BRIEF COMMUNICATIONS.

• Author: SINOR, DENIS

Remembering Paul Pelliot, 1878-1945

I have recently visited the studies of two Sinologists, one of whom was in his mid-thirties, the other in his mid-forties. Both had on display pictures of Paul Pelliot, who died more than half a century ago, before these scholars were born. It is a fact that Pelliot's many publications are still widely read and that his extraordinary personality still seems to arouse interest and command respect. Indeed, in sheer volume, his posthumous publications exceed those that appeared during his lifetime.

I have three reasons for putting to paper the following reminiscences. I am the only scholar still alive who knew Paul Pelliot well. Secondly, in the whole hagiology dealing with Pelliot, no mention is made of his foibles. Thirdly, and quite rightly, previous writers emphasize mostly his work on the Tun-huang manuscripts and his contribution to Sinology. As it were, they all speak of the young Pelliot. Few remarks have been made on his last years and on his contributions to Altaic studies. it is on this period of his life and on his contribution to this field of study that I shall focus my attention. I venture to present him here from an unusual angle. Of course, reminiscences such as these carry the risk of containing too much that concerns the narrator; I am not sure that I can entirely avoid this pitfall.

My relationship with Pelliot was of short duration, barely six years, from 1939 to his death on 26 October 1945. In more than one way, those were fateful times, very hard on all of us living in German-occupied France. I first met Pelliot in early August 1939 when, with modest support given by the Hungarian Ministry of Education, I arrived in Paris, ostensibly to prepare for my Ph.D. examination but, in fact, to get to know and study with Pelliot. Of my two teachers in Budapest, one, Louis Ligeti, had himself worked for three years with Pelliot; the other, the great Turcologist Gyula Nemeth, bid me farewell with the parting words that in the person of Pelliot I was going to meet a man "with limitless knowledge." As a matter of fact I had been in touch with Pelliot at an earlier date. At the age of nineteen I sent him for publication an atrociously bad article, the receipt of which he never acknowledged, but which, for reasons unfathomable, he published in T'oung Pao. In later years I never mustered the courage to ask him how this could have happened; I dreaded the thought that he might recognize in me the perpetrator of that sorry effort. [1]

Aged twenty-three, I arrived in Paris and soon after, formally dressed with hat and gloves, I called on Pelliot. The reception I received was, to put it mildly, something of an anticlimax. Wearing pyjamas, he opened the door of his apartment, situated on the Avenue Foch, on the top floor of the Musee Dennery. He would not let me pass the antechamber and informed me that in October when he was to begin his classes at the College de France I could attend those. Not exactly a warm welcome, it compared most unfavorably with those which, in 1937 and 1938, I had experienced in Berlin from, respectively, Erich Haenisch and Otto Franke. In the course of time, this first impression needed no revision. Kindness, friendliness at first sight, were not Pelliot's dominant traits of character.

Pelliot was a solitary man and scholar, he created no school, had no institute of his own, and was not surrounded with an adoring and helpful group of students. Contrary to our current practice, when even junior professors at small colleges rely on the services of research assistants, Pelliot had none, not even a secretary, at least not in France (perhaps he had someone Chinese working for him when he was in Hanoi). He wrote all his works himself, in a small, not very legible hand. It seems he never owned a typewriter. In the last years of his life I was officially his assistant for Altaic Studies at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Chinoises, but this was a courtesy title, given for me to include on my resume, so to speak. He never once asked me to perform any scholarly task for him. My principal duties, if they may be so called, consisted of providing him with cigarettes, in those war years difficult to come by. He was almost a chain smoker. Shortly before his death--he was already hospitalized--as I was vis iting him, I was received by a very agitated Mine. Pelliot clamoring for cigarettes. I had none and pointed out that not long ago I had brought enough to last him for a good while. "Je sais, Sinor," came her reply, "mais-c'est terrible, je pensais qu'il allait mourir et je les ai toutes fumees moi-meme."

In the strict, traditional sense of the word, Pelliot had few pupils. From among those who persevered in research the names of Louis Ligeti, Francis Woodman Cleaves, Louis Hambis, Rolf Stein, Louis Bazin, and my own come to mind. I regret if, accidentally, I have omitted a name or two, but it was a very small band. Without any doubt, Hambis--whose role almost attained that of a research-assistant--was closest to him; but more will be said about this later.

Soon after our first brief meeting, but not because of it, World War II broke out and, after a period of administrative hesitation, the College de France opened its doors for Fall classes. Because of his age, Pelliot could not be mobilized and he found unacceptable such war-time duties as were offered to him. He could not see himself in a hierarchy in which his place was not on the top. So, to my great luck, he resumed his courses. These were of two types: one addressed to humans, i.e., to a wider public, the other intended for his students. In his courses of the latter type he paid no consideration whatsoever to the level of knowledge we may have had. I vividly remember the...