Father Louis Bouyer shares memories of his happy childhood in Paris before World War I. He recalls living with his family in an apartment near the place de Wagram, and fondly remembers the sounds and small shops of the neighborhood. His mother, nurse, father, aunt and uncle provided him with love and care. Though the war began when he was only a year old, it did not disturb his peaceful childhood. He has vivid positive memories of this time that have stayed with him.

2. Memoirs
2

3. Louis Bouyer
3

4. Memoirs
TRANSLATED AND ANNOTATED BY
ANNE ENGLUND NASH
IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO
4

5. Cover photograph of
Father Louis Bouyer, circa 1990s
Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum
© 2015 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-58617-695-2 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-68149-683-2 (E)
Library of Congress Control Number 2014912783
Printed in the United States of America
5

6. Note from the Publisher
We at Ignatius Press are blessed to have been among Father Louis Bouyer’s wide circle
of friends. The very first book Ignatius Press published, in the spring of 1979, was his
Woman in the Church, still in print because still a voice of wisdom in a confused world.
Before leaving us after one of his regular yearly sojourns in San Francisco, he left us
with the original French manuscript of his memoirs from which this translation has been
made, with the hope that we would one day publish it. We are happy finally to have
fulfilled his commission.
Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J.
Founder and Editor
Ignatius Press
6

7. Contents
Introduction
1. The Narrator’s Childhood
2. Gardens Open or Closed
3. From Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained
4. Initiation
5. Retreat on the Rhine
6. Pendent Opera Interrupta
7. Laqueus Contritus Est . . .
8. . . . Et Nos Liberati Sumus
9. Return to Juilly and the Beginning of a Liturgical Movement
10. Between Two Continents
11. From Strasbourg to Normandy, Brittany, and around the World
12. Around a Council
13. Friendships and Favorite Places
14. Finita jam sunt praelia!
Notes
7

8. Introduction
A very dear and very reliable friend, Cardinal Heenan,1 Archbishop of Westminster,
whose premature loss is one of my greatest regrets, entitled his memoirs Not the Whole
Truth. With those very first words, he seems to me to have denounced the claim of so
many memorialists, starting with Rousseau, to have said everything: as if that were
possible, even if one sincerely wished to do so . . . which is probably never the case!
But, as his example shows, undoubtedly the best a memorialist can do is offer a selection
from among his memories of what, on reflection, seems capable of revealing something
meaningful, for himself, first of all, and perhaps then for a few others.
The closer I come to the end, the more in fact I sense that there is a meaning in our
life. The hand of God leads us to it, using all things for his purposes: failures,
disillusionments, as well as and even more than successes, moments of happiness, or
what seems to us to be such, and, what is most astounding, even our glaring faults!
So in the pages that follow, what I would like to recall is what, on final, or
undoubtedly very nearly final, reflection, seems to me to have the most meaning. I hope
that those who read them, and especially my friends, both known and unknown (for a
writer, are not many of these latter often among the closest?), will also draw some profit
from them, perhaps more than I do myself. I hasten to add that the entertainment that
these pages could, at least I hope, provide them is an integral part in my eyes of that
potential profit. For it is a too-little-known but to me unquestionable fact that Providence
has a great and, of course, the best sense of humor! The terrible lack in this regard on
the part of modern Christians in general (and of ecclesiastics in particular) is in my
opinion what most prevents them from being taken seriously no matter what they say. I
do not want to try to provoke them, but I will do nothing special to spare them.
May those of good faith, Christian or not, who read these pages sense that they are
addressed to them by someone who had no other ambition in writing them but to merit
being counted among them.
8

9. CHAPTER ONE
The Narrator’s Childhood
I was born the third child of parents already rather advanced in age, although my two
older siblings were already dead, the first nearly at birth, the other at scarcely two years
of age. And, what is more, I was born on the eve of that 1914 war which, by common
opinion, marked the end of a civilization. After these introductory declarations, one might
believe that my childhood was miserable, or at the very least unhappy. Nothing could be
farther from the truth.
Undoubtedly under the influence of that unconscious selection which governs the
retention of memories, but also, very obviously, because good memories were plentiful in
it, my first years leave me with a singularly sunny impression. I can best express it by
recalling one of those early childhood memories that remain to me with a distinctness that
has rescued them from any such oblivion. The window of our dining room is open in the
apartment where I was born on 5 rue Juliette Lamber, a short distance from the place de
Wagram and the boulevard Pereire.1 It must be a spring morning or at the beginning of
summer. I may be around a year old, for I am taking my first steps. On the other side of
the street, a lowered orange and white striped awning glistens in the sun. I am starting
toward a chair placed in the same direction, where an orange, which is itself brilliantly
colored, has been placed in order to entice me.
. . . According to what I have been told, it seems that my rapid progress was
interrupted by a memorable fall, after which for a long time I no longer wished to make
use of my legs, to the great distress of my family and of Irma, my little nurse. But it is
quite revealing that I, for my part, have retained no memory of this misadventure at all,
while the luminous awning and the attractive fruit have left an indelible memory of an
entrance into a world of happy brightness in which shadows only enhance the light. I can
say that all the trials of my life, and I have not been spared them, have never managed to
erase that vision of awakening.
My mother’s solicitous concern (reflected in an absolutely firm belief, which even a
fair degree of annoyance was never to shake), Irma’s kindness toward me (which, I am
ashamed to say, I rewarded at least once by hurling a bowl of creamy milk at her face—I
have always detested that, but she had been instructed to make me swallow it as is), my
father’s goodness and dreamy idealism (which, in my judgment, was not in the least
affected by the sound thrashing he felt obliged in conscience to administer to me that
day): all that would have been enough to make those early years a paradise.
Obviously adding to that impression were the charm of that part of Paris, the
proximity of my young aunt and godmother Jeanne, my mother’s younger sister, of her
husband, Uncle Francis (an expert in Far Eastern art who was, unconsciously I think, to
leave an indelible mark on me), and of my cousin, their daughter Jacqueline, who was a
little older than I. So much so that those early years seem to me to have passed like a
9

10. single beautiful day like the one I have recalled.
I was thus scarcely more than a year old when we entered the war: the “great war”, as
it would be called . . . before another one made it seem small-scale. A second one of my
oldest memories must relate to its very beginning, for I see myself there on our balcony
in the arms of my nurse. She, my mother, and I are watching my father get out of a taxi
(still a rare thing) and shout to us: “We are not leaving: no more trains!” This could only
have been one of the early days of August 1914.
In fact, we would leave all the same for the summer holidays a little later, to the beach
at Fouras,2 summoned back by the La Rochelle origins of my father’s family to the place
where the mayor was a cousin of my father. That war, I must admit, did not long affect
my childhood or, undoubtedly, that of many others who were spared any separation by
the weak constitution of their fathers. The only lasting impression was made by what
might seem comical or incongruous: such as a Zeppelin or the “taubes”, as they were
called (the first German military airplanes), flying over Paris. The most unusual thing I
recall was an interminable procession of ambulances that were to bring back the victims
of the Marne.3 But, apart from that, it seems to me that as long as we lived in that part
of Paris (which, if I am not mistaken, was until 1916 or 1917), it remained a tranquil
little world where life passed peacefully, and for us happily, in a beautiful setting shaded
by tall trees, where the only excitement was serene and gay.
Nothing has remained more definite for me than the various sounds that followed one
another there; but they stood out against a background of silence that it would be difficult
today to reconcile with the idea of a large city. It is true that we were just on the edge of
the city: quite close to the desert of fortifications where I often went to play when there
was not enough time to spend a whole morning or afternoon with my mother or my
nurse at the Parc Monceau.4 Beyond that, it was almost a completely country suburb,
where a semi-rural disorder of mismatched buildings and little garden patches suffered
from only a few noisy and smoky industrial blocks.
But along where we lived and my aunt lived, the place de Wagram, or along the
boulevard Pereire, the two most urban noises made by the traffic of that time did no
more than pleasantly punctuate the silence. One, I would say, filled it without dispelling
it: it was that of horses trotting on the wooden pavement. A sound of which people have
no idea today: a familiar and quiet music, with a bit of gaiety to it, which harmonized
delightfully with the swaying coziness of the old carriages, where you were so well
placed, on large grey or blue cushions, to watch from on high the swinging spectacle of
houses, trees, and passersby. The other sound was a sign of a civilization that was barely
on the way: the deafening racket, entertaining as long as it remained rare, of electric
tramways creaking, whirling, and vibrating on their rails, with the joyful chimes of their
bells, operated by the foot of the driver.
Apart from that, I recall only the noise of the little street trades: noise whose poetry I
will always miss, like that of the diverse but equally pleasant characters whose call was
enough to bring us to the windows. There was, above all, as I remember, the
glassworker, whose modulated cry had an incomparable fullness and originality. The
10

11. clothes merchants, for their part, gave out those languid chants that still seem to me to
have been the height of romanticism. Nothing was more optimistic, on the other hand,
than the vigorous call of the grinders, which was regularly punctuated (I have no idea
why) with the ringing of energetically struck bells. But the virtuosos in the most
unexpected vocal exercises remained without a doubt the menders of crockery and
porcelain, as they were called, who, for their part, took a rest from broadcasting their
invocations, which were in turn ironic or nonsensical, by making a terrible racket
sounding shrill little trumpets, which had the most comical effect.
I wonder what those good people could really have earned. But I must believe they
enjoyed their work, even if it did not pay well, for they were all of an inexhaustible good
humor and gaiety. The chair menders were generally, but not always, more silent. They
would set up in a nice, quiet, sunny place in order to restore our worn seats with
beautiful golden straw, a bundle of which they always held between their lips and which
they wove with a fascinating sureness of hand.
I have spoken of the “fortifs”5 and the Parc Monceau. They were the areas reserved
for the wafer merchants: true magicians who had us turn a kind of sparkling arrow on the
cover of a colored cylinder that they carried on their backs. The arrow would stop dead
on the variable number of those light delicacies to which we were entitled by the little sou
we had paid in order to be allowed to launch this fanciful contraption, which sometimes
filled us and sometimes left us hungry.
And, too, what about the variety, the picturesque quality, even the mystery of the
innumerable little shops, which were rare on our more or less well-to-do streets but
which were crowded next to each other when you moved on in the direction of the
Batignolles,6 where you went up toward the Ternes7 on the avenue de Wagram. On that
side, though, there was the first of the large department stores, “Les Trois Quartiers”,
where I would soon be grumbling to see my mother and my aunts spend endless hours
going from counter to counter in what seemed to me to be a mob and which was only a
pleasant throng of idle Parisian women.
But the shops of the dairymen with their milk and cream, of the grocers and fruit
sellers, where everything was so fresh or, on the other hand, filled with elaborate scents
that were strangely mixed together—of cinnamon, pepper, dried fruits, and particularly
coffee, roasted regularly two or three times a week, filling the air of a whole district with
its fragrance. Less appealing to one’s sense of smell but even more exciting to the eyes
were the dealers in small notions, with their spools of infinite shades, their ribbons, their
trims of a variety unimaginable today. And then there were the pharmacies of that time,
whose windows were decorated with crystal amphoras of flamboyant colors, made
luminous at nightfall by gas lamps placed behind them.
But, in fact, the shop I knew best for its chaotic profusion was unquestionably that of
my godfather, the husband of one of my maternal aunts. It took two streetcars to get
there, one after the other: first, from the place Pereire, a double-decker, whose tall brown
body would take you, if I remember correctly, to the École Militaire.8 You got off there
to take the much more imposing but less entertaining vehicle of the Compagnie des
11

12. Omnibus, which succeeded the old coaches drawn by four horses and was to pass on its
dark green uniform, edged in yellow, to the present-day buses. It let us off at the
Vaugirard town hall, and then we had no more than a few steps in order to reach the rue
de la Procession, where the store of my uncle and godfather faced Saint-Lambert
Square.
Even after years of visiting this pleasant shambles, I would not be able to recount
everything to be found there, and still less what might not be unearthed. Dry goods,
knick-knacks, stationery goods, perfume, hardware, newspapers (especially the most
popular illustrated ones), all in an inextricable jumble, even for my aunt. But, in an
emergency, all my uncle had to do in order to go straight to the desired object to satisfy
the request of an imaginative client was to adjust his pince-nez with its black cord.
Yet, in his eyes, the only value of all that was that it earned him a living, which is not
to say he did not take some pride in it. But my uncle, before being an unbeatable
tradesman, had the justifiable pride of being an artist. The repair—or, better said, the
resurrection and transfiguration—of the most pitiful dolls, either because of their
accidental misfortunes or because of the very mediocrity of their construction, was his
gift, if not his genius. He was so widely and so well known by the feminine hordes that
very well-bred little girls sometimes burst into that neighborhood, which was quite
working class at the time. Chaperoned by respectable nannies, they came in tears and not
without some apprehension to entrust their treasures, almost in shreds, to the miraculous
surgeon whose reputation must have spread to the fashionable neighborhoods bordering
the Champ de Mars. A few days later, all these mothers in distress would retrieve their
beloved babies with a mixture of exultation and astonishment, so creative could the
restoration of these pitiful wrecks be.
I appreciated the true merit of these heroic deeds of my godfather, but I must say I
took a particularly equivocal interest in the odor of the warm glue that accompanied his
work, unable to tell if its strong pungency pleased me because of its strangeness or
sickened me because of its stench of spoiled fish. My uncle and godfather (whose name
was Louis Dauphin) excelled, however, not only in the plastic arts. He had a splendid
voice, of which he was innocently proud, and would sing grand opera for you as well as
light-hearted songs with scarcely less spirit than emotion. Where and how he had
developed this gift, I could not say, for he was a foundling, as was discreetly said at that
time. A very handsome man on top of that, he must have had something aristocratic in
his obscure pedigree. When he was in evening dress, he made a magnificent impression,
with his prematurely white hair. That impression was unfortunately upset the moment he
opened his mouth other than to sing. Not that he was in the least foolish (although
pleasantly boastful), but because his language was that of a pure Parisian titi9 and
because his education, picked up here and there, allowed him only just barely to read and
scarcely to write.
I think his artistic tastes are what made him fall in with my mother’s family. He and
his wife, Aunt Mélie (short for Amélie), also had my grandfather staying with them, a
magnificent and intractable old Spaniard to whom his son-in-law was bound by a
12

13. delightful mixture of exasperation and congeniality. For this old man, as cordial as he was
irascible, was an exceptional musician. The son of a dignified bourgeois family from
Gerona, in Catalonia, he had had a fatal falling out with his family when he was barely
twenty years old. Having arrived in France with only his father’s curse as luggage, he had
joined the army in order to earn his bread and change his nationality. But his abilities had
caused him to climb the rungs of the military musical hierarchy with a surprising
swiftness, so that, despite various incidents due to his congenital insubordination, he was,
scarcely in his forties, the command master chief of music of the fleet. Having settled in
Toulon10 with a sweet young Italian woman—also an artist although the daughter of a
mere house painter—whom he had met in Languedoc, where his career began, this
flattering arrival at the summit of his profession barely allowed him to feed the four sons
and four daughters who had blessed their union. A new, conveniently timed, more or less
Oedipal conflict, this time with the admiral of the Levant Fleet,11 made him decide to
offer himself to the Republican Guard Band12 at the time of its formation.
Having gone up to Paris with his whole family, he had managed to raise it by adding to
his meager pay what he could get as both first violinist and first clarinettist at the Opéra,
not without having also been the conductor of the orchestra at the Hippodrome, the
famous circus of the 1889 exposition. My kind, poor little grandmother died prematurely
from the work, but the whole family nevertheless became a nest of songbirds in which
everyone tried his hand at nearly all the instruments. The boys, unfortunately, were each
carried off in turn when they were barely adults by what was then called consumption—
in particular, a certain Louis, whose name and romantic library I inherited and whom his
sisters, apparently more robust when it came to withstanding privations, were agreed in
describing as a prodigy of kindness, intelligence, and musicality all at once.
It was clear that my grandfather, despite his anarchism, thought his two eldest
daughters had lowered themselves socially by their marriages, while having a strong if
grumbling affection for at least the one of his two first sons-in-law of whom I have
spoken (I never knew the other or saw much of his wife, who seems to have returned
early in life to the ancestral type of the Piedmontese Mama). On the other hand, this
temperamental, difficult old man, though basically a good fellow, burst with pride over
his two younger daughters, and, in the first place, my mother, whom brilliant studies had
cast into a profession as a private teacher among the grand families of the P.H.S.
(Protestant High Society), including a famous British doctor whose name I have
forgotten. She had at the same time served as second mother to my godmother Jeanne,
of whom I have already said a few words: a marvel of youth, charm, and beauty,
although she had undeniably inherited some of her father’s quick temper. That had not
prevented her from seducing my uncle Francis, heir of a wealthy Geneva family and, as I
have said, an expert in Far Eastern art.
They have left me the memory of a delightful couple who died too young, one after
the other having been taken away toward the end of the war by the same tuberculosis
that had prematurely decimated my four young uncles.
My mother, shortly after her young sister, had in her turn married, less grandly but
13

14. also very happily. My father, the only son of a postal official of Charente origins, had in
fact had to interrupt his studies after finishing high school because his own father had
also died very young. But he had had no difficulty in finding a rather good position in one
of the first electric companies in Paris, which had brought him some delectable
experiences, since his duties included supervising (as they say today) telephone
installations, still an utter novelty, among the cream of high society. His tastes, too,
however, were completely intellectual and artistic. He read voraciously, drew and painted
very well, and, until his marriage in 1908, seems to have used his free time and savings
in visiting the art centers of Italy, Spain, and Central Europe.
I have already mentioned the British episode in my mother’s own youth, which was to
leave her with an Anglomania that she passed on to me. For his part, my father was
rather a Germanist, and it is not his fault if his influence succeeded in giving me nothing
but a wholly academic introduction to German, but one that did include various Teutonic
friends whom I was to host, Prussian squires or Rhenish intellectuals distinguished by an
equal Francomania, which ruled out any chance of speaking their own idiom with them.
But I am already anticipating the future! These early years of my existence, as one can
foresee, as Parisian as it was, was divided between aristocratic holidays on the Monceau
plain and somewhat plebian excursions on the Vaugirard side. In these latter, I enjoyed, in
addition to the avuncular shop, endless walks in the neighborhood and far beyond it, in
particular along the wharfs, lagging behind either my godfather or my grandfather.
I will say this in their favor: that they both had the rare merit of treating me, at five or
six years of age, as if I had been their contemporary and, even more, an old friend
trustworthy enough to be made a party to their shared grumbling about the fairer sex,
whom they affected to scorn but of whom they were the slaves, as I well saw. They
would have been greatly surprised, more even than flattered, if they had been told that
they proved to be much more effective teachers than their daughters, wives, or sister-in-
laws thought themselves to be. They passed on to me, along with a solid independence
of judgment, a love for and untiring curiosity about old Paris and all that it implies of
charm, common as well as elegant, with a definite taste for direct and well-bred speech,
an amused liking for original characters, figures a bit outside the usual frame of
reference.
Neither my aunts nor my mother looked very favorably on these rambles together, but
the inquiries to which my aunt Mélie, in particular, attempted to subject me on my return
from our harmless escapades were promptly discouraged by my apparently faulty
memory, which was attributed to the perpetual daydream in which I was lost, as it was
soon generally acknowledged, and which became an invaluable alibi for me.
The boulevard Pereire and the place de Wagram side was of course spiced with less
colorful pleasures, to which I was, however, no less sensible and without any particular
snobbery. The regular company of my very pretty cousin was most pleasant. With both
of us dressed very elegantly by our respective mothers, we sent the old ladies into
raptures who took us for brother and sister, which I have trouble understanding, for I
cannot believe I could ever have been what is called a charming child. My cousin
14

15. Jacqueline was supremely so, which did not prevent her from being much more
mischievous and forward than I. She had won over my father on the eve of his marriage
by telling him, at the risk of making my future godmother faint: “You know! Maman
thinks you’re not bad, although it’s a shame you have the nose of a drum!” Of course
my aunt had said “trumpet”,13 but the children of the family had been raised among such
a multitude of instruments that they could easily mistake them.
Among other misdeeds in which she involved me: one morning when we had both
been dressed in adorable outfits of dark green velvet with large lace collars in order to
play the most touching parts in the marriage of a mutual cousin, while we were waiting to
be led in, Jacqueline persuaded me to finish off, by the handful, what remained of a plate
of macaroni with tomatoes and cheese . . . We were taken by surprise in the midst of this
operation, with our frills and flounces in a state that can well be imagined, which led to
another fit of hysterics for my poor little aunt. My uncle Francis, who did not know
whether to laugh or cry, tried in vain, as usual, to calm her, blowing on his pince-nez and
saying sweetly: “My dear, they are children! Never mind about their clothes as long as
they don’t cripple or blind themselves . . .” To which my aunt proclaimed: “Ah! That is
what you men find to console us! Is it possible to be unhappier than I am?” in tragic
tones and with a wringing of her hands. My father appeared unexpectedly at that point
and, not daring to look at his brother-in-law and close friend, diverted this Italian-Spanish
fury to himself by saying, “My dear Jeanne, with a husband like yours, who could be
happier than you?”
I must admit on this occasion that the southern Latin element that governed our family
gave everything a tragi-comic form that somewhat disconcerted me but entertained me
even more. For me as for my exquisite cousin, it was to contribute not a little to the
ingenious perversity that our unhappy (though actually very happy) mothers vied with
each other in lamenting.
But since I am on the subject of the theatre, it is time to say a word about a pleasant
relationship my godmother brought to my childhood. Living at 5 place de Wagram, her
balcony almost adjoined that of Sarah Bernhardt, who also lived in that part of the
boulevard Pereire. She could not have failed to notice this sparkling young brunette, who
must have reminded her of her own youth, as quick to laugh as to cry, singing like a bird
or suddenly bursting into fits of rage that were just as ravishing. The sincere worship that
my little aunt maintained for the Unforgettable One14 must have helped the development
of a friendship that went beyond that of good neighbors and in which, along with my
cousin, I was inevitably given a share.
Here, I must admit, I am for the first time confronted with one of those episodes
where it is difficult for me to disentangle what I recall, what I have been told, and what
my imagination or that of my family may have embroidered. It nevertheless seems that I
might in all modesty acknowledge not only that I knew Sarah Bernhardt but that I was
on intimate terms with her: Did she not call me “My love!”, kissing me full on the lips? I
hasten to point out that this was no more compromising for her than for me, since she
had to have been more than eighty years old at the time and I was five or six.
15

16. I recall a voice of unreal richness and smoothness, oddly linked with a face that would
have been made frightening by the paint she used had it not been for the eyes, which
were like burning coals, surprisingly young and gay. I must have attended one of her last
recitations: I do not know which was the more extraordinary: the monologue from
Phèdre,15 from an armchair, under sweeping veils, or the more breathtaking speech from
L’Aiglon,16 in a white uniform, standing, but supported behind a table because of her
wooden leg.
Yet I did not lack a critical mind even then, for a similar session (with Madame
Segond-Weber,17 if I am not mistaken) given a little later left me with the opposite
memory of a hilarity that was as uncontrollable as it was indecent.
To finish off with one stroke the most incredible memories, or quasi-memories, of my
ancient history, I must still note, around the same period, the very distinct vision of a
majestic old lady, supported by a gold-handled cane, clothed in black lace trailing behind
in the dust of the Tuilerie Gardens and of my mother or my aunt (I no longer know
which) assuring me, on the verge of ecstasy, that this was Empress Eugénie18 in person
. . .
I must admit that coming into contact with such splendor in my childhood, however,
did not compare with the intoxicating sweetness of the daily strolls along the pleasant
streets of the Monceau neighborhood or the charm of their more or less old mansions
shaded by large trees or of those beautiful symmetrical houses in the place de Wagram,
with the carriages trotting along as in a song by Yvette Guilbert19. . .
Above all, I remember the Chinese ornaments of my uncle Francis: the Ming vases
(esteemed at the time as the summit of that art), the sumptuous silks, with their
grotesque figures that managed to be at once so malicious and so dignified, the ivories,
the lacquers, and the ebonies inlaid with mother-of-pearl, or the heavy antique bronzes.
In our own living room, there were also several rare pieces of this kind in which my
uncle had been able to interest my father. But, like most of the educated Parisians of the
period, great readers of the Goncourts20
and the ineffable Loti (whom my father had
known personally in Rochefort),21 it must be admitted that he preferred to amuse himself
with charming Japanese curios.
It is odd, and perhaps due in particular to my affectionate respect for my uncle, that I
felt even then more attracted by the cheerful solemnity of China than by so much slightly
overly ornate elegance.
My mother, for her part, was already trying to interest me in singing and piano but was
distressed by my mediocre success. I note that while I was very early on extremely
sensitive to forms and colors and almost morbidly so to the scents and other fragrances
of Paris at that time, sounds were to remain for many years a mere object of vague
entertainment for me. Perhaps this was an individualist’s reaction to the musical
supersaturation of everyone in my mother’s family. I do not know.
In any case, the many-colored, delicate, amusing, and enchanting dream of those early
years would not last. Concern about my health, a new job for my father, which had him
16

17. go from a luxury electricity no longer used to the production of the first X-ray machines,
led to our departure from the Monceau plain and our settling in the small suburban town
of Asnières.22 Apart from an interlude in Saint-Germain, our stay there was to last until
the death of my mother and a little beyond.
17

18. CHAPTER TWO
Gardens Open or Closed
If the years of my early childhood were decidedly urban, albeit far removed from what
“city” may mean for a young Parisian of today, those of the second part of my
childhood, what the Geneva psychologists have called the adult childhood and the
beginning of my adolescence, could be described as, if not rural, at least spent in gardens.
For, during the last years of the war, then the first of the postwar period (I am of
course still speaking of 1914–1918), I have the sense of having spent most of my time,
more or less on my own, in three successive gardens. The first seemed large to me, as it
would have to any child, but, having seen it again unchanged a little while ago, I have no
doubt that it was tiny, although a tangle of winding paths, trees, shrubs, and bushes may
contribute to an illusion of greater size. It was situated at 52 avenue Faidherbe, in
Asnières, and I think it can still be found there. That is to say, it went with one of the
very last houses of that locality. Almost immediately beyond it came what was called
“the Plain”: a plain called “Bécon les bruyères” (Bécon heather), although I have never
seen a trace of the latter there: a vast, irregular area, only a small part of which was
cultivated, with the rest left in a state of neglect, but spotted and encircled with trees.
For me, this plain represented a first, incredible discovery of nature; though it must
have been fairly bare! But the walks we took there at dusk and quite simply the view that
we had over it from a high veranda, with only a few isolated lights spotting its borders in
the night, brought me my first experience of the vastness and mystery of the world.
I realize that this was reinforced by the curious feeling given me by the neighboring
pathways: one, adjoining our house, ran between two high property walls. I thoroughly
enjoyed imagining it to be exclusively my own during the long moments when I was
allowed to pedal my tricycle there. The latter had been a gift, I believe, from my
godfather—and one that did not fail to worry my mother, who nevertheless allowed me
to use it anyway, provided that it was solely along that reserved strip. The other path was
completely different. It opened nearly in front of us, between a double row of dense
gardens, whose contemplative mystery, in contrast to the immense (in my eyes) mystery
of the Plain, was centered on a little girl who for a long time remained inaccessible and
who must have been for me a first incarnation of the eternal feminine.1 All that I
remember of her (I can no longer even recall her name!) is that she had long blond hair,
that she often sang in a fluid voice, and that she was a marvel at playing ball. I
discovered later that she also played (and very well, it seems) the piano. The first time I
dared speak to her, she told me she was fourteen years old, a prodigious age to me. Alas!
These successive discoveries, although she proved to be likable and discreet, seemed to
have been enough to exhaust the charm—felt for the first time and long savored—of the
unknown (in the feminine, of course!)
A little past our house, if one turned one’s back to the Plain, there was another garden,
18

19. spread out generously in the sun: the kitchen garden of our own gardener, into which he
one day consented to admit me, to my great pride. But, while full of instructive interest,
it soon seemed to me prosaic after all.
Still farther on that side arose the last very modest buildings of the city of Asnières.
Among them was a school that I would later attend, which closed the view of our street
at a distance that seemed considerable to me. But, except for a few visits to the shops
and some other visits of which I will soon say a word, all my attention during those years
on the avenue Faidherbe seem to me to have been captured by our garden, in addition to
the two very different pathways and the Plain, whether far or near.
What was I doing there then? Not much except a little fanciful gardening, apart from
the never-ending comings and goings of my tricycle. But I usually had there the company
of my first friend: my dog, Tobie, with whom I exchanged interminable dialogues in
which his part, if limited to affectionate yaps and a whole variety of tail wags, was
nonetheless essential. Except for a swing, however, I must say that I found greater
pleasure in inside games, even if transported into the garden in summer. One was the
electric train, which so enchanted me that it was undoubtedly the origin of my first
imaginary vocation: that of an engineer.
But another was to leave a much greater mark on me forever: a magnificent toy
theatre that I owed to my uncle Francis but which I tirelessly expanded for years, it
seems to me, with scenery, actors, lighting, incidental music: in short, everything related
to it. When, much later, I discovered Calderón’s Le Grand Théâtre,2 the rapture into
which the title alone immediately thrust me was the fruit of this gift that was undoubtedly
one of the most decisive factors of my entire education.
This is because, thanks to this theatre, my imagination began to draw inexhaustible
food from all that I was told or, a little later, could read. In that way, I converted it into a
dream reality in which, without knowing it, I can say that I was living, before having
even lived, a life whose richness surpassed anything that so-called real life could ever
offer me. Even though I must recognize, before the curtain is definitively drawn on the
latter, that it has not been stingy with me. But perhaps it is to this blessed theatre that I
owe above all the discovery of another title by Calderón: Vida es sueño,3 whose full
meaning we will later see.
I have just alluded to my first reading: although my mother had begun to instruct me
very early, she was so alarmed to see that I knew how to read at scarcely four years of
age that she wisely tried at first to slow down a raging appetite that she judged to be
premature. But, like many wise pedagogical intentions, hers had exactly the opposite
effect from what she expected. Deprived of access to more or less serious books, I fell
back (definitively, she soon came to fear) on the comics that I could devour in peace
(and for free!) at my godfather’s house during my mother’s endless conversations with
her sister.
The result of this unfortunate proclivity, detected in me too late, was that Le Petit
Illustré, Cri-cri, L’Épatant, Guignol, and, to crown it all, those two paragons of little
girls’ literature: Fillette and La Semaine de Suzette, became for me the weekly
19

20. ingredients of what was soon an indispensable drug. My poor mama was plunged into the
most pathetic desolation by the particular liking I seemed to have for the entertaining but
villainous epic of Pieds-nickelés in L’Épatant, and, worse yet, for the inept jokes
exchanged in Le Petit Illustré between the explorer Carolus Bousillard,4 said to be the
most illustrious child of Monpied-sur-Tabouche,5 and his old friend the black king
Dipaça-Samféroté6 . . .
Yet, while I could not stop talking within my family about these merry heroes, it might
interest a psychologist of an already rather outdated Freudianism that I stayed
closemouthed about the infinite reveries provided me by the fairy tales of La Semaine de
Suzette, so carefully scrutinized (as I later learned) by the Jesuit censors: with their
beautiful, pious, and sweet young girls of the highest society, who triumphed, untouched
and merciful, over the shady undertakings of loathsome oppressors. In fact, separated as
I now was from my cousin Jacqueline, but more and more shut into the world of my
mother, simply enlarged by that of my aunts, it could well be that these stories and
dreams fortunately preserved me from all the possible deviations that apparently threaten
small boys who are victims of so strictly maternalistic an education.
Since my mother, however, had had the ingenuous imprudence of boasting to a friend,
while I was naturally feigning inattention, that she knew all my thoughts, a scruple of
conscience led me to admit to her all these secret thoughts. She was visibly petrified but
manifested without knowing it a rather exceptional good sense and moral health by telling
me that all that had neither any importance nor, still less, any sinful character.
Perhaps it will be surprising, in that regard, that I have not yet said anything of my
religious and moral education. What I must reveal, in fact, having arrived at this point in
my account, is that it was for me as for the Chinese. Many a learned European thought
they had no religion, properly speaking, but they themselves replied that they
undoubtedly make this impression on us because their religion is so inseparable from
existence that a foreign observer may not even perceive it. In fact, in my childhood, the
thought of God as present behind everything, inseparable from both a demand for and a
promise of truth and goodness, went without saying, more by virtue of the constant,
peaceful behavior of my mother, which was visibly but, even more, tacitly approved by
my father, than by any explicit lesson. It was enough for me to see her pray briefly every
day with me, preparing or prolonging it on her own in a silent dialogue with the little
black Bible with gilded edges that scarcely ever left her. For a long time she dispensed
only a few drops from it to me, like a rare and precious essence. But that very fact
contributed in no small part to making not only her vision but also her practice
unquestionable for me.
Apart from that, my religion, if I am not mistaken, was for a long time given concrete
expression only by a rather beautiful image of the Good Shepherd that adorned my
room. It was explained very early on but without particular insistence as the image of the
Son of God, who had sent him to be with us and to lead us back to him.
Those final years of the war, when the academic phase of my education was to begin
with reading, brought just two further points of information. One was that of the first
20

21. pious book I possessed: a well-chosen collection of biblical passages, principally from the
Gospels, whose illustrations, naturally enough, held my interest more in the beginning
and succeeded in stirring up more questions in me than the text, whose sheer abundance
was too much to give rise to any so early. I remember in particular the effect produced
on me by an image of the Virgin presenting the Child to the Magi. My mother corrected
the pious heresy that made me think for a moment that this Mother of the Son of God
must herself be divine (“dieuse”,7 as I said in my linguistic ignorance!) but said nothing
that could weaken my respect for a creature brought so close to God.
This requires a bit more description of my parents’ religion, which it took me a long
time to recognize as both fundamentally orthodox and original, without their suspecting it,
in many of its forms. I was the son of a father of old Charentais stock, whose own father
had for this reason retained of his ancestral Protestantism only a bitter anticlericalism. His
Breton mother, however, had had him baptized, but without getting permission from her
intransigent spouse for him to advance any farther down the baleful paths of superstition.
I had a mother who, for her part, had gone as far as first communion but not beyond that
because of the parallel wishes of a Spanish father, who was himself in revolt against all
his family traditions. I should actually have fallen into a family with no religion. But my
mother had been entrusted to some Catholic priests by my grandmother during the brief
time she had been able to watch over her education. They had apparently not presented
the gospel in a very convincing fashion, but she had received it, at the end of her
adolescence, from those haughty families of the Protestant bourgeoisie who employed
her—whom she did not spare her criticism even while willingly recognizing all the same
what she owed to them. Her stay in England in a Darbyite8 milieu, which is to say of the
strictest but also the most sectarian evangelicalism, had ended by forming in her a solid
piety, but—and this seemed to me to show her soundness of judgment—without passing
on any narrow-mindedness to her. By some convergence of happy circumstances, on her
return to France she had come to frequent that Reformed parish called L’Étoile (the
Star), on the avenue de la Grande Armée, where a late-nineteenth-century pastor,
Eugène Bersier,9 an excellent preacher endowed with an exceptional liturgical sense for
that time, had quietly introduced a form of worship that was nearly Catholic in
substance. She had no trouble winning my father over to it, especially since Bersier had,
among his successors, in the person of Pastor Russier, who baptized me, a spiritual man
whose refinement must have satisfied their equally pure tastes.
Yet, if I am not mistaken, during the last years of their stay in Paris, the church that
gave them full satisfaction was one that was theoretically Protestant but still more
Catholic-evangelical in spirit: the Lutheran parish of the Ascension, on the rue Dulong,
where Pastor Schaffner was the first to dare establish in Paris a “High Church”
Lutheranism whose dogmatic firmness as well as liturgical traditionalism of the highest
order far surpassed even the pious and discreet Bersier.
Deprived by their suburban exile of these resources, it seems to me typical of these
two naturaliter christianae souls,10 who were for all that, I would say today,
21

22. unknowingly Catholic, that, even without having any outside support, they had not
deviated from a paradoxically Catholic Protestantism so individualistic in its instinctive
tendencies. The more years pass, the more I weigh the benefit I received from this
singular formation: I owe to it quite simply my discovery of the gospel, not what has,
since the modern era, been called “Catholicism”, but just the true Church of Christ:
catholic, not despite the gospel, but precisely because of the pure and simple acceptance
of the latter, with all that it represents. This is so, it seems to me, because simple souls
and sound minds cannot fail to perceive it if a distorted education does not manage to
conceal it from them. I will soon tell how this experience of my parents was later to be
clarified by the experience, which is much more common than is believed, of what is in
fact the piety of nearly all Protestants who still have any, whatever might be their
prejudices about the Catholic Church . . . and whatever the prejudices of Catholics in
general might be about those whom they call “our separated brethren”, a little like the
way we call animals “our inferior brethren”. Needless to say, in contrasting “Catholicism”
to the Catholic Church, I thereby mean only to contrast true fidelity to tradition to an
anti-Protestantism deliberately ignorant of the Bible, suspicious of any personal religion,
reducing faith to the verbal acceptance of ever-repeated formulas, and seeing in
authority, not a means, but an end, the end par excellence. We have since seen how this
almost entirely external Catholicism, confusing a sheep-like mentality with fidelity, can,
from one day to the next, completely empty its baggage overboard or, if it fears the
consequences, see salvation only in a supreme hardening of its emptiest shells.
But I close this digression in order to give one further detail of a fundamental
experience I was to receive from my mother during the lowest, grimmest days of the
terrible winter of 1917. I can still see that dark afternoon when she and I were trying (she
more than I, for I was then surprisingly insensitive to cold) to warm ourselves, huddled
near a meager fire of pseudo-coal nuts that were only balls of newspaper that had been
dampened and then dried. She suddenly began, without any particular preparation, to
teach me to recite by heart what she called “the prayer that Jesus taught us”, the Our
Father of course. Her explanations, if there were any, and although she was capable on
occasion, like all her southern French family, of a loquaciousness that never ceased to
embarrass me, were reduced to a strict minimum. But the simple solemnity with which
she taught it to me and had me learn to repeat it was to assure me, better than any
possible commentary, that everything was included in it, in terms of faith as well as of
prayer, and which, in fact, would gradually emerge from it for me.
I will leave this subject for the moment, after having noted that I owe to this very early
religious formation the conviction that I would much later find formally expressed by
Newman11 and justified in a way that seemed to me definitive: there can only be a
resolutely dogmatic Christianity, but the dogmas of Christianity transcend any
explanations that those called the “great theologians” can provide. Which is precisely why
these dogmas have nothing in common with the most diverse opinions that are most
vehemently mistaken for them by the majority of Protestants as well as by some
Catholics, persuaded of being more and better than others.
22

23. I have just mentioned for the first time the period when I also began to realize, at least
in some respects, what I was hearing said and repeated around me without, until then,
making much sense of it: that we were at war. But I must also add that this discovery, in
my understanding, which was apparently very alert but still very unreceptive to the
mentality of adults, was for a rather long time that of something quite different from
what they, as I realized later, meant by that word. In those dark years, in fact, and in that
winter when precisely the meagerness of heating forced us to gather in a single room of
our house, I began to experience something of the physical rigors of the war. But perhaps
because of the evangelical asceticism of my mother, as far as she was from any
Manichaeism,12 I experienced these privations more as a kind of sports exercise than as a
truly difficult shortage.
My mother did not hide from me her fears of seeing my father called “to the front”,
which still had no definite meaning for me. But above all the tragic consequences that
this departure would have had for ourselves seemed magnified by her Iberian dramatics.
So, far from arousing my fears, these alarmist statements rather calmed them. Even
more, I was incredibly entertained by the alerts, which were now frequent, especially at
night, which made us dress hurriedly in order to leave the house under the beams of the
searchlights of the anti-aircraft defense, and above all by the gymnastics my father
regularly went through in order to extinguish an inopportune gas lamp. After that, in the
depths of the cellars of one of the buildings of which I have spoken, we would chat with
still half-asleep neighbors in the strangest get-ups, ended by the famous “all clear”, which
drew us out of our holes. It was all far too amusing a time for me to find anything tragic
in it.
Although hypersensitive in other aspects, I must have had strong, or simply numb,
nerves to have been appropriately saddened but not much troubled by the successive
deaths, around that time, of my grandfather, my uncle Francis, and my aunt Jeanne. Not
even the absolute carnage among our neighbors by what was discreetly called the
“Spanish flu”, but which must have been a kind of plague (the only conquest our valiant
“poilus”13 seem to have brought back from the campaign in the East), was able to upset
me seriously. I remember, however, my mother’s emotion the day when a truck filled
with coffins (there were no longer enough hearses) passed under our windows. Had my
mother not herself assured me that, for those who were faithful to God, life went on
after death, incomparably better and close to him?
I must nevertheless admit that, many years later, when I suddenly realized that we
could very well have been hit by bombs or even by the shells from Big Bertha,14 which,
for my part, I was amused to hear in the distance making its “boom boom”, I was
gripped by fear that was scarcely less intense for being retrospective. But, at the time, I
had to take with more indulgence than true sympathy the delight and joy with which my
mother and neighbors congratulated each other when the bells of the armistice rang out.
Nevertheless, in the afternoon, I enjoyed very much strolling in a sunny Paris on the
shoulders of my father in the midst of an enthusiastic crowd. But I was so little disposed
to getting excited about such great events, which seemed to have scarcely any effect on
23

24. our existence, that I was definitely surprised, a short time later, to see him, who was
usually so much calmer than my mother, waste a beautiful spring evening that he could
have spent in our garden with Tobie, my mother, and me, in order to go gaze at
Poincaré, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Wilson, and who knows what other great public
figures, on the occasion of some event leading up to the Treaty of Versailles;15 what he
told me about them left me cold. Still, if it had been a matter of King George and
generals looking prestigious in their uniforms! But I absolutely did not see what these
men of fine words, who, according to what I had been told, had never dreamed of going
to fight like the others, could possibly have to offer to make it worth the trouble.
To be completely frank, “peace”, a word that seemed to me even more vague, if
possible, than the word “war”, for a long time had no other concrete meaning than the
resurrection of the carnivals, for which I immediately developed an extreme liking. The
amazing circus parades, like that of Zanfretta or Rancy, particularly appealed to me.
Nonetheless, the peace would soon earn us a relaxing stay in Saint-German-en-Laye,
which, to my regret, lasted only one summer.
The world of the fairgrounds and its dazzling condensation of circus shows were as
important to me as my theatre. I will say nothing of the theatre in general: after the great
Sarah, individual actors, such as Gérard Philippe in Le Prince de Hombourg, Maria
Casares, Michel Bouquet, and especially Ludmilia Pitoeff could each in turn fill me with
enthusiasm, but too often in mediocre plays that were of value only because of them.
And I would always take more pleasure in theatre that was read than in theatre as it was
acted, since its most perfect forms in my eyes, whether it was Racine or Shakespeare,
seem to me too often betrayed, when not made ridiculous, by their interpretation.
The circus, on the other hand, neither tires me nor disappoints me, provided it remains
carefully, lovingly traditional, as it was when it first won me over. And I will say
straightaway that, having returned there several weeks ago with three delightful children,
not only did I find once again with them (it was the nice Grüss circus) exactly the
impressions I had on the very first day, but I had no difficulty at all in reliving them
myself. For the circus, in the absence of any text, has the at once immediate and limitless
poetry of a world absolutely set apart, where the whole everyday world seems to open
out into something both magical and familiar: bodies no longer weigh anything and are no
longer subject to most of their other constraints, animals rediscover a mystical intimacy
with men, and the unrestrained comedy that alternates with the magical enchantment is
only an ironic and good-natured form of the latter, which it succeeds in introducing
among us.
I will add that all that my instructors could later teach me about the superiority of
comedy of character over comedy of situation never succeeded in uprooting from me the
conviction of every child: that people who throw cream pies in each other’s faces are
funny in a more relaxing and, thus, in the end, more satisfying way than the more subtle
forms of what is called wit, which, remarkably enough, usually go stale in less than a
generation.
Finally, I will say that the circus, in its simplicity, is the only example of a world of art
24

25. that is complete in itself and indivisible: from the agility of the trapeze artists to the
brilliance of the jugglers, from the smiling grace of the horsemen to the acrobatic feats of
the lion-tamers or the mastery of those who train the superb horses or the comical
performing geese, as from the bluffs of the illusionists to the pranks of the clowns, it all
forms a single family atmosphere: the smell of horse manure mixed with that of the big
cats, the spotlights, the boisterous music, and even the red or blue costume of M.
Loyal,16 everything is indispensable to it, and everything holds together in an unparalleled
joy.
But I must stop myself, for I am touching on one of those chapters, as unexpected as
it may be to my reader, where I could easily go on talking forever.
The other unhoped-for gift that this peace (which was not understandable to me) was
to bring me was that stay in Saint-Germain to which I have already alluded. In fact, I had
already been there for a whole summer with my parents and my grandfather and, what is
more, in the same house, located on the rue Henri IV, just behind the barracks, in the
shadow of the château, the year of my birth. Naturally, I had no definite memory of it,
but it may well be that a first vague and delicious sensation of happy leisure, of light and
music, had remained in me that contributed to the constant, dreamlike happiness that this
other stay was going to offer me.
For, first of all, it was in another garden that we lived that summer: the most enclosed
I had known, behind an old-fashioned middle-class building, where the very small house
itself disappeared in the midst of trees and flowering groves. But this enclosed garden
seemed to extend, or rather to be transposed, into the glorious garden, in full bloom,
opposite the château, whose terrace, which looked out over the whole valley of the
Seine, with Paris in the distance, was entirely open to the sky. The forest extended it
through that indefinite aura of its great being, always quivering, it seemed to me, in the
gold of the summer sun, under the breeze that was inseparable from that height where
we thought to have escaped the everyday, banal world.
This strange and exalting conviction was supported and carried to its climax by the
nearly incessant fanfares from the barracks announcing or setting the rhythm for the
marches and countermarches of the dragoons. Added to this, nearly every evening, were
the nostalgic calls of the invisible hunting horns, sent to us from the depths of the woods,
when the sunset falling on the tall trees seemed gradually to extend the gentle and
protective shadow of the night.
Beneath the rather unreal silhouette of the old château, which was white and set with
red bricks, a silhouette that was extended out through an archway at the end of the
terrace by the precious charm of the Henri IV pavilion, there was the beautiful French
garden completed by a park, which, its turn, disappeared into the forest, rolling into the
distance as far as the Marly aqueduct. This formed a new universe for me, where
everything was only happy vacations and calm daydreams. It was inhabited by the lively,
exciting but wordless presence of those tall trees sweeping their crests above the joyous
racing of the beautiful chestnut horses on which the shining heavy cavalry swords of the
young black horsemen glistened.
25

26. In the background, the town, which was no less royal but more informal and tranquil
than Versailles, also charmed me with its nonchalant elegance. And, moreover, it had, on
the ground floor of the large house that was in front of and seemed to protect our little
dwelling, a cheerful and recollected group of Chinese students who had fallen there from
who knows where, whose gaiety, warmth, and childlike tone of voice never ceased to
delight me and whose strange language bewildered me, in the dreamland that alone
befitted this whole world, or, rather, this dream into which I had been transported so
suddenly.
It can be imagined how difficult I found it to leave this dwelling place for an
apartment, which was nonetheless most agreeable and comfortable, close to the Asnières
train station on the rue Auguste Bailly, to say nothing of the school (for girls, O horrors!
and little boys—so-called) where I was placed at the start of the new school term. The
only boy in the midst of a pack of girls, who pestered me, teased me, pampered me,
while making great fun of me! I really do not know what Ulysses17 must have felt in
similar circumstances, but I do know, for one thing, that I would never have learned
anything if I had remained more than a month in that rustling inferno—except that I
would have undoubtedly contracted a fierce and endemic misogyny. Fortunately, the
disastrous effect of this trial, which was certainly once again as well-intentioned as it was
unrealistic, was quickly noticed.
So my mother again took my education in hand that year. The result was to place me,
a year later, without any particular effort, at the head of the class when it was decided
just to send me to the nearest local grade school. It was the same one, right at the end of
the avenue Faidherbe, whose distant contemplation had for a long time represented for
me “the world” as opposed to “nature”. Finding there a young, cultured teacher with
exquisite manners and, for the first time in my existence, friends who were, on the other
hand, of a very working-class solidity, I was going to taste there an unhoped-for
satisfaction for that heterogeneous mixture of refined and plebian instincts that my early
education, grafted onto a disparate pedigree, had already put in place.
I did, however, suffer at home from having no other view but that of other house
fronts, but I did find compensation in the fact that, by turning to the right on our balcony,
I looked down over the suburban gardens that extended all the way to the railroad, while
on the left, our street stopped short at a cul-de-sac, in the direction of an immense park
that I knew screened an invisible château, and across which there was an enormous iron
gate that never opened.
It was, however, to open one single time in order to reveal to me the most fabulous
spectacle of my childhood. It was at the time of the burial of the apparently solitary
master of this impenetrable domain, enclosed by high walls. My eyes had never yet been
to such a festival. I remember the hearse, more impressive than any coach, with its black
plumes, its heavy funeral hangings, its veiled flares, and its silver stars or teardrops, but
especially, of course, the four horses, caparisoned in similarly grandiose and even more
ghostly apparel, which left only their large, shining eyes visible in their heads, which were
also plumed. And along with that, there was a whole crowd of sumptuous uniforms,
26

27. surrounding a group of women buried under their black mourning crepe, who must, I
thought, be concealing an indescribable sadness. And all that in the midst of a line of
tremendous carts piled high with flowers . . .
I never knew who the deceased was who won such a parade for us, since the coats of
arms emblazoned on the hearse were only an additional puzzle to me. But I must admit
that what struck me the most was the funereal splendor and the dignity of the master of
ceremonies, with his sword, his cocked hat in his hand, his silk stockings, and, on top of
everything, his sweeping black cape lined with satin. For the first time, in the weeks that
followed, my vocation as an engineer wavered: Did not that of a funeral director have an
exceptional appeal? It is needless to describe my poor mother’s terror when I admitted
these naïvely necrophilic leanings to her!
This macabre festival was, as it were, the conclusion of our brief stay on the rue
Auguste Bailly. We had spent only three years there when another move was to give me
once again a garden, which, even more than the preceding two, impressed me as a place
of incomparable delights.
This second Asnières garden, along with other more or less similar ones, had been
taken out of the grounds of the Palatine Princess’ château, then occupied by a
Dominican school for young girls, for whom, by an odd stroke of fate many years later, I
became the chaplain. Its charm was that of being totally enclosed between high walls
covered with ivy and Virginia creeper, with the sole exception of one side, where it
extended beyond a light fence right up to a house that was the twin, or, more precisely,
exactly symmetrical, to our own. Fortunately, it was very quietly occupied by our
neighbors, who immediately became excellent friends—an elderly retired gentleman, who
smoked a pipe but whose unexpected tapestry work had earned him the family nickname
of Penelope,18 and his son, who was himself the director of a musical instrument factory
(obviously, I would be in for hard work!). To this must be added an old maid who had
been born of the first marriage of “Penelope’s” deceased wife, who did the
housecleaning for the bachelor household and who was one of the most pleasant-natured
people I have ever known. Her half-brother, a painter when he was in the mood and with
a passion for the theatre, was soon a discreet mentor for me, and his father was to fill the
role of a kind of honorary grandfather all the time we were their neighbors.
But, I must emphasize, the discretion of these neighbors and friends was such that my
memory of that hidden garden, where I recall a particular abundance of roses and irises,
is of a place above all of solitude and silence. On a chaise-longue in the garden or in a
large wicker armchair inherited from my genuine grandfather, on a comfortably reclusive
veranda, I would at leisure assuage my raging hunger for reading, the satisfaction of
which extended into endless daydreams. The particularly rich library of our neighbors,
immediately placed at my disposal, came at the opportune moment to complete that of
my father, which was now freely open to me.
My father himself had begun to give me an appetite by reading to my mother and me
in the evenings, especially, if I remember well, the Three Musketeers. Soon I could not
contain my impatience and in Switzerland devoured the end of the volume. He later
27

28. launched me into Twenty Years After, then The Vicomte of Bragelonne (seven volumes
in all, if I am not mistaken).19 Once that series was completed, we went on to all the
others by Dumas. But I think I most enjoyed the other series, which revolves around
Cagliostro.20 It was a first awakening of interest in fantasy literature. My father, who
shared that interest, was not long in noticing this and in encouraging me on that path, first
of all by giving me the tales of Edgar Poe, in Baudelaire’s translation, which paved the
way for my introduction to the poetry of the latter, and those of Hoffman as well as the
most esoteric of Balzac. From the detective stories by that same Edgar Poe I passed on,
still under the guidance of my father, to the series by Conan Doyle, whose interesting
influence on me will soon be seen.
At the same time, the library of our neighbors opened to me all of Jules Verne, in the
marvelous volumes of the first edition, serialized in Hetzel’s Magasin d’éducation et de
récréation, with their superb engravings, often more evocative than the text.
The effect of this reading was to stimulate in me an intellectual orientation whose
beginnings could undoubtedly be found in my early childhood but which could never
perhaps have been so clearly defined without this retreat into a place of daydreams,
where the world of books, of these books in particular, came quite naturally to fill the
emptiness of an enclosed garden, full of light and silence.
On the one hand, there was my propensity to live in a world of unfettered imagination,
but one that extended the world of everyday existence itself, as if in the discovery of its
background, made up, paradoxically, at least in appearance, both of what was beyond the
visible and of pure interiority. On the other hand, Poe in particular, underlined by Conan
Doyle in his complementary tendency along with all that would be added by Jules Verne
and others, like the all-too-forgotten Jacollet21 of L’Afrique mystérieuse, would strongly
encourage a critical, rational tendency toward analysis and a reconstruction of reality as
well as of the surreal by the most rigorous intelligence.
Initially I had the illusion (which I would later rediscover perfectly systematized by
Paul Valéry) of reducing the first tendency to the latter, or, rather, of equaling it through
the development of the latter to the point of seeming to absorb everything in it. But that
could only pave the way for the observation of the fact that the best as well as the most
that the rational intelligence could do was to recognize in an irrefutable way the final and
invincible superiority as well as the precedence of mystery: the mystery of things
themselves, which prepares us for the all-inclusive mystery of ourselves as well as that of
the universe, to speak like Jaspers.22
But, for now, I had not yet reached that point. The immediate effect of these readings
and meditations on my serious studies beginning at the nearby Voltaire primary school
was a passionate interest in the sciences and, above all, in physics and chemistry. But
very quickly what attracted me was what was then beginning to be developed under the
name of physical chemistry, which was in fact a new “natural philosophy”, as the Anglo-
Saxons still say, that aimed at an ultimate explanation of the universe, of all reality, in the
integral exploration and rationalization of its elementary structure. I still have astonishing
28

29. notebooks in which, at scarcely twelve years of age, I was going to try to present, on the
basis of the atomic theory such as it was defined at that time, a kind of entirely unified
global vision of all reality. That was my personal Eurêka.23
Without knowing it, I was thus joining a kind of Pythagorean ideal that, far from
implying any materialism, made nature itself enter into the mind by a kind of rational
monism in which numbers and figures that seem to be confined to it produce the whole
of reality in a coherent vision that the absolute mind gives to itself in our minds, which
are completely dependent on it.
So I had no difficulty in harmonizing this vision, which was still feeling its way, with
the religious vision of the universe being fed to me by the Protestant catechism (which
was excellent, moreover) that I was studying at the same time in the little Methodist
church next to the Asnières station—the only place of Protestant worship that was
accessible to us then. Quite the contrary, I saw the pursuit of my scientific cogitations
spontaneously develop into a kind of Christian apologetics, or, better yet, into an integral
theology of which it would constitute, as it were, the core: the basis of tangible
experience that would itself call for this transcendent rationalization.
All these idle musings were going to be shattered, in an implosion rather than an
explosion, caused by the nearly sudden death of my mother.
29

30. CHAPTER THREE
From Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained
My mother had always suffered from headaches, from a cause unknown at the time but
that modern medicine, I believe, would explain as hepatic insufficiency. Nothing,
however, had prepared us for the revelation of liver cancer, which, early in the winter of
1924, would carry her away after scarcely one month of suffering.
The effect of this death on me was indescribable. The grief I felt was itself no equal to
the shock it would produce to the very roots of my being, the depth of which would be
revealed only later.
At the time, I was able to survive only by plunging even more into my reading and the
speculations it fed. Two secondary preoccupations, however, also increased during these
first months of adversity, which I recognize today as warning signs of the tragic void
whose inevitability my mother’s death had confirmed, ready to be revealed shortly in an
unexpected catastrophe.
One was the reawakening of my passion for the theatre, aroused by a production of
Tartuffe, with the fine actor Sylvain, who was by chance also from Asnières, in the
leading role. My new friend Jacques Ducroquet, our neighbor, had taken me to it, and
the first discovery at school of the classics, Molière, Racine, and Corneille, whom I had
begun to read with passion, made this attraction even greater. This reached the point of
making me undertake the writing of an implausible tragedy of which Louis XI (I do not
know why; probably the reading of Quentin Durward?)1 was the subject, and of giving
singular performances to myself, particularly of Les Plaideurs.2
The other warning sign, subtly connected to the preceding, was a sudden infatuation,
prompted by the Gun Club of Jules Verne’s planetary science fiction novels, with the
foundation of clubs for which I feverishly drafted the statutes and generously offered the
presidency to my best school companions.
I think that both of these whims, and particularly the second, betrayed a need felt by
the loner I was increasingly becoming for social overcompensation, accompanied by a
quasi-liturgy whose elaborate rituals had me participate with my potential associates in
that cosmic integration of my very existence which my thinking alone pursued with such
a frenzy.
But all that was only palliative: until then, in fact, my mother had been for me the only
real being with whom I lived in symbiosis. When she disappeared, I remained totally,
absolutely alone in a world emptied of any real presence other than my own.
The well-intentioned mistake that prompted my father, a little more than a year after
the death of my mother, to get married again, to the wife, widowed at the same time as
he, of one of his best friends, certainly with the goal of supplying me with a replacement
mother, actually precipitated the inevitable evolution. This excellent woman, who, despite
her own desires, was as foreign to my father’s psychology as she was to mine,
30

31. succeeded only in becoming a screen between him and me.
Increasingly absorbed in my reading and the writing of my Eurêka, of which I have
spoken, I would soon arrive, under these conditions, at a veritable obsession that could
well have turned into dementia praecox. I in fact came to doubt that there could be other
consciousnesses than my own, that the idea of God or of other beings in the world was
anything more than a projection of my own thinking. As a consequence, I sank down
into that impression of stifling solitude that can only be, for a sick consciousness that
nevertheless remains basically desperately normal, the sole effect of a solipsism taken
seriously.
On the advice of a psychiatrist (Dr. Claude, brother of the famous chemist,3 one of
my heroes), my studies were then interrupted, and my father asked some friends of my
mother to take me in for several months in the little old town of Sancerre, in the Loire
Valley, where they themselves had fled from Paris for several years. Nothing could have
been more providential than this step, and, because of this fortunate consequence, the
illness that had been the occasion for it. In fact, I must recognize in it a reportable case of
that creative illness which Dr. Henri Ellenberger,4 several years later, would observe at
the origin of the most fruitful vocations. It was to it that I owed this trip, even more than
the friendly welcome that awaited me, to a land that will always remain for me, as it
were, the native land of my spirit, of my soul, of my heart: in a word, of all the best that
life has providentially allowed me, not only to achieve, but, I think, to be.
In order to make this understandable, I can do nothing better than mention the evening
of my arrival. Already, at that end of a spring day, from the moment the train had
rejoined the valley of the Loire, near Gien and Montargis, I had been pulled away from
my reading by the golden sweetness of this landscape of harmonious lines, where the
waters and the woods surround peaceful dwellings of simple forms that were as if
nonchalantly grouped along their course, between their branches.
But it was something quite different when I was welcomed, at the Tracy station, in the
midst of the forest, and immediately carried off by my friends to the riverbank where we
were going to have a frugal dinner alone, in the last and softest light of that beautiful
evening. Before me, on the other bank, the declining sun had not yet let the shadows
completely absorb the three hills where Sancerre, the first town on the north side,
dominated, followed by L’Orme-aux-Loups and La Pierre-Goupillière: Sancerre crowned
by its tower and its château, but nearly completely draped in its woods; L’Orme-aux-
Loups with its hundreds of vineyards, broken into by the still rosy fissure of a quarry; La
Pierre-Goupillière buried anew under a sylvan cloak that undulated in the distance up to
the approach of the great river.
This river, at my feet, slid its emerald mirror between its sandbanks around leafy
islands whose reflection shimmered on the surface of its waters just above the few
tranquil houses of Saint-Thibaut, topped in the distance by the great white viaduct that
connected Sancerre to the crest of the Bois-de-Charnes forest, right after the tall
silhouette of the unfinished church of Saint-Satur.
On my right, the stone piers and the rhythmic curves of the suspension bridge cables
31

32. barred the river with a chain that the evening darkness closing in on us made more
musical than daylight would have.
All of that was of such a tranquil and certain beauty that I felt at peace as a result and
forever captured. The charm only grew when we set off again, crossing the bridge,
which, in the increasing darkness, trembled under our steps. After a brief walk along the
sleeping village, then the other crossing, this time on the bridge over the canal, between
its two avenues of poplars, we briefly passed by Saint-Satur, in order soon to find
ourselves again in the countryside of meadows and vineyards, where the so-called White
Queen road zigzags its way up.
It was to leave us, in almost complete darkness, at the ruins of the Saint-Romble
priory,5 which had been invaded by wild vegetation. Then began, along the endless wall
of the park, the ascent of the stony footpath leading to the esplanade of Port-César,
whose “lighthouse” (three powerful electric lamps in a triangle) had long been drawing us
near.
When we reached this terrace, the moment we spent there, as we turned to look back
on the path of our slow journey, completed the enchantment, with the view of the Loire
winding its way under the moon, between its sandy banks and its woods, the bouquets of
lights marked along its course by towns and villages, the crest of dark hills dominating it
on the horizon, and, at our feet, the carpet of vineyards streaked with dark hedges and
light paths up to the ribbon of the canal rolled out between its double borders of slender
trees.
Far from growing fainter during the following days and years, this first impression
would be as if nourished and perfected. So much so that, even recently, with a friend on
another fine summer evening, I was unable to see the hill of Sancerre again from a
distance from the road that borders the Loire on the other bank without tears rising in my
eyes.
The charm of this varied and hilly land, all bends and curves, which presents at every
moment renewed and unexpected vistas, is in itself most certainly extraordinary. I could
not explain the effect it had on me and on many others better than to say that it was, in a
totally different register, an equivalent of what the English Lake district would prove to
be for its poets, and above all for Wordsworth. In fact, when I discovered this latter poet
later, I would find as if a preestablished harmony with what these first months of solitary
acquaintance with the Sancerre area was to bring me but which, for me, too, would not
cease to deepen and increase during the return trips I would make there every year until
the Second World War.
If I had to define this immediate impression as well as I could, I would say that I was
touched equally by the humanity and the grandeur of these landscapes, which were all
the more compelling for remaining so discreet. The rise of the hills, the expanding vistas
they offered, alternating with the meditative spirit of the little wooded valleys where
springs and streams abounded, but perhaps even more the enveloping magic of the great
silent river with the constant lonely presence of its waters, its sands, and its foliage—all
contributed to this effect.
32

33. It is a curious thing, but not so singular as it might seem, that the solipsistic obsession
of which I have spoken was spontaneously dispelled during my solitary walks in every
direction of this world that was completely new to me. This world in fact both called
forth human presences and immersed them again, soaking them again, as it were, in their
source, in a presence that was limitless but not vague or blurred for all that. It seemed to
me that it was as if suggested by the both paternal and maternal expectation of an
inspired gratitude.
Thus I at once sympathized with Wordsworth in his protestations against those who
accused his cosmic poetry of pantheism. In fact, for me just as for him, it was quite
natural that this life in regular contact with a land so evocative of a presence, of
supernatural presences, behind or within nature itself, had to be harmonized with a
rediscovery, or simply a renewed discovery, of the most precisely evangelical
Christianity.
I was helped in this, of course, by the reading quite simply offered to me by the very
well-furnished library I found in the room that had been reserved for me under the eaves.
The nineteenth-century preacher Adolphe Monod filled me with enthusiasm, even
more by his Adieux,6 a series of meditations improvised on his deathbed and noted down
by his friends, than by his sermons, despite the excellence of the latter. I am not sure that
the discovery of Alexandre Vinet, of his marvelous Théologie pastorale,7 should be
added as early as this first period of my retreats in Sancerre, but it remains forever linked
to the memory of them.
Perhaps even more promising for future developments would be the very simple but
excellent religious instruction given to me as well as my hosts’ children by Pastor
Coudirolle. This shrewd native of Béarn, reaching the end of his career in Sancerre, in
fact combined, along with a wholly peasant wisdom and sharpness, learning of a quality
that was very rare, even at that time, among the clergy, whether Protestant or Catholic. A
student in Paris, during the first years of the century, of the great patrologist Eugène de
Faye, he had not only retained those lessons, but he had assimilated them so well that he
knew how to inflame our little group of kids with a passion for the writings and
personalities of the Fathers of the Church, particularly Tertullian, Clement, and Origen.
As far as I was concerned, this excellent man was to sow in me the seeds of what would
later germinate in my studies as well as in my personal research.
I believe it was in Adolphe Monod that I found for the first time so clearly expressed
the idea that God is love and that this love had its manifestation par excellence in the
Cross of Christ: there, I saw in all clarity what the heart of Christianity is. Vinet,
however, without in the least denying this intuition, persuaded me that the broadest
humanism, far from contradicting it, had to make it explicit: How would one love God,
love with his love, that love which is God himself, without loving as he does all that he
loves?
I must also note that I was reading at that time, with personal satisfaction, a very
subtle essay by Pastor Henri Monnier (who was later to be one of my most esteemed
professors) on the redemption,8 which convinced me that the Cross of Christ saves us as
33

34. a supreme act of solidarity with us. That presupposes, obviously, as he did not fail to
point out, that it saved us, not by exempting us from suffering, but by making us capable
of a suffering that is fruitful. This would be my first link to an ascetical view of
Christianity, a view, however, from which I would remain distant for a long time. My
earlier education as well as my deep instincts remained and, I think, always will remain
the source of a fundamental eudaemonism,9 but it still kept for many years something of
the naïveté of an existence that up until then had been doubtlessly overly protected
before being suddenly torn apart by the premature and totally unexpected death of my
mother.
This is obviously what my passion for science had expressed up until then as well as
the bewitching charm of the familiar places I have already described, which the discovery
of the Sancerre region only refreshed and deepened. Yet, in a contradictory but
simultaneous way, the influence of the fervent and rather narrow Protestant milieu in
which I then found myself plunged was developing, in a passing horror of Catholicism,
both my estrangement from any asceticism, seen as mutilation, and a kind of Quaker-
type extremism in its rejection of any intermediary, of all that is not direct, personal
contact of the soul with God.
It was only gradually that I would come to discover that the cosmic aspect of my
discovery of God as a reality, and not as a mere notion, itself postulated a social and
incarnate worship, yet there could be no victory over evil in a sinful world and for a
sinful man without painful effort, certainly not sought because it was painful but because
that was the price of purifying love itself, the sole source of the highest and abiding joy.
For that to occur, the intervention of other influences, of which I will soon speak, would
have to converge. That would also be the time when what I have just described as
“Quaker” would find no less satisfaction in the purest mystical tradition: first of all, that
of Saint John of the Cross, then of the Dionysian and Rheno-Flemish mysticism.10
But, once again, this is anticipating. Before reaching that point, it would be necessary
for me to strengthen and expand what my first visit to the Sancerre region had so
serenely and so vigorously opened up, but also to correct certain aspects of it. This was
the work of new reading that I undertook, and new encounters as well, in the years that
followed.
My father and stepmother, the latter wanting to lead a more active life, had decided to
leave our house in Asnières in order to take over a business, first on the rue du
Chevaleret, near the place d’Italie, and then, several years later, on the rue Louis Braille,
not far from the Bois de Vincennes.
The first of these moves led us, my father and me, to go to the little Lutheran church
of the Trinity, on the boulevard de la Gare, where Pastor Samuel Lambert was
officiating. I was to become his vicar some years later. But Pastor Russier, who had
baptized me, had informed Pastor Louis Kreyts, of the Reformed church of Port-Royal,
near the Gobelins, of our new address, and it was he who was the first to have contact
with us. As a result, our religious practice alternated between these two neighboring
churches.
34

35. From the beginning, in spite of my instinctive Quakerism, I will admit that the
charming little church of the Trinity and its liturgical offices, which were very discreetly
Catholic in style, pleased me much more than the Port-Royal temple11 and its “worship”,
which was more verbose and noticeably less prayerful. But Pastor Kreyts, a Jewish
convert and an enthusiastic self-educated man, not only was cordiality itself, but proved
to be an excellent teacher for me through the books he loaned me and the explanations
he provided me. I am indebted to him above all for having made Newman known to me
through the book by Henri Bremond,12 which captivated me immediately and I never
tired of rereading, especially, I must say, at that time because of the selection and
excellent translation of the texts that make it an anthology of what is most delightful in
Newman. I was not long in realizing, however, that, despite the brilliance of Bremond’s
style and presentation, Newman’s thought was singularly more complete and powerful
than that of his biographer.
I was, moreover, prepared for what was thus suddenly revealed to me of the Catholic
tradition in a way that was more particularly accessible for a Protestant thanks to the
friendship of three girls, little cousins of my stepmother’s, who lived not far from our
new home. They were profoundly religious, and the long conversations that I had with
them and, here again, the books that they had loaned me, beginning with La Cathédrale
by Huysmans,13 had already undermined my anti-Catholicism.
But the definitive collapse was achieved by some excellent articles by the Lutheran
pastor Frank Wheatcroft (destined to become one of my best friends and my mentor) on
the traditional liturgy. These convinced me once and for all of the inanity, and very
especially of the unbiblical and un-Christian character, of the anti-ritualism breathed in
the Sancerre milieu, which had suited my individualism and its tendency toward fanatical
interiorization only too well but was of questionable intellectual or spiritual health.
It goes without saying that during these final years of my secondary studies (first at
Jean-Baptiste Say, then at Chaptal), I was reading many other things as well. I must say
a word first of all about the popular scientific works, which were combined with strong
apologetics, by a certain Abbé Moreux,14 toward which my curiosity had been attracted
by the simple fact that he was in charge of the Bourges observatory, a town very close to
Sancerre that had fascinated me from my first visit. The rather facile concordism of
these books did not prevent either an exalted vision of creation or many remarks of
penetrating wisdom. The thought that the world cannot be the observer’s daydream of
which he is the unconscious author since it proves totally resistant to being at the disposal
of his will—which incorporates something like a summary of the thought of Maine de
Biran,15 whom I would discover only much later—dealt the final blow to my solipsism.
But above all, around the same time, I savored at length, in the same perspective as that
last remark, Charles Secrétan’s Philosophie de la Liberté.16 Although the sympathy that
it communicated to me for the thought of Duns Scotus was not to withstand direct
contact with his all-too-famous subtlety, I remain profoundly influenced by Secrétan’s
conception of an essentially personalist universe. I am no less indebted to him for an
35

36. inclination to treat, as I myself would later do, theological research as an analysis of the
organic evolution of questions in the collective human mind. It seems to me that at an
equal distance from an abstract a priori systematization and a spineless eclecticism we
have there the sole philosophical method of real and lasting fruitfulness, as long as it
remains open . . . unlike Hegelianism and its by-products!
These various discoveries, however, unfolded during those years only following and,
as it were, within my initiation to Newman and, through him, to the creative formation of
the Christian tradition beginning with the Fathers of the Church. My second stay in
Sancerre, which had as great an impact on me as the first, occurred the following year,
on the return of summer, and remains inseparable from my meditation on the Apologia17
and several of the best pages from the Parochial and Plain Sermons.18 The first of these
books was at that time the almost invariable companion of my walks in the Sancerre
region. Those horizons will always be linked for me to that reading, which I have taken
up again I do not know how many times, as well as to the visions of Oxford, which,
later, would become just as familiar and scarcely less enchanting to me.
Under the influence of these different studies, but obviously above all of Newman,
and particularly of his two sermons for the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels and on
the invisible world (and with the impressions of the Sancerre region having no small part
as well), it was during those years that I began to work out the view of the world that I
have tried to set down in my Cosmos,19 which is now being published.
The English poets, and Wordsworth to a high degree, whom I was soon going to
discover, would confirm and help to give it all its resonances. On the speculative level, it
would be fortified by my later studies of the Alexandrine Fathers, and even more that of
Gregory of Nyssa, as well as of Saint Thomas Aquinas’ De Veritate, and, finally, by an
attentive reading of Berkeley, clarified by the critical analyses of his last editor, A. A.
Luce (with whom I would engage in a most cordial correspondence in the sixties).
I will simply say that, in this view, the material, physical world cannot be dissociated
from the invisible, essentially “intelligible”, spiritual world, of which it is like a common
irradiation, when it comes to the firstborn spirits, the angels. And it is from this that the
human mind emerges and finds in it not only its medium of communication but also the
awakening of its consciousness. This world, in which the intelligible and the sensible
make but a single fabric, is thus only one thought of God, eternally present in him,
projected into time and, at the same time, into the distinct existence of other
consciousnesses.
Later, I would come to recognize in it the projection of a Wisdom of creation outside
of the eternal Word, under the animation of the Divine Spirit, who, at the same time,
urges it to come back to this filial Word in order to espouse it and rise with it, in the same
Spirit, to the Father, as in an eternal Eucharist.
The influence of Newman was at once of even greater significance to me: inspiring my
admiration for an exceptional union of intellectual honesty and lucid precision in the
search for truth with the demanding sense of the religious character of all existence. But
that was brought to perfection by the, for me, irresistible attraction not only of the richest
36

37. and most refined human culture but of that poetic gift of a purity and intensity no less
rare, which is undoubtedly what Bremond was able to bring out best in his book, as
narrow as that book proves to be in the end, indeed, almost imperceptibly off-course in
nearly all its comments.
I cannot close this chapter on Sancerre without also expressing the importance of the
personal encounters that I made there. I have already mentioned the sympathetic figure
of that old pastor who, in introducing me to the Fathers of the Church, and especially the
Alexandrians, had, without even suspecting it, prepared me for Newman’s best lessons.
I would be scarcely less unjust if I did not say at least a word about the excellent
friendships I developed there with the children of my hosts, and particularly their older
son, who was a little younger than I. With him, I discovered all that the walks and games
shared together, accompanied by endless conversations, could bring to adolescents who
were different from each other but who perhaps got along all the better for completing
each other, even if by endless discussions that never succeeded in convincing.
But still less could I omit mentioning the affection and the very intense friendship that
developed very soon with a cousin of my young friends, younger than I by seven years,
which, for me at least, was not long in changing into love. I could soon not imagine my
future life if not shared with this Elisabeth, who was very delicate and cheerful but no
less mysterious for all that, in spite of the exceptional clarity of her eyes, which were of a
blue that I have never encountered again. These feelings contributed to the definitive
formation of my personality, as much, I think, by the enthusiasm and hope that they
would for a long time keep alive as by the heartbreaking disappointment in which they
were to end.
37

38. CHAPTER FOUR
Initiation
The last years of my secondary studies were once again filled with abundant intellectual
activity. Newman, along with my discovery of the liturgy, prompted me, first of all, to
develop a knowledge of the English language, to which my mother had already
introduced me by making me a regular user of the Prayer Book and the English Bible
while attending Evensong every Sunday, either at the American pro-cathedral on the
avenue George V or at the charming little English church since then terribly defaced, on
the rue Auguste Vacquerie: Saint George’s. Over and above my school studies and my
reading, an accelerated study of Greek and Latin was soon to be added, from which I
had been diverted until then by my scientific orientation. By myself, however, until my
second stay in Sancerre, I had not yet imagined any change in my vocation, despite my
growing immersion in theology and religious philosophy. But, as has happened many
other times in my existence, it was an unexpected intervention that determined a major
change: this time my renunciation of a career as a physician or chemist, even though I
was considering it more and more from a perspective of Christian witness.
The paternal grandmother of my new friends, a wise but profoundly religious old
Alsacian whom I liked much more, I will admit, than the pious imperialism of the
maternal grandmother (even if she was more cultured), had only to say to me: “You
should become a pastor, not a professor!” for me to say to myself immediately: “Why
didn’t I think of that? But since she thinks it, she must be right!”
The seriousness of Protestant theology studies at that time thus obliged me to make up
work, which I undertook all the more willingly now that Newman had sharpened in me
my old attraction for Hellenism.
Going to Anglican churches, however, not only captivated me through the worship
service of which they continue to be the home; it at the same time introduced me both to
the traditional liturgy and to a more detailed and profound meditation on the Bible in its
context of prayer and adoration. Chance willed that one of the first times I was in the
Holy Trinity Pro-Cathedral of which I have spoken, Dean Beekman (one of the best
pioneers of nascent ecumenism) had invited there the Saint Sergius Russian Theological
Institute, on the rue de Crimée. This was the occasion for me to discover at once the
unsuspected splendor of the Orthodox liturgy and the brilliant personality of Father Sergei
Bulgakov,1 who preached there, in that correct but rough English that would always
remain the medium of his contacts with the West. I immediately had the impression that I
was seeing the Christianity of the Fathers rise up before me, especially that of the Greek
Fathers, to whom Pastor Coudirolle had introduced me in so pleasant a way and to
whom Newman had definitively won me over.
These new interests were encouraged by the blossoming of the ecumenical movement
in those same years. The Protestant publications I was reading more or less regularly
38