Gide and the Epistle to the Romans

Most of you will have seen, several years ago, André Labarthe's film entitled La Vie commence demain, a film which speculated in quite a fascinating way on the future of the human race by seeing it through the eyes of certain great Frenchmen. A perhaps excessively ingenuous young man, played by Jean-Pierre Aumont, puts questions to them, and their answers and what they are doing when he visits them reveal the way the world is supposed to be developing. The biological future is represented by some rather grisly experiments with a young calf in a rubber bath, carried out by Jean Rostand; the architectural future by Le Corbusier and his city of the sun; the future of the fine arts by Picasso sketching or making one of his plates complete with basso-rilievo knife, fork and sausages. One of these plates sent as a present via the ingenuous young man is the introduction to the next personage, who is demonstrating one of the possibilities of human speech in the future by handling a tape-recorder. To show the virtues of the instrument, its owner-this is, of course, André Gide-switches it on, and we hear his voice coming from it. And as it speaks, and develops a brief theme-what theme it is, matters very little-Gide's face broadens with pleasure, with enormous satisfaction

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