bordeaux Szekely founded the International Biogenic Society to promote and expand on their ideas of the integration of mind, body and spirit and the virtues of a natural, simple, vegetarian lifestyle. He moved to Villeneuve, on the shores of Lac Léman (Lake Geneva) to devote himself to writing. His life was interrupted by health problems, and by travels to art exhibitions. His voyage to Moscow (1935), on the invitation of Maxim Gorky, was an opportunity to meet Stalin, whom he considered the greatest man of his time. Rolland served unofficially as ambassador of French artists to the Soviet Union. In 1937, he came back to live in Vézelay, which, in 1940, was occupied by the Germans. During the occupation, he isolated himself in complete solitude. Never stopping his work, in 1940, he finished his memoirs. He also placed the finishing touches on his musical research on the life of Ludwig van Beethoven. Shortly before his death, he wrote Péguy (1944), in which he examines religion and socialism through the context of his memories. He died December 30, 1944 in Vézelay.
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