Plus Ca Change ...

When French Academician Charles Maurras was sentenced to life imprisonment for collaboration, one newspaper commented: "What a long time for an Immortal!'" Last week the moribund Academy, with 14 of 40 seats vacated by prison terms and natural deaths, muffed its biggest chance in 300 years for a new lease on life.

Up the Institut de France's rickety stairs, to the second-floor conference chamber, hobbled some two dozen venerable French "Immortals"--scholars with "glorious pasts and no futures." There, amid marble busts of bygone Academicians, they heard an earnest harangue from "Perpetual Secretary" Georges Duhamel. In its past the Academy had spurned Moliere, Daudet, Balzac, Zola, many another great nonconformist; why not, demanded Novelist Duhamel, seize this magnificent occasion to elect such latter-day greats as Louis Aragon, Roger Martin du Gard, Andre Gide, Andre Malraux, Paul Claudel?

Duhamel's colleagues put their cocked hats together, chose instead five Old Guardists--Baron Ernest Seilliere, philosopher; Jean Tharaud, novelist; Rene Grousset, orientalist; Octave Aubry, historian; Robert d'Harcourt, specialist on Germany. Duhamel forthwith resigned. "But why?" chided his late associates. Duhamel's favorites, they said, did not want to be elected anyway.

Cried Aragon, "poet of the Resistance," "Why won't I become a candidate for the Academy? Just look at them! It would honor the Academy, not me. The Academy had a chance to act courageously before the liberation by throwing out Petain. It acted too late."

Observed 74-year-old Novelist Gide: "I am too well known, my reputation is too big, and I am too old." (Academician-Admiral Marie-Jean-Lucien Lacaze is 86.)

Nobel Prizewinner Martin du Card asked scornfully: "The Academy? What's that?"

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