Abstract: “To fall victim to a biography” is the obsession of André Malraux’s heroes who do not want to be reduced by them. With his posthumous book on T. E. Lawrence, Le Démon de l’Absolu, André Malraux signed his one biography. This article compares Malraux’s biographical enterprise and the memoirs of T. E. Lawrence, Les Sept Piliers de la Sagesse, and shows that biography, as a genre, remains inferior to memoirs, and third person to first person.
