Philosophy
Lovers!
Click Here

GOD EXISTS: I HAVE MET HIM, 1970

by André Frossard

“Converts are a bother,” said Bernanos.

It is for this reason, and a few others, that I put off for so long the writing of this story. It is indeed hard to speak of one’s conversion without speaking of oneself, and even harder to speak of oneself without sounding complacent or falling into what was once properly called “irony,” that underhand way of shortchanging the reader’s judgment by making oneself out to be rather more full of faults than is strictly truthful. This would not matter were it not for the fact that the witness I bear is inseparable from the witness that I am, the credit of each dependent on that of the other, with the risk that the two may be jointly discounted.

Even so, I have come to the conclusion that a witness, however unworthy, who happens to learn the truth about some matter under trial, owes it to himself to speak that truth in the hope that it will win on its own merits the hearing that he cannot hope for on his own.

Now by an amazing chance it so happens that, in respect of the most stubborn of disputes, the most ancient of controversies, I know the truth. God exists.

I have met Him.

The meeting was unexpected—I could say it happened by chance were it not that chance has no part in events of this kind. It created the sort of astonishment a man might feel if he went round the corner of a road in Paris and saw before him, not the familiar square or crossroads but an unexpected and boundless ocean lapping at the doorsteps of the houses.

It was a moment of utter astonishment which is still with me. I have never got used to the existence of God.

At ten past five I went into a chapel in the Latin Quarter, looking for a friend. At a quarter past five I came out with a friendship that was not of this world.

I went in there as a sceptic and atheist of the extreme left, and with something more than scepticism, something more than atheism, namely, an indifference and an immersion in so much that had so little to do with God that I no longer even bothered to deny His existence. It seemed to me absolutely one of those things that had long since been relegated to the profit and loss account of man’s insecurity and ignorance. I came out a few minutes later “Catholic, apostolic, Roman,” carried, uplifted, caught and borne forward on a tidal wave of inexhaustible joy.

I went in as a man of twenty. I came out as a child ready for baptism, staring wide-eyed at this inhabited heaven, this city that did not realize it was suspended in mid-air, these beings who in the full light of the sun appeared to walk in darkness, without noticing the colossal rent that had just been torn in the fabric of this world. My feelings, the inner landscape of my mind, the intellectual constructs within which I had hitherto felt so at ease no longer existed; even my habits had vanished and my tastes were transformed.

I have to concede that a conversion of this kind must, by its sheer unexpectedness, have something about it both shocking and unacceptable for contemporary minds that would much prefer the explorations of reason to any mystical thunderbolt and feel less and less inclined to bother with divine interventions in daily life. But however much I might like to put myself on easy terms with the spirit of the age, I cannot mark out the stages of a measured investigation when there was in fact an abrupt change. I cannot provide psychological reasons either immediate or remote for that change, since those reasons do not exist. I am unable to describe the path which led me to faith because I was on an entirely different path and thinking of something completely different when I fell into a sort of ambush. This book is not the story of how I found my way to Catholicism but of how I was going in a quite different direction and suddenly found myself there. This is not the story of an intellectual evolution but the account of a happening, something like a witness statement made after an accident. If I think it necessary to give a moderately lengthy account of my childhood, it is not—I beg you to believe—because I want to set a particular value on my personal history but simply to establish that nothing prepared me for what actually happened. The divine charity can act gratuitously. And if I have to resign myself to speaking a great deal in the first person, it is because it is as clear to me as I hope it will be soon for you that I played no part in my own conversion.

But it is not enough to say all this, I have still to prove it. Here are the facts.

My father’s village was the only one in France to have a synagogue but no church.

After Belfort you have a countryside of short cropped grass and fog, one of those territories of the East that are slow to welcome the sun; pale ghosts of past invasions lurk behind each clump of trees. The houses have tiled roofs like Alsatian caps pulled down over the eyes; they lean into the hillside to resist the wind.

Here and there can be seen the odd block of grey stone sunk into the clay of the fields; they are posts marking the old German frontier or perhaps a soldier’s grave. Here lies an Austrian officer with his helmet fastened to the granite, there Pegoud the airman, his metal dragonfly crushed at the edge of this little wood after a brief trajectory of glory and of flames.

Foussemagne, with four hundred inhabitants and the black lances of a patrol of pinetrees on the horizon, a claypit and a tile factory whose two uneven chimneys, a yearly rendezvous for storks, stood like two red lines on a stark Brueghel landscape.

Attracted by the liberal attitudes of the local lords of the manor, the counts of Reinach-Foussemagne, a considerable Jewish colony had, at the end of the Middle Ages, settled at the heart of the village.

This explained the presence, not far from the mairie [town hall], of a synagogue in pink sandstone, not much frequented in the intervals between great festivals, a vast building of indeterminate style with arched windows displaying glasswork of the kind appropriate to a bourgeois staircase. It was haunted by the threadbare figure of the rabbi, unobtrusive, poor and married late in life to a lady even later, like humbly plaintive sparrows perched on the menorah, their penury a subject of their congregation’s affectionate and smiling comment, “Rabbi, that’s no job for a Jew!”

Were our Jews practicing? Their religion seemed to be made up more of juridical and moral observances than of works of piety. The Sabbath rest was there to be observed and they observed it, together with the Mosaic prescriptions as to fasting and the preparation of food. They faithfully celebrated Passover, a mysterious feast whose ritual involved biscuits of unleavened bread, wonderfully white and, as it were, dotted with bubbles lightly browned in the heat of the oven. Once a year, clad in sheepskin, they would attend the synagogue to prepare for the fast of Yom Kippur by a night of prayers or religious standing about, a fast which on the following day occasionally brought us a furtive and famished visitor whom we would watch with amusement as they fiddled as if distracted with raisins or sugar lumps while chatting with unusual intensity about the weather. Were they believers? Certainly. For a Jew, to be a believer and to be a Jew are one and the same thing and he could not deny his God without denying his own self. But they never breathed a word about religion with us, red republicans of the deepest dye.

The two communities lived side by side without dissension, never encroaching on each other, and I must as a child have spent a large proportion of my holidays in this strangely assorted village without learning that there was, in the opinion of some, “a Jewish problem.” The Christians had their feast days which they would go off to celebrate in neighbouring villages, ones that had churches, and the Jews had theirs which fell on different dates. The Christians rested on Sundays, the Jews on Saturdays, an arrangement that in principle ensured for everybody the advantages of an English working week. The Christians had their cemetery and the Jews had theirs, near Belfort; my grandmother is buried there.

There did exist a mental frontier dividing people but it was created by politics, not by religion. There were the “blacks,” regarded by the “reds” as the politically incorrect survivors of a bygone age. Black in the way of the countryside’s uniform for marriages and funerals, black like the soutanes of their priests, black like the night of the past from which somehow they had escaped; they voted right wing in the interests of big money, even though they themselves were for the most part as financially humble as ourselves.

Full of respect for the order of society, they never dreamed of changing it, not even to make it better; they were content to obey and to defer. At least that is the impression they conveyed to us.

The first among the “reds” was my grand-father, a saddler by trade, who gave himself out to be a radical republican. At that time and in that place to which socialism had not yet penetrated it was impossible to state more clearly that one was a revolutionary. In the evening his workshop was the meeting place for republican peasants and workers in the tile factory; they would talk politics while he under the lamp went on cutting and stitching. Talking politics meant talking poverty. The workers earned five to ten sous per hour and this earned some jealousy among peasants who found it hard to live off their few acres of difficult soil. No social legislation protected the former, working ten or twelve hours a day without hope of escaping destitution; the latter depended on the fickleness of the seasons and could expect no help from anybody. This was the “Belle Epoque.” The lord of the manor was no longer the Count of Reinach-Foussemagne whose properties had long since been broken up and sold off, but the owner of the tile works. He lived near his factory in a large detached house, built of brick and rather ugly but which we village children thought as rich and imposing as Versailles. We would imagine it full of enormous toys, laughter and light; nobody could possibly be unhappy there. But however bold we might normally be, we never dared get too close to it, and we would make our way quickly past its pointed wrought iron gates. It might be the house of happiness or it might be the house of the ogre, fatal to any left-wing Tom Thumb, and I was in dread of hearing, as I went by, the traditional invitation of grown-ups trying to be friendly: “Come in, we won’t eat you!”

I never knew my grand-father. Ever since his death my grand-mother reigned over our modest house of cob with the abrupt authority of a woman who had never lost her head save once when she fell in love, as a young lady from a Jewish family in easy circumstances, with the blue eyes of the simple home worker that my grandfather then was. This union of a young heiress, however small her fortune, and a proletarian of Catholic origin, however remote his Catholicism, was a source of amazement to local Jews and Christians, for whom friendly relations never went as far as marriage.

On the severe countenance of the woman who, dressed invariably in black, ruled us inflexibly and never expressed any tenderness save in the discretely roundabout form of irony, there was nothing to recall that story of love. There was a propensity to mock that was characteristic of our family and perhaps of the region; the mockery was sometimes gentle, sometimes cynical or punitive. Thanks to it we lived with our feelings in a state of hibernation, any emotional impulse frozen before it got anywhere.

We were a very united family but, come the morning, we hardly dared to wish each other good day; the first one up, not wishing to hurt the late riser, would pretend not to notice his appearing, so that when we actually embraced each other, it was normally done without a word spoken, as if by chance or as if bumping into each other in a doorway. I used to look at my uncle huddled over his workbench in the shop that smelled so pleasantly of new leather, or at my aunt in the kitchen, kneading her pastry, and being quite unable to express our affection for each other, we ended up by not speaking at all. Since we never spoke, we had less and less to say; we lived in a state of secrecy devoid of secrets.

After dinner, in winter, a few neighbours would come round to talk politics or to play a new game of cards. Its arrival must have been one of the great novelties of the post-war period, on a level with that of electricity in the countryside; I refer to belote, a democratic game in which the knave ranks above the king and queen who go to the last rank of the court cards. In belote the knave can trump the ace and the ten; his promotion was a preliminary assault, indirect but all the same significant, on the established social hierarchy. We played with dog-eared cards which ended up smelling like damp cardboard. The butcher, a handsome man with a handle-bar moustache, would slam down his winning cards with a fist like a crusader’s, making the table jump. The cattle dealer, sitting astride his chair, would wedge his great belly against the back and send the spit from his everlasting quid of tobacco into a bucket of sawdust prudently pushed to beside him. His waistcoat and the distinction of his gilt watch chain gave one to understand that he was rich but in our village a man was rich if he wore a tie on weekdays without being a civil servant. In between deals he would offer analysis, correction, blame and advice, being one of those players who pay more attention to their partner’s game than to their own. During these utterances, gravely delivered and ignored by all, my uncle would roll a cigarette with grey tobacco, pass the edge of the paper beneath his lordly moustache, lodge the finished product behind his right ear like a clerk’s pencil and cut matters short by re-dealing the cards. Beneath its florid china shade the lamp supposed to do the work of forty candles cast a pitiless light on the players, the workshop, the sheets of leather, the tangle of reins, the empty oval of the horse-collars, all those familiar persons and objects deprived by electricity of the indefinable extra character once added to them by the paraffin lamp, namely, their shadows.

The children (I had two cousins of my own age) watched proceedings with varying degrees of interest. The youngest had a feminine prettiness and would soon be off to the kitchen. His elder brother would stick it out a bit longer and then we would be off upstairs to sleep in our Spartan bedroom; little icicles used sometimes to float on the water jug. I would slide quickly between sheets heavy with the cold, beneath the airy weight of the eiderdown puffed up like a vast feathery soufflé, concealing most of the room and half the ceiling. When I was by myself, I only felt truly at ease in pitch darkness; I could see nothing, of course, but then nobody could see me. It was at such moments that, with all lights out, the strangeness of the universe would sometimes call out to me from beyond the dark window, as the start not of a nightmare but of an adventure. Night would bring the return of the infinite and I would use it to escape from the solid outline of things and to wander I know not where, between earth and moon, my every sense alert, hoping to light upon some secret, who knows what, some dialogue between the blade of grass and the nebula. I felt certain that all these worlds, mysteriously ordered, somehow complicit with each other, would at long last utter for me a word which would give me the key to the riddle. I moved in silence on my quest for a truth that was always just on the point of being revealed at the very moment when sleep would abruptly wipe away the symbols that night had written on its blackboard.

Winter appealed to me more than summer. Work in the fields was suspended, nightfall and the cold would bring us back early to the fireside and give our snow-bound house the look of an inner life made up of damp wood, fine soup, quiet thoughts around the cast-iron stove to which we held out our frozen hands. It was also the time of festivals one after the other, the strangest of the year, the return of St Nicholas whom they called Santa Claus at the upper end of the village towards the old frontier; every year he would take on the role of paternal justice, his job being to reward the good and punish the wrongdoer (there never were any). We knew about him from almanacs and postcards with a sparkle of hoarfrost on his coat that would leave specks on our fingers.

On Christmas Eve, long after nightfall, the “blacks” in their Sunday best would go off to their funny rituals—that is the way we used to talk but it was without malice—carrying lanterns, talking more loudly than usual and appearing to be happy. We had no more understanding of those rituals than we did of Jewish religious observances, despite our family connections. We thought that both lots were wasting a great deal of time on singing to no purpose.

The following day the far-off bells of villages round about would cast, as it were, a veil of ceremony over the dead countryside. The bells created no echo in us. But we with nowhere to go would likewise put on our Sunday best. My uncle would present us with things he had made, pretty little whips with a white lash, belts, satchels of green canvas reinforced with leather and designed to be worn on one’s back; as we ran on our way to school they made us look like miniature infantrymen in pursuit of knowledge as it fled.

My aunt, a stalwart woman of Alsace with a gentle turn of mockery, would bake one cake after another in her super-heated kitchen stove. We would dine in the big room that was shut most of the time, and on the white table cloth reserved for grand occasions. But neither the sweet Alsatian wine nor the beer nor the raspberry liqueur could make the family more talkative. The meal was richer than usual and there was a pine tree draped with silver tinsel but they commemorated nothing. It was a Christmas with amnesia; it carried no religious memories and it celebrated nobody.

God did not exist. His image or rather the images that call to mind His existence or that of what might be called His offspring in history, the saints, the prophets, the great figures of the Bible, had no presence whatsoever in our house. Nobody spoke to us of Him. The fully committed Jews never said a word to us about their faith. Jews do not go in for propaganda; their religion is a family affair that is no concern of outsiders, even if they happen to be half-Jewish. But on the other hand our religious indifference made us tolerant and constituted for them a sort of guarantee: while we were “of the left” by virtue of our atheism, they “voted left” so as to enjoy their piety in peace whenever they felt inclined to it. They entered into our convictions in order the better to preserve their own, living the mysterious life of their community scattered for two thousand years but still retaining its identity, apportioned among the nations like a leaven which a heavy German dough would shortly try to smother once and for all, unchanged yet peculiarly adapted to change, faithful even in unbelief (for there were some open unbelievers who showed themselves stricter than others for the observances and promises of the Scriptures), capable of standing up to every sort of trial and, what is rarer, to every sort of success, capable, in short, of understanding everything save what it is to be a Jew; but as to that, who can say what it means?

As for the Christians of the village, who would have been able to instruct us, they too stayed silent, doubtless for reasons of discretion, perhaps to spare themselves our sarcasm. Their piety had no visible effects and apart from the extra supply of cakes that featured in the festivals saluted by bells in the misty distance, we had not the least idea of what it gave them. Their every-day morality was more or less the same as ours, with the addition of one or two unusual virtues such as obedience and humility, which we considered grave defects; it differed also in this, that their actions seemed to be with a view to future reward or from fear of a future punishment, a mercenary mind set that we could not much respect. They did not know, as we had known ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that original sin had been abolished by decree of philosophers and that man was naturally good.

They looked, rather, as if they thought man naturally bad. The Christians of those days had not yet discovered nature, the promises of science, the benevolent influence of liberty. They moved cautiously through a thicket of prohibitions without daring to take stock of things and get in touch with the world. They gave us the impression of being afraid of life, frightened they might misuse it.

That left nature which under its other name, “creation,” might have been able to suggest to us the idea of a creator. But nature with its law that every life-form must feed on or feed another, nature driving the little fish into the maw of the big fish and the antelope into the claws of the lion, nature did not seem to obey the Gospel; moreover the kind of suspicion in which it was held by Catholics placed it firmly in our camp. Nature was unbelieving and as such our ally against believers. If these had their “revealed truth”—as I was to learn much later—nature with its immense range of experiences and of scientific advances was our “revealable truth.” We who were enfolded in it, all subject to the same risks and the same inequalities, we would save it together with ourselves by science and by progress which would one day manage to control its excesses and humanize its laws. If a God had, to our knowledge, existed, nature would nevertheless have kept us away from Him and drawn us to itself.

But, as I have said, there was no God. The heavens were empty, the earth an assemblage of chemical elements combined into fantastic forms by the interplay of natural attractions and repulsions. The earth would soon be surrendering to us its ultimate secrets, one of which was the non-existence of God.

We were perfect atheists, numbered among those who no longer even ask themselves questions about their atheism. The last surviving militant anti-clericals who still preached against religion at public meetings seemed to us oddly touching, slightly ridiculous, somewhat as would historians laboriously challenging the historicity of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Their zeal had no other effect than to give a further inconsequential lease of life to a debate that reason had long since brought to a close.

The perfect atheist is not so much the person who denies the existence of God as the person for whom the question of God’s existence does not even arise.

Village life had two grand sources of entertainment, the first being the annual festivity that covered the muddy grass of the common with planks, paper decorations, an orchestra for public dancing and three stalls designed to fleece the simple-minded; the second was politics. Election campaigns would put some warmth into the locality, a little excitement in left wing households (right wing households regarded politics as a kind of vice, admittedly enjoying by way of exception a dispensation granted by the hierarchy but nonetheless not the sort of thing to speak of in the presence of the children). The men would disappear on Sundays and return home from the neighbouring villages very late, exhausted but full of themselves, just for the once in sparkling form and voluble with details of the ways in which they had done down the other side.

The right wing candidates had to put up with holding their public meetings at the mairie in the so-called “festival hall” that never saw a festival apart from the spectacle that they willy-nilly provided. Everyone of the left made it their business to prevent them speaking. My uncle and his cousin the blacksmith made a somewhat theatrical point by attending the meetings wearing their aprons of thick canvas or leather, thus giving the intruder to understand that the harsh conditions of a worker’s life made it impossible for them to change clothes, that they had snatched a brief moment from work, sacrificed their dinner time, not in order to listen to his speech but to hurl back the onslaught of reaction, a task performed occasionally without mercy. The most surprising candidate I ever saw confronting the opposition of this unwelcoming locality was called Tardieu, a notable personality of the Third Republic and a gifted speaker if allowed to speak. With his back to an iron pillar and surrounded by boisterous left-wingers who had crowded his supporters into one corner of the hall and who were calling down on him the lay equivalent of curses, he stood firm against the storm, of necessity silent but with a smile of bravado, fiddling distractedly with an over-long cigarette-holder which made him look like a sardonic Saint Sebastian smoking one of his arrows. After thirty minutes he made off, pursued by cat-calls, uninjured and pleased with himself; even if he had not been able to get in a single word, he had at least made his presence felt, which was the most that any right-wing candidate could hope for at Foussemagne.

Left-wing candidates did not often go to the mairie. They preferred the café with its noise and clouds of tobacco smoke, a symbolic evocation of industrial labour and the intangible future promised by ideology. The right never attempted to prevent them from speaking; the right was already on the defensive. Tomorrow did not belong to the right; it represented tradition, reverence for ancestors, the past, all of them territories abandoned to the right by the left without resistance but from which thereafter any attempt to emerge was shouted down.

Once the elections were over and the left most often defeated, time resumed its march day by day, presided over by local virtues of which the most remarkable was fidelity. People of the East are faithful in the same way as one is either light-haired or dark. Faithful in the first place to their countryside in which they can see all sorts of good features invisible to travelers anxious to get away from the draughts in this well-known cross-roads of invasions. Who was it who said that love is blind? Love alone has keen eyes; it can see beauties where others can see nothing. The gaze of one who loves is invariably a gaze of wonder. That is how the man of Belfort comes to love his flat landscape. A few small trees leaning over a river churned up by a storm, and he revels in all the joys of nature, all but ready to abandon that watchful control he normally keeps over his emotions. But he never does actually abandon it. He is of the race of that monumental lion carved by Bartholdi in the towering pink sandstone of its fortifications and, from the three German assaults it has withstood, he has taken on the mentality of a man perpetually under siege. His town is impregnable; so is he. There must exist in psychology a Vauban complex.

His fidelity to his land is in proportion to its bleakness. He is similarly faithful to his family, his friends, his trade, his house. He turns his habits into regulations and every element in his life takes on the character of an institution. To change location is a grave matter; to change an opinion is a military defeat. The revolutionary milieu in which I grew up was seriously intent on changing the world but nobody would have dreamed of altering the position of a clock. After the war, the house had to be rebuilt. A small shell had made short work of its ancient beams and cob walls. My uncle insisted that it should be rebuilt exactly as before, with all the awkward features that had lasted nearly a hundred years. It would have hurt him a great deal to make good the defects of his house. It would have made him feel he was moving, a step all but inconceivable, analogous to a soldier abandoning his post. Intellectually, morally and, so far as possible, physically a man of the frontier does not change his garrison. What looks like his rigidity is simply a rock-solid attachment to what destiny has allotted to him, and it is easy to understand that he gives little of himself since he never takes it back. And like most of my fellow-countrymen I would probably have kept till death all the ideas acquired in my youth if I had not been one day, as will be seen, brutally refuted by evidence.

While parents conducted their war against reaction, it was the Trojan war that engrossed the children. At the age of nine I discovered the Iliad among those few books in the house that were not about politics. It became the enchanted dwelling of my childhood. I lived in it for years. It was a magic book, made of ivory and blue mosaic, in which the unchanging words drew strange light-filled power from their repetition in the space created by poetry; it was as if they were painted in some unknown substance. For years and years I tried to put my hand on the secret of those works that retain a freshness untouched by the passing of centuries until at last I realized, probably long after everybody else, that time could not touch them because time had never entered into them.

There is no time in the Iliad or more precisely it is utterly subservient to the story. Between the moment when the spear leaves the hero’s hand and the moment when it pierces the enemy, there is room for a speech, a reply, a conference of interested divinities and an Olympian adjudication. Poetry has an absolute power over the movement of the stars, and the sun sets only when there is nothing more to be looked at on earth. When personages from Olympus intruded, my youthful unbelief was in no way taken aback. On the contrary, these intrusions were effected so naturally that there was no longer anything supernatural about them. Moreover the obstinate attempt by these gods to conquer simple mortals had something pathetic about it, they wanted to make themselves human and for the most part succeeded only in becoming a bull or half a horse.

I disliked the gods who favoured the Trojans; they were bourgeois gods, like Ares the patron of military men or Aphrodite, a woman of the world with no good works to her name and thus doubly suspect. Furthermore, their beauty created around itself every kind of sickness. Ares created rage, Phoebus spread the plague and Aphrodite I was not quite sure what.

There was only one worker on all Olympus, Hephaestos, and he was on the side of the Greeks. That was enough to ensure that a child of the International would be too, and in any case I was in love with Athene who was not suggested by anyone to have had an affair with anybody. I would watch out for her interventions from one page to the next, disappointed if they were too long in coming. But by dint of reading and re-reading, I came to know my text so thoroughly that it was no problem to create a rendezvous.

My passion for Homer’s heroes I communicated to my two cousins and to a childhood friend, a person of loyalty and goodness whom I was one day lucky not to lose in the great massacre of Jews that cost him his father and his young sister. The countryside echoed with the sound of our wooden swords beating on our cardboard shields. I cannot imagine why our families, who never let us dress up in uniform or play with toy soldiers, did not absolutely forbid our warlike games. It is true that we were all Greeks and in socialist mythology Greeks are of the left. Perhaps things would have been different if we had been Trojans.

I hardly need to say that I was not christened. As was customary in progressive circles, my parents jointly decided that I could at the age of twenty choose my religion for myself, assuming that contrary to every reasonable expectation I decided to have one. The decision was disinterested and gave every outward appearance of impartiality. At the age of twenty a lad on the threshold of his majority is beginning to become his own man, to settle down in his ideas. It is in the spirit of democratic legality that he should be granted the right to work out his own philosophy. Does he want to become a believer? Then let him believe. But in truth the impatience and turbulence of this age is such that those who have been reared in the faith manage nowadays to lose it, before recovering it thirty or forty years later like a childhood sweetheart, all but forgotten, with whom one tries to remake one’s life. Those who have not received it from the cradle have small hope of finding it on entering the barracks, but at all events such was the custom, and it has to be admitted that my parents, even if they had been better disposed towards religion, would have found it difficult to provide me with a belief that did not offend at least some of those around me. Would they have taken me to the church, the synagogue or the temple?

To the church in memory of a radical grandfather who had forgotten the way there if indeed he had every known it? To the synagogue in order to please my grandmother Schwob? Or to the temple out of respect for the parents of my mother? Because if on my father’s side one was of Jewish or of vaguely Catholic origin, on my mother’s side one was Protestant.

My mother’s home village had no church either. The only spire was that of the school, black and pointed in the Franche-Comte style, lifted up towards the clouds by the hill on which it stood, a hill with white stones showing here and there through the grass like the grain of watercolour paper. The waters of a trout stream, of a poplar-lined canal, of a broad river in which shimmered the reflection of an ancient tower in ruins, gave an extra dimension to the countryside and justified the charm of its official nomenclature: Colombier-Chatelot, in the district of Baume-les-Dames and the valley of the Doubs that in earlier times was written Doux.

That is where I was born. I should have come into the world at Belfort where my parents had settled but whereas nowadays women travel to the city when due to give birth, in those days they still took themselves off to the country so as to perform this natural operation as closely as possible to nature. Thus it happened that I was born on the banks of the trout-stream in a large square house surrounded by bee-hives and fruit trees, at the entrance to this village much better adapted than the other to children. Small-scale local industry provided plenty to amuse them; a whining sawmill that from morning to nightfall churned out logs and turned beech trees into planks; a mill with little dams that held shoals of tiny fish, manoeuvring with the precision of English grenadiers but breaking their admirable formations at the slightest alarm; a sabot factory full of curls of white wood beautifully shaped, curved up at the end like a gondola for elegant ladies or the prow of a barge transporting goods across the countryside: the huge millstone of a cider-press under a lime tree twenty-five metres tall that had once been a Tree of Liberty, even though there is nothing less free than a tree and less exciting than a lime.

Most of the village inhabitants were pietists with a minority of Lutherans and a few indifferentists whom Lutherans and pietists jointly regarded as pagans. Pietism is a sect without clergy or sacraments. If one of the initiates feels himself called to officiate, he will say the prayers and read the Scriptures to the community, assembled in a shed or barn. These believers, always ready with a scriptural reference and hardened to endure the unpopularity they earn with a rigorism of exceptional harshness, have sometimes seemed to me reproduced in American westerns, in the form of those Puritan pioneers lavish with Biblical quotations and invariably eager to obstruct the hero in a hurry with their chapter and verse that might look final but is never what the situation requires. Our village masters of quotation were always ready to dispense their biblical allusions at the wrong moment, with a tone so confidently inappropriate that they too might have been thought post-synchronised. Their preference was for the Old Testament, the testament of the strong, and their wives were often called Ruth or Esther. By dint of returning to the sources they had passed over the Gospels and headed for the origin of time, making their way through a sinful world that their taste for historical analogies peopled with Midianites and Philistines. The Lutherans did not much like them, by reason both of their numerical superiority and of the uncomfortable way they made the Lutherans feel themselves to be only half-reformed.

If at Foussemagne one was not rich, at Colombier-Chatelot one was poor. My grandparents, driven by lack of money from the square house at the water’s edge, occupied two rooms on the first floor of a terrace house stuck in the middle of a row of wattle and daub. The ground floor with its damp flagstones was home to an aged aunt, so wrapped up in bits and pieces of cloth that only her nose and the tips of her fingers were visible. She lived on water, the few vegetables she grew in her garden, and the crumbs from upstairs. An open-work staircase, steep as a gangway, led to the principal room of our lodging; this was furnished with a wood-burning stove, a stoneware kitchen sink with no water, either hot or cold, a table covered with a stained oilcloth and a glass-fronted cupboard that I think I was never tempted to break into; its vast hold never contained more than a minute cargo of spices.

We slept in the other room, my grandfather in a bed with tall sides over which he would tumble every morning to perform the regulation gymnastics of his old profession as a gendarme: bending, stretching, rotating, shadow boxing, thanks to which he kept to the end of his life the upright figure of a young man. My grandmother used to sleep under the loft staircase, with myself at her feet, on a good woollen mattress.

I was sure to be the last one to get up but it always seemed pretty early to me when I heard from the nearby courtyard the clatter of scythes collected by the girls on their way to mow—there were as yet no expensive machines—and the click of reins being fastened to the horse collar, the short and hopeless attempt of the horse to escape the shafts. I would run to the kitchen to drink a bowl of milk, then to the stream to splash a little water to my left eye and then my right. I would then return home to sit on the broad window sill and watch the day, like a slow-paced lady in blue, passing by, touching nothing.

Towards ten o’clock my grandmother would put into a basket some things to eat and we would go out to find my grandfather in the fields. Having no machine, he needed to work much longer hours than the others. After a fair walk down little dusty paths we would locate him by the scraping of his whetstone on the blade of his scythe and find him at work in the golden lane he had cut into a field of wheat or in a green tangle of tall grass. We would lay out our lunch in the open air at the foot of a tree, hands sometimes surprised to feel the water of an unseen spring, and then we would get down to our share in the work. Working with wheat was beyond me; it needs strength because wheat is heavy and it needs care to avoid loss of grain. But I could cope with the minor operations of the harvest, the movements endlessly repeated in the humming heat, among the never-ending swaths of dried grass that needed to be turned over in the sun, gathered up into long rows and then into round stacks, then loaded onto a hay-wagon hauled from place to place by a poor horse mottled with grey flies. It was one of my duties to drive them away with a hazel switch.

My grandfather had made me some tools that suited my size, a rake with a single row of prongs (to halve the risk of damage if I happened to fall on it) and a little wooden fork with carefully blunted points. With these I was deemed to be taking a little exercise while playing at making myself useful. In reality I hated work in the fields, however slight my contribution. The meadows were too vast, the wagon too tall, the sky too harsh and the horse too big. The best moment of the day was when we unwrapped our lunch in the shade, the block of Comte cheese wrapped in a damp cloth with a red border, the loaf softened on the side that had been touching the bottle of lemonade tinged with a little wine. But even this moment of refreshment was spoiled by the prospect of our return to the house and the hour of perspiring toil we would have to endure in the dust and the flying chaff as we piled huge armloads of hay under the rafters of the barn. The only thing I really liked about nature was water, clear, free, carrying no memories and, as my old Homer said, bearing no harvest.

My grandfather proclaimed himself a socialist, a profession of faith that cannot have done much to advance his career in the gendarmerie. The temple a few miles away never saw him except at burials. He never spoke of religion, not even to sneer at parish priests, a race in any event unknown in our canton. The pastor used occasionally to visit our village but so far as I can remember his interest in it never got him as far as visiting our house and since I was taken to the temple exclusively for burials, I had no idea of what he did for a living, this man in black respected by the Lutherans, distrusted by the pietists.

My grandfather may have had no religion but he had principles of which he gave the benefit to those who needed it. He was a born redresser of wrongs and took the side of right and justice in all village quarrels. His interventions were not invariably well received and with those who did not welcome them he would communicate by means of placards on which in large letters he would write messages such as “Pray less and stop stealing.” These he would stick up by the roadside at the corner of his property, chuckling up his sleeve. The village bore him no malice for these stern measures; he “knew what’s what with plants” and was good at dealing with nasty injuries and people frequently turned to him for help while awaiting the arrival of the doctor from our local administrative centre, he being a conscientious practitioner with a goatee but impossible to get in touch with. In our bedroom there was an ancient apothecary’s desk full of dried herbs and powders in boxes and wrappers all meticulously labeled. I was forbidden to touch them but I would not have dreamed of doing so. I had for my amusement the wooden toys that skillful poverty had fashioned for me and in my presence, there in the carpentry workshop with its heaps of farming items brought in for repair. Not many children know the delight of seeing their future present taking shape little by little before their eyes, a shaving at a time, delicately brought into being by the rough hand that a moment before had been using pick or spade and was now working a subtle magic. Ever since then I have understood why, in fairy tales, the enchanter is often depicted as an old man.

It goes without saying that I also had a whistle of elder wood, a bow of hazel wood, arrows of dried reeds and a sort of garden syringe with which to souse any wandering dog that got into our cabbage patch. At the end of the year I also had two or three small coins with which to buy sticks of liquorice. My Schwob grand-mother would annually distribute a half-napoleon among her grand-children. My grandfather could not compete with that but he would put his little coins in old cough-sweet boxes; this for me rendered the present unspeakably precious. He would always choose boxes with sliding lids to avoid any risk of me cutting myself. Today I wonder whether he bought cough-sweets for his cough or for the boxes.

Sunday was the day of the Lord for both Lutherans and pietists. The former would occasionally visit the temple, the latter would walk in little groups to their meeting, each under the skeptical gaze of the Philistines. For us, it meant the weekly wash in the deep running water of the trout stream, after which my grandfather would rub my head with a preparation of camomile enhanced with rum and curl the blond ringlets I retained for quite some time. My mother’s young brother who lived with us used to take me fishing, paying not the slightest attention to any regulations. He was an adventurous young man, given to running away from home and possessed of all the gifts I most envied, strength, boldness, a taste for violent games, the sort of bronzed and unkempt good looks that one imagines in the Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights. My mother had another brother, fair-haired, delicate, a musician; his gentle ways calmed the neighbourhood’s misgiving as to the unteachable restlessness of the former. He died very young “of his chest,” as people used to say then. I do not know whether I knew him or whether the image I retain of a sort of violin-playing angel coming down one evening into a farmyard and departing well before the dawn is drawn genuinely from my memory or from stories told to me about his charm and his sad fate. He too had been handsome as indeed was every single person on that side of the family with the exception of my poor self. I used to look without pleasure at my dim reflection in windows or on the blade of the kitchen knives which gave me sight of little more than my nose.

My grandmother, slim and tiny beneath a cloud of lovely white hair, was like a bird held prisoner by a kindly disposed but bad-tempered policeman. She used to sing to herself all day long, in the kitchen, in the loft, beside the stream when doing her laundry, out in the fields with a rake in her hand, out in the woods picking blackberries. The songs were all from the repertoire of the Belle Epoque, waltzes playing at nightfall and gentlemen each one dancing with his ladylove. Life for her was a mournful operetta, performed without any hope of an audience on the bleak stage of poverty by a frail Cinderella worn down with work and who would never, never, see her grey dress turn into a ball gown and her pumpkins turn into a carriage.

When evening came she would take me on her lap and softly sing to me a lullaby of her own making, “Away, away, far away, away, away, far away.” The song had no other words but she would make it last a good quarter of an hour and her “Away, away, far away” in tones so varied would send me into a smiling dream and so to sleep. It must be to her that I owe a patience greater than some can muster for litanies in the liturgy that seem to them too long but which seem to me too short.

Once a week, in high summer, she would go off to sell her vegetables at the market. I would see her setting out early in the morning on the pot-holed main street of the town, scarcely taller than the garden fences past which she would push her little cart of beans, peas and carrots, stepping round a puddle or occasionally tripping on a stone. She would come back in the afternoon with a few coins, take off her muddy shoes, put on her sabots and resume the humble round of household duties that had been interrupted by this brief moment as a market-gardener: the animals to attend to, the men to feed, the housework to be done, the grandchild to put to sleep, the day to be brought to its end with the shutting of doors in the stable, the barn, the house and last of all the bedroom where she was the last to lie down after blowing out the lamp.

I never had from her anything but cakes and cuddles and those good strong country kisses that sound like the popping of champagne corks, and I never saw her angry or even in a bad mood. Her sorrows and vexations all went into her singing which passed them on to the other little birds and they carried them away. She was gentleness itself, grief accepted, tenderness at its most vulnerable, resignation at its uttermost and everything that can be put into music by one who has nothing more to say.

She did not so much walk as scurry, unceasingly, from the oven to the kitchen sink, to the hens with their grain, to the market with her little cart, with the energy and abruptness of a mechanical toy wound up to the full, unwearying, at least that is what we believed—we never saw her seated if not leaning forward, her feet drawn up beneath the chair and herself ready to move on. She died by no means old, far from it, of the disease that used to be called pernicious anaemia; it now has a more scientific name but is no less fatal.

She had been taken to the Protestant hospital in Besancon, where I went to see her with my mother. On our last visit, I seem to remember that the town and its fine houses which in our eyes stood for everything that was opulent in the world, was damp and empty. The religious sisters who ran the hospital, knowing how matters were with her, had put her in quite a large room with a tall curtain-less window that looked out over a garden. She was a white shape beneath her white hair, even more tiny and, as it were, huddled in the middle of the bed as if not venturing to occupy all of it, no more in revolt than she had ever been, no less gently welcoming, astonished that she was being looked after and by ladies of education; these would from time to time half-open the door and withdraw without her having been able to think of anything to ask for. She was as without thought for herself as she had always been, and her last words were of compassion for the sufferings of another. With her weakened eyes she could no longer read but she would often glance at a crucifix hanging on the wall opposite her bed. One day, the last of her life, she gazed at it for a long time and, further than ever before from thinking of her own fate, “Ah, the poor man!” she said in a tone of gentle pity, the last tiny cry of the exhausted bird that has hopped to the very end of the branch that is about to break.

Cared for by these two old people—they were perhaps not so old after all—who desired nothing better than to send me back at the end of the holidays to my parents, bigger and better and well instructed in all that concerned the countryside, I was a happy child even if in a village that was not all that happy itself.

Colombier-Chatelot was far from being what nowadays is termed “a consumer society.” It was rather a “non-consumer society,” in which the thing was to take as little as possible of the transient goods of this world, to be contented with little, with less, with nothing. Nobody could support himself on the produce of a plot of land endlessly sub-divided, so everybody had a second job. One man would be a carter, another a carpenter. Some, more unusually, assembled or repaired watches on their window sills during the hours of daylight, and nothing could be more touching than to watch those thick peasant fingers, crackled like earthenware, patiently persuading the tiny little wheels to hum along together in their metal shell. Many families used to send their sons and daughters to find employment at the chair workshop in the next village or in the huge factory in the town which every morning sent out buses to collect its labour force from all over the departement.

But these salaries added to everything else still left everyone poor. Many of the houses had a floor of beaten earth and the barn had a deck of wooden planks only to prevent the heavy hay-carts cutting ruts. People asked of life only the most basic of its gifts, much of what was necessary being regarded as superfluous. Their existence was an endless succession of daily obligations, recurring with the seasons, from which nobody had either the means or even the thought of escaping. Temptation took the traditional form of fantasizing about land rights, of the field with shifting borders, of the boundary stone that moved by night from one hole to another just a little further away. If there were any other temptations, I was not allowed to see them.

The pietists called themselves “the elect” and derived from that a measure of pride with an extra reserve of patience. We had a quite different idea of election, which to our way of thinking had to come not from above but from below; we as unbelievers had a morality founded on reason and it took us no further than the bleak satisfaction of duty well done, of a conscience at peace with itself; on the most favourable showing it took one towards that “better future” which had already replaced the next world as the object of hope for ordinary people. Setting aside the prohibitions peculiar to religion, our conception of good and evil was more or less the same as that of the pietists and Lutherans. It was simply that there were some things that were done and some that were not, it depending on the individual to say whether this was pursuant to God’s will or human wisdom. But every single one, believer or unbeliever, carried an identical burden, slowly, towards the same destination, along a road embellished at very long intervals with a marriage feast under the trees, a beautiful summer, a tune on the accordion. My belief is that hardly anybody asked themselves any questions. For those to whom religion had given all the answers, any further questioning would have been thought unwise; for the others, the unbelievers, no explanation was expected from anywhere.

Yes, my childhood was happy and, all things considered, it was not difficult to make me happy. A pencil and a few sheets of paper were all it needed to ensure hours of peace for all around me. When I had finished with my paper, I would sketch on the back of waxcloth, on the plywood of chairs, in fact on anything that could be scribbled on without obvious damage, sketch people, trains, complicated arabesques that aroused the admiration of my family. A drawing had something about it like a feat of magic; it was reality caught in a net, pinned down on the white page; it made them feel as amazed as if out of the void I had pulled up a beautiful fish, and I was never left without pencils. At a time when distrust was the attitude of the bourgeoisie to any suggestion of interest in art, an attitude now changed to respectful astonishment by the way in which masterpieces today fetch prices that qualify them as safe investments, simple folk had on the contrary the greatest respect for “the gift of drawing” which made the one who had it a being set apart, to be handled with care. Those who lack everything will also lack the means of expressing themselves, and drawing is the means that best attracts attention and rewards it. For my part I have sometimes asked myself where this gift came from, indeed this fascination that was found nowhere else in our family. I think it was the natural outcome of my idleness which made me want to form my own image of the world at home so as to avoid the trouble of confronting it on its own ground.

Whatever the truth of it, my habit of spending hours in front of a sheet of paper from which life and movement would never escape gave me very early on a taste for a certain kind of solitude that was protected by my remarkable capacity for getting out of things. Cheerful and easy-going, I can see now that as a child I was extraordinarily absent to such an extent that I cannot write “I was there, such and such a thing happened to me.” Whereas the briefest moment of dreaming or recollection is enough for me to recover intact all the sensations of that distant time, the taste of the translucent white currants by the garden gate, the cool water of the stream against my ankles, the thin line of moving vegetation in the middle of the canal, the drone of my grandmother’s sing-song in her kitchen, I cannot recall a single anecdote or incident in which I was involved; I retain a memory of how voices sounded, not of anything said or of anything that happened to me, perhaps because my folk always made sure that nothing did.

Or almost nothing. They had no control over war and peace. Thus it happens that one of my few memories, which is also the oldest, is of the Belfort cellar in which my mother and I were wounded by a bomb weighing seven kilos, then a respectable weight. I had refused to leave my place at the skirts of my mother in order to get into the great chest of wood stuffed with straw in which the other residents had, immediately the siren sounded, stowed their children. In the face of my resistance we were placed just underneath the ventilator shaft, a position deemed to be safe because, when the shells came, the shrapnel would pass harmlessly over our heads. On that particular day several bombs fell on the town, dropped by black aeroplanes shaped like crosses, called Taubes. One of these bombs fell in front of our house and tore up seven metres of pavement. The sandbags massed in front of the shaft altered the trajectory of the shrapnel and falsified expectations; the only persons wounded not only in the cellar but in the entire town were my mother and myself, she in her right arm and I in my left foot. I was two years old. I retain of this moment the soundless image of a sort of crypt, peopled with shadows, in which the faint glow of a lantern at the far end gave a little light to a few children huddled in a crèche.

In the hospital a doctor examined our wounds, judged mine to be really nasty and spoke of amputating my foot in order to avoid complications. It was war-time and surgeons were extremely busy. My mother, energy personified, immediately threatened to throw herself with me out of the window. It was put to her that my tendons were severed, that my toes would never grow, that I would have a deformed foot, quite apart from the distinct possibility of gangrene. It was all in vain, my mother stood her ground and since there was that in her blue eyes which made it impossible to doubt her determination, it was decided not to amputate my foot. As it happened, our wounds healed and when we left the hospital we were carrying our bomb splinters in a big box with a clasp in the shape of a shell.

In the train that took us back to my grandparents an officer clinking with medals and military accessories noticed our bandages, asked what had happened to us, cursed the barbarity of the Hun, detached one of his medals and leant over me in order to fasten it to my coat; this may have been in order to get a better look at my mother who was very young and very blonde.

The Route Nationale passed some kilometers away, leaving us isolated from current movements and exchanges of opinion, from passing traffic of the military or of the fairground, also of politicians. At Colombier-Chatelot there were none of those confrontational public meetings which from time to time thawed Foussemagne. A marquis ruled the region, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and doubtless to be followed by his son and grandson. Everyone except the reds voted for him without question, out of habit, for his qualities or his quality; the base-born elector was perhaps gratified to put the marquis under an obligation to his former serfs. In any case politics had a bad reputation among those of the right; they were something a man should not touch any more than alcohol save in case of emergency and then only to avoid a greater evil. A polling station was just a little suspect; one needed My Lord’s permission to visit it.

It goes without saying that conversely, on the left, politics were considered the highest activity of mind, the finest of careers barring only that of doctor. It was in fact to politics that my parents owed their having met. My mother had an enquiring mind and had heard my father speaking about socialism to a working class audience on the outskirts of Belfort, with all the vigour of his twenty-five years, a fighting intelligence, a wonderful voice. From that day onwards she followed him from meeting to meeting, for love of socialism, and ended at the mairie. When she told me this story, I did not really understand it. For me my parents had always been my parents and I could not imagine them not having been so at any given moment of their lives. The candour, the unassuming decency of their life together had given me an idea of marriage as of something indestructible and which, having no end, also had no beginning.

They shared with one other tenant a small apartment in a Belfort road at the end of which could be seen the bleached grass of some waste ground. My mother used to sell on the street the newspaper of the socialist federation, edited from start to finish by my father, at that time a teacher dismissed for his revolutionary activities and reduced to penury. But for him politics took the place of all else. He would often say that he had taken to politics like a duck to water. At the age of ten he had made his choice; he was going to be a journalist and a deputy.

He did not have to wait to become a journalist. Every evening on the benches of his primary school he would compose, for his own pleasure and that of his little comrades, a leaflet cut out of wrapping paper and entitled “The Boer” as a mark of respect for the republicans of the Transvaal, heroes of a forgotten colonial war. At the age of thirteen he was the regular correspondent of a paper in eastern France whose editor was inspired to invite all his contributors to a banquet. This admirably democratic initiative afforded him the shock of meeting a political commentator in short trousers, one who was definitely not there, as was initially supposed, to make his father’s apologies for non-attendance.

Admitted to the Teachers College with a dispensation relating to his age and with a State scholarship covering half the fees, he was to emerge from it at an age at which others were still trying to get in. But he was very young and had committed the imprudence of getting himself talked about, by reason not only of his small-scale regional publications but also of the articles he sent to the newspaper of Jean Jaures, “L’Humanite,” and of the role he took in public meetings all over the departement as an all-round dissident. He was therefore allotted a sort of mountain school in the Vosges, empty for two thirds of the year, in winter because of the snow and in summer because of work in the fields.

It was in these uplands that he was to meet dismissal, after the domiciliary visitation of a prosecutor and a judge, jointly commissioned to instruct and to repress, and who acted in concert against the spirit of the law. They were meant to prove that my father was responsible for a slight rise in temperature registered in the region’s barracks where the soldiery had evinced a certain discontent at being kept in the ranks after their time of service. They were unable to prove any such thing since there was no truth in it but their enquiry was simply a formality. Its negative outcome could not prevent it being followed within three weeks by the most positive dismissal. Even if schoolmasters were not expressly prohibited from being socialists, it was nonetheless strongly conveyed to them that they should not too openly profess their socialism, condemned as a disorder of the mind by a bourgeois society innocently reposing on the wisdom of the poor, the patience of the poor, the longsuffering of the poor, and which greatly disliked the sensation of this pillar starting to shift beneath it.

Now a socialist is what my father had been since the age of thirteen. It was a speech of Jaures which had, he said, “revealed to him the promised land,” glimpsed through and beyond the stucco and tottering arabesques of the Belle Epoque, a “dame aux camelias” ominously shivering and shortly to die of an exposed frontier. Like those birds which fly around the façade of a cathedral and find entry through some tall window, the bold intelligence of the young student of the primary school had been caught up with delight into the vast echoing system constructed by the greatest tribune in the history of French socialism. Detached from the resolutely down to earth concerns which at the time constituted the entirety of the radical left’s politics and carried up into the air by the unique visionary power of that eloquence, he was going to become totally and exclusively a militant for whom everything was reducible to politics rather as for ancient philosophers everything was reducible to the concept of being.

Thenceforward his family would see very little of him and the departement would soon become too narrow a field for him and his talents. At the age of twenty-nine he was the General Secretary of the Socialist Party, and he established his little family on the fifth floor of a building with no lift in the fifteenth arrondissement, above a coal store lying alongside the garden of a convent. “There are no buildings opposite us,” my mother used to say with pride. From our balcony you could make out the two top storeys of the Eiffel Tower, for the time being in the service of a car manufacturer whose glory it proclaimed in letters of fire. Of our three rooms the one I slept in was during the day my father’s office. I slept facing a portrait of Karl Marx and beneath a pen-and-ink portrait of Jules Guesde and a photograph of Jaures. A respected doctrinaire Marxist, listened to but not understood, Jules Guesde with his long hair and tangled beard looked somewhat like a willow tree in a storm and his imposing rather melancholy gaze appeared to avoid Jaures at his side, Jaures with his beard thrust forward in the style of Darius’s Immortals, the image of Mediterranean optimism, of the joy of living in a world that was going to be so beautiful, the delight of successful advocacy and of seeing so many people struggling towards the fraternal city that is discovered for them in the far reaches of history and pointed out to them and towards which they are propelled by a gale of prophecies.

It follows that I lived with a socialist Janus with contradictory profiles, simultaneously eloquent of studious retirement and of creative improvisation, the fertile silence of the reading room and the abounding energy of one remaking society.

I was fascinated by Karl Marx. He was a lion, a sphinx, a solar storm. The monumental forehead stood out from a cloud of silvery hair like an impregnable tower of thought. His gaze, of extraordinary penetration, pursued all round the room any person minded to contradict him and reduced all such to a state of crushed objection. The outline of his moustache created that illusion of a smile which must once have greeted in the thinker’s unobtrusive London lodgings illustrious visitors named Leo Tolstoy and Elisee Reclus who ended their visit without having heard a single treacherous word of politeness. Jules Guesde and Jaures were men of their epoch, the former by virtue of his melancholy and the latter by virtue of his humanism. Karl Marx was outside time. There was in him something indestructible, namely, the certitude, written in stone, that he was right. This block of compacted dialectic watched over my infant sleep.

I knew the cemetery of Pere Lachaise before I ever heard of Father Christmas. At the age of five, my parents having nobody in Paris with whom to leave me, I used to accompany them in the pilgrimages to the Mur des Federes, the traditional destination of revolutionary demonstrations. I saw that wall come snow, come sun, come mud, come flowers. It was the end of the world, the seawall against which the flood of human beings would break in a red foam of bouquets and banners. I had learned how to behave, sitting for hours at the foot of the platforms while above my head resounded speeches that left on me the impression of a continuous storm carrying on its wings so many wrongs, so many flags. In front of me faces without number uplifted on a field of wild roses listened to the tale of all they had suffered and they wept.

Then all voices would hush and from end to end of the silence that had fallen the wind would catch the red folds of the flags. A sound would rise from the earth like the lament of an unfinished resurrection, the roaring of “Foule esclave, debout, debout..” The uncanny chanting came like thunder out of a limitless hope that never reached as far as happiness, eyes would fill with a sort of prayer mingled with defiance. The music of the International had like a canticle its slow passages and its crescendos. Socialism was living through its own age of cathedrals.

It was a religion and like every religion at its beginnings, it excluded all others. It was not an economic theory—among the Marxists I met, those who had read Karl Marx were as rare as Catholics who have read the Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas—it was a faith: man was good, although men may not always have been so, and man had taken in hand the gigantic task of his own salvation. Among us Jaures and Jules Guesde were accorded a reverence like that given to the Fathers of the Church; Karl Marx, the Moses of all proletarian exiles, had led us out of the Egypt of traditionalism and submission. He had vanished long since in the fogs of the Thames but the violence of his thought went with us still and would carry us irresistibly towards that world, free of contradictions, whose coming he had predicted. We were brothers, not simply by virtue of our shared beliefs but by the power of the blood shed in the unending human sacrifice of the millennia without justice. Traditional religions have the same belief that men are brothers. But our brotherhood was not exactly like theirs. Traditional religions hold that men have a common father; our religion acknowledged nothing of the kind. Our brotherhood, sincere and heart-felt, was a brotherhood of orphans. Doubtless that was why, instead of calling each other brothers, we called each other comrades.

It was a new faith, a new church, and my father was one of the youngest and most talented of its ministers. His mother had given him the double forename of “Louis-Oscar” but the comrades called him, for some reason I never learned, Ludovic. Perhaps they felt that this name with something of the romantic still clinging to it went with his image of a thinker, with his premature baldness, his pince-nez, his short-sighted gaze that gave the impression of distractedly serving out to all around him helpings of black coffee. The swiftness with which he grasped the significance of a political event, with which he could compose an analysis, a motion, an article had made him indispensable as a committee man. His quick understanding saved time and his memory was as good as an archive; unbelievable though it sounds, he was able to reel off all the six hundred constituencies of France with the number of votes obtained in the first and second round by those elected, as well as the dates of birth and death of any randomly selected person from the pages of a dictionary. All his books, with their numerous references to events or speeches, were written from memory, and when he spoke at public meetings or in the Assembly, which he did often at great length, in perfectly constructed sentences and with a tone of voice that started with mingled emotion and irony and ended in a hammering gallop as of brazen hooves, he spoke without notes.

In the Chamber of Deputies it was his duty to welcome at the tribune, in the name of his political grouping, the ministers awaiting their formal appointment and there were some who never quite recovered from this rite of initiation, administered with a fearsome dose of sarcastic comment. He spoke so much in public that he had nothing further to say at home. He would leave in the early morning and return in the late evening, taking his dinner alone with an unvarying menu of hard-boiled eggs in a salad, grilled potatoes and hazelnuts that he took pleasure in cracking with his teeth, his eyes being focussed on some thought on the tablecloth or glancing sideways at a twice folded newspaper set beside his plate. I would pass through the room without uttering a word, almost on tip-toe, as I made my way around one timidly looked up to by the family as a monument of intellectual concentration. His eyes would follow me in unspoken sympathy.

From time to time, in summer, he would feel he needed to breathe the air of the place where he was born. The moment he arrived, he would go fishing, his rod over his shoulder and a wicker basket lined with fresh leaves in his hand, on the bank of the little river just outside the village, among the reeds and the wild grass. We would choose a spot with the best shade, not the best for fish. My father would cast his line and then roll one of those cigarettes with the paper that burned more slowly than the tobacco and ended up like a dead leaf in the corner of his mouth. He would go and stretch out with his back against a tree, his hat over his eyes, telling me to watch the float; it did not move very often but I had to sound the alarm if there was a bite. After an hour of damp inertia amid the insect buzzing of the meadows, we would go home with one or two little fishes jumping about inside our basket. My aunt would fry them with a laugh at his contribution to dinner.

At table we would have one of those Belfort conversations I have already described, conducted at the local rate of one word every quarter of an hour, a word chosen with care so as not to compel anyone to answer. The presence of the head of the family, his growing reputation as an orator and politician, kept us mute and the gift of repartee that he had inherited from his mother made us careful. We were loaded to the muzzle with proper feelings like canons that nobody ever dared to fire. Trappists are more talkative that we were. By dint of never saying anything we came to think all words inadequate and we managed to understand each other without them. My uncle would scarcely go beyond a “How are things down there?,” compressing past, present and future into an impersonal question that manifested a reasonable curiosity. The “How are things down there?” contained a discreet reference to the elder brother who had gone off to make his way in Paris and who would answer with a pursing of the lips that expressed at one and the same moment the right degree of modest satisfaction and of scepticism for everything to do with politics since one can never tell how they will go; thus the family was informed and reassured.

When, as tradition dictated, the neighbours came round to take a cup of coffee with us and a piece of the blueberry or rhubarb tart, my father became a completely different person. The imperative to explain and persuade would light up his normally impassive countenance. His hands—he had beautiful hands—would contribute to his argument, thumping on the table top or directing at the hostile thesis a forceful index finger. His slightly hunched attitude no longer suggested a withdrawal into meditation but a crouch preparatory to a spring forward. He would take as much trouble to convince this humble audience as to carry a motion in a legislative assembly, and we would be privately astonished to see how a person so calm, so undemonstrative, could at a moment’s notice unleash so much energy and display such passion. We would see how in himself and far from his family he was daily transformed by politics; we understood that he belonged body and soul to an ideal and we could dimly discern that it would never give him back to us.

He was to an exceptional extent detached and free from anything resembling worldly self-interest although he had for a long time and despite his public reputation dreaded a possible return to the penury of the years following his dismissal as a teacher. If a war had not driven him out of them, the humble lodgings in which he began would have been those which saw his end. He rarely intervened in our daily lives and usually it was only to announce that he would not do so. On one occasion, however, he did so; it was to order my mother to take back to the toy shop the box of tin soldiers I had received for Christmas; they were exchanged for some sort of culturally acceptable electric game. As a socialist he would never admit that a society should be founded on relationships marked by violence; so, no soldiers under our roof. It must have been one of the big surprises of my childhood to learn that Soviet Russia had an army with discipline, hierarchy, uniforms. Could it be that even there people had the pessimistic view of human nature that made soldiers necessary? Absolutely not. They were there to resist encirclement by forces of evil. And in any case, the army of the Soviet Union was known as the Red Army, and I used to imagine it painted red, which was enough to make it different from all other armies.

Soviet Russia exercised on my father the same attraction that it did on all socialists of his period. There came a day when, together with Marcel Cachin, editor of L’Humanite, he set off for Russia, carrying with him a suitcase full of provisions and a mandate to negotiate for his party an eventual membership of the Third International. The journey took them two weeks via the Baltic, Stettin, Helsingfors; the blockade mounted by the bourgeois powers left no other way to get into the socialist fatherland. At Moscow they met the most notable protagonists of what my father had called, from the first moment he heard of it, “the event of the century.” They were as men dazzled by that still burning fire. They were admonished by Lenin, preached at in words acid with mockery of the embourgeoisement of the Second International, their one, and of the ideological impotence of L’Humanite in which, he said, he had never found more than one single socialist column, “that of the subscribers.” Deafened by the din of doctrinaires over-whelming them with slogans and directives, disoriented by the complex choreography of Slav negotiations, they were compelled, I believe, to undergo certain changes of atmosphere, alternatively of tactics, which followed the initial warmth with icy cold.

But one country had made the transition to socialism, for the first time in the history of the world the least favoured classes held absolute power through the intermediary of their ideological vanguard, Marxism had emerged from its dogmatic dreaming to become part of the life of an immense people. For people formed in the French school of socialism there might have been much that was strange and even shocking about the Russian way of doing things, entirely given to the exploitation of the ideal, far more systematic and far more harsh than their way, far less sensitive to the fine individual distinctions for every shade of which Western congresses piously made room, the very cruelties of the civil war still continuing in the supplementary form of the purge; all these things were covered over by the still abstract but fascinating image of the future city, taking shape before them at the hands of builders who claimed continuity with the men of the 1793 Convention and the fighters of the Commune. When the two pilgrims got back to France, they had given their heart to it and their heart supplied them with reasons. At the subsequent congress, two thirds of the militants responded to their appeal and chose the Third International. This was the split of Tours. My father became the first General Secretary of the French Communist Party.

It goes without saying that my life as a well behaved child was left unaffected by these comings and goings. At home we saw less of Comrade Charles Rappoport, which I regretted. Of all the leading figures of the party he was the one I liked best, because of his Father Christmas beard, his laughter and his jovial personality like a vegetarian ogre. But it seemed he belonged to a different faction, as did Leon Blum, another favourite with children. He had the sensitivity to treat them as grown-ups instead of feeling compelled, as others did, to act like a child with them. We used to visit more often the home of Marcel Cachin. His wife, a tough American woman, used to lift me up skywards with every kind of demonstrativeness for which the Belfort regime left me unprepared. Her strength simultaneously frightened me a little yet reassured me. The Party, for me, consisted of her, the Wall and certain undistinguished premises in the Rue Grange-Bateliere which had been built, so I was told, above an underground river; I was never quite able to imagine how it flowed in darkness beneath the pavements of Paris. Was it vaulted over? Were there any Bateliere boatmen? The fate of this imprisoned stream gave me the shivers.

When my curls were cut off to qualify me to learn to read, the first book given to me by my parents after the Roman de Renart was a work bound in a red cover, as thick as a dictionary, entitled “Little Pierre is going to be a socialist.” So far as I can remember, it was an ideological variation on the theme of the “Tour de France de deux enfants,” composed in such a way as to familiarize little minds in suitable terms with the main theses of Marxist thought. Little Pierre, traveling about and asking questions, became aware of social realities, the oppressions of the working class and the injustices of a society founded on the exploitation of the poor by a privileged class that held on to the means of production and exchange, that is, land, tools, machines or money, and which sucked up all the profit of other people’s labour. This profit then gave it fresh means of acquisition, so that it unceasingly became richer and richer while the poor grew more and more numerous, poorer and poorer.

Between the class in possession and that of the dispossessed this naturally gives rise to a state of permanent tension or “class warfare” which breaks out periodically into revolts which the laws are simply designed to hinder, prevent or repress. In every age it is the privileged who create institutions in order to perpetuate their privileges; the task of morality was to fetter consciences to the established order, contrary to the justice despised by capitalism and indefinitely postponed by religion.

But Little Pierre was very soon to learn that for this immense evil, as old as history, there existed a remedy. Public ownership of the means of production and exchange would alter all human relationships at their root, purifying them of every wrongful and pernicious element. Never again would there be established the relationship of master and slave, of oppressor and oppressed, but only that of man and man in the perfect equality of a universal deprivation decreed by law for the benefit of the collectivity. Out of the goods produced by the workers the community would take what was needed to give “to each according to his work,” pending the moment when sufficient wealth would exist to give “to each according to his needs.” Avarice, the desire for gain and for power, would no longer find in the new society anything to support or encourage them and would thus die away. The clash of social and economic interests would disappear together with all that had made them unavoidable and in consequence war, deprived of any objective, would vanish from the face of the earth. Members of the old possessing class, reduced in one way or another to a condition of equity, would be humanized thereby while the workers would recover their dignity together with plenary possession of their own selves. Morality would no longer be the variously penal code of resignation that it once had been, and the last bastions of organized religion, deprived of all that had supported them, would collapse of their own accord. Men would at long last know the taste of justice and peace. Science would see to everything else.

I do not presume to summarise Marxism in a single page and I have probably confused the memory of its first lessons with that of my big red book. However that may be, Little Pierre became a socialist. As he was sincere and kind-hearted, I became one too.

As I have said before, God did not exist; but there were a number of ways of not existing.

For some, given to distributing ancient pamphlets detailing “the twelve proofs of the non-existence of God” (thus providing in negative form seven more proofs than the five normally advanced by apologists for the contrary view), the imaginary being designated by the name “God” was quite simply an invention of the priesthood, a term arbitrarily fixed by them to the chain of causality or a childish way of shouting “Time’s up!” before Nature had finished speaking. It was the priests who wore big black hats.

Such persons found it a little disconcerting that a man like Robespierre, who concentrated in his own person the entire spirit of the Revolution, should have so frequently made reference to a “Supreme Being” who did seem to share a number of features with the Creator of the religions now abolished. But perhaps it was simply his experienced need of the absolute which drove him to finish off his work at the still dangerously exposed frontier of Heaven by installing there a nameless Being, close enough to the “Great Being” of pagan antiquity, established in a sort of presidency over the natural order, one devoid alike of attributes and of responsibilities. That was how they explained away the deism of Robespierre.

For others, the existence of God was not simply implausible but positively inadmissible. It would have placed at the origin of all things, between creator and creatures, an inequality calculated to render any argument futile and any dialogue impossible. The act of creation communicates to every creature its form and with that form the laws which are proper to its condition; now the objectors to whom I presently refer could never accept that a law should have been given to them which was never open to them to challenge. Chance to whose activity they attributed the entirety of all that existed did not impose any such demand; indeed what chance had made could be un-made without any contravention of the decrees of an Almighty. There was in them a refusal a priori; they raised what is called in public assemblies a “preliminary objection.”

For many, religion was a primitive form of consciousness that could not resist the advance of knowledge. Men of earlier times, unable to explain natural phenomena, attributed their origin to supernatural beings whose favour it was wise to seek; “God” was in the last analysis no more than the consolidated projection of everything they did not know. The more they knew, the less they would believe; it was obvious that the domain of all religions would diminish in proportion as the domain of science expanded. Religion would meet its end on the day, probably quite close, when everything would be explained. Those who shared this point of view could never accept that the things explained still had even more need of explanation than everything else.

These theoretical objections could be supplemented, if need arose, by those deriving from the sufferings of the innocent and the imperfections of the Church, but such need arose infrequently.

Anticlericalism no longer played the central part which had belonged to it in the opening years of the century. The separation of Church and State had indeed effectively separated the hostile parties who had learned on other battlefields to know each other better. In any case, little groups of Christians, breaking with the tradition that had so long held them on the right wing, were calling themselves democrats and genuinely trying to be such in reality. We found them charming without managing to take them quite seriously. At the second Moscow congress a Dutch delegate had raised a gigantic wave of laughter when he proposed the candidature, for some post or other, of a comrade described as a “Christian-communist.” Having laughed its fill at this contradiction in terms the congress had passed on to other business and my father, who was not actually the secretary, recorded in his notebooks that the Dutch joke had seemed to him a trifle heavy-handed. To us it seemed impossible that people subjected to a teaching authority that proceeded by way of unchallengeable definition, people subject to the duty of going to confession (the practice of “self-criticism” had not yet reached the statute book), people submitting in the inner sanctum of their thoughts to the interventions of the priest, could ever be democrats as we understood the word and even less could they be communists.

But passions on the subject of religion had very much died down. Even on the great feast days we did not particularly bother, as the saying goes, to “eat priest.”

We rejected everything that came from Catholicism, with the notable exception of the person, the human person, of Jesus Christ, towards whom the seniors of the Party preserved (not on any great scale, it must be said) a sort of feeling with a moral origin and a poetic application.

We were not his followers but he could have been one of us by virtue of his love of the poor, his severity towards the powerful and above all the fact that he had been the victim of the priests, at any rate of the most highly placed priests, and executed by the civil power with its machinery of oppression. My father would, if asked, willingly recite for his friends a poem of Jehan Rictus, entitled “What if he came back?,” formulated in the language of populism on the theme of an eventual return of Christ among men. What if he came back? Things would doubtless proceed exactly as before, save that the bourgeoisie would have learned by experience not to make a martyr of him but to treat him as a visionary needing treatment, gentle but very firm. One thing was certain, though; he would not set foot among those who asserted their allegiance to him; he would never be seen at church but much more likely at the police station with all the rejects of the established order. The poem expressed for Jesus the vaguely protective tenderness of a pity that was close to compassion:

“Do you still have that wound of the spear in your side?”

The blow of the lance in the side of the Crucified One was one more count in the indictment to be levelled against society and my father would recite the passage with extraordinary force.

The general opinion was that, once the Gospels had been stripped of their mythological superstructure, they could pass for a fairly good introduction to socialism; we would willing concede as much to Christians who asked us to do so. Once we had made that concession, it was a matter for astonishment that they did not forthwith become socialists. As for ourselves becoming Christians, the idea never even crossed our minds. Everything that had preceded socialism served simply as a fore-runner. Our faith was sufficient for us. Bound up with the very movement of history, it had in our eyes the further advantage of being irrefutable. And indeed it may well be that the only way of refuting Marxism was to put it into practice.

The believer often wrongly imagines that the unbeliever, when alone with his thoughts on life and death, suffers from his inability to give an answer to all the innumerable questions “Why” that come and torment consciences despite the interdict pronounced against them by the spirit of science. But for the unbeliever the problem of life belongs to experts who will one day be able to reproduce it and thus to deliver it from death. Over and above this, it must be understood that collectivism is not simply an economic doctrine but an authentic mysticism that offers its adherents a certain impersonal assurance of immortality. A person who lives wholly and entirely for the community, what would he have to lose at the end of his life? The jaws of death would close on emptiness. Having abandoned his whole self to the collectivity, he would survive in some way within it, he having been long since trained by it to surrender to it his judgment and his will. The collective mystic loses himself in the collectivity rather as the Christian mystic loses himself in God. The difference is that the former does not find himself again.

This book is not a confession. I would in fact be incapable of the sacrifices required by that particular literary form. The dazzling light of the July that I describe below has blotted out in me almost everything that preceded it. The impressions of childhood have stood firm because in all of us they are so strong that they end up taking over in old age, but those of adolescence only survive in my memory somewhat like those indeterminate splashes of colour that swim in one’s retina after one has for a moment looked at the sun.

What I was between the ages of ten and twenty is, I suppose, common to me and everybody else who has lived through them. However, apart from the particular features of the milieu that I have already described, there were some differences that I have to set down. They do me no credit.

From the fact that my father had shown exceptional brilliance in class everyone deduced that I would do the same; everyone was mistaken. They were all the more justifiably mistaken because initially they were right.

At the communal school, everything went well. We were all of humble origin, at any rate so far as appearances went, we all wore the same black smock, our teachers saw life in the same terms as our parents did and they taught us with that degree of gravity then common to those who dispensed a benefit of recent origin, which the poorer classes were not yet used to receiving, namely, education, an immeasurable blessing. The world was simple. History, proceeding on its path between the poles of good and evil and beneath a heaven almost entirely occupied by Victor Hugo, was sustained by virtue, impeded by ignorance and proceeding towards that happy consummation predicted by the best among us who were also the most far-sighted. Liberty gave access to the ideal of universal goodness and brotherhood which was not only that of our masters and therefore of ourselves but also that of the republic and of the philosophy of our times. In order to be free one had only to study; we studied, taught with scrupulous patience by exemplary instructors conscious of possessing in their books the secret of every sort of achievement.

I had good marks and the little cardboard rectangles, yellow, blue and red, of “good points” accumulated in the little bag of black velvet that I, like all the others, had hanging on my chest from a cord around my neck, somewhat in the manner of a scapular. A certain number of good points won the cross of honour; I was often so decorated. I used to work with ease, despite remaining in that state of vagueness and absence that was habitual with me. I was made to take dictation of a passage of Merimee. This was probably the cause of my downfall; I made only one mistake—it was with the word “alveole,” the form and meaning of which have always suggested to me the feminine gender. I was judged to be of exceptional promise. My father already envisaged me at an Ecole Normale, indeed at the Ecole Normale Superieure, with the higher degree of my aggregation, a professor of history, in fact everything that he could easily have been himself had not poverty compelled him to take a shorter path. After consultation with my teachers and the headmaster of my school, it was decided to send me to the lycee. I was placed in the sixth form at the age of nine and a half.

It was too soon. Even more than the change of methods and of teachers, the change of milieu was fatal to me. My comrades at the communal school were like my cousins, my childhood friends, we had the same way of life, we played games after class in dreary Belfort streets that we pretended were those of Paris. But at the lycee, sited at the edge of the expensive districts in which houses had lifts, the young boys wearing ties who surrounded me had already learned manners from their parents, even if not the manners of the adult world, and they knew that this world, not yet open to them, would one day be theirs to claim. For them, learning was not in order to become free but in order to dominate; I did not feel it in quite those terms but that is what I felt. The communal school was a public benefaction, the schoolmaster was the heir of sages of earlier times and we owed him our attention and our gratitude. The lycee was like a family chateau, the family not being mine, in which the teacher had succeeded the nurse as the dispenser of an intellectual diet which earned him only a modest increase of prestige. The self-confidence of my little comrades who studied with nonchalance and played to win, the irony of our teachers who addressed us as “monsieur” with an empty formality that stressed politeness in proportion to our ignorance, the changes of classroom and master according the subject, all this became for me a cause of distress and anxiety. Fear would overcome me the moment I saw from far off the walls of the lycee with its windows crisscrossed with huge iron bars. It was with the authentic despair of a child that I would cross the threshold of the immense glass cage in which I would find no friends. In the classroom the dread of having to answer a question never left me unless replaced by the fear of being ignored. If a question did compel me to stand up, I would experience a kind of vertigo that emptied my head of such little knowledge as it could take and left me unable to speak in the midst of a pitying silence. During times of recreation I cannot recall ever having played any kind of game with the others who hurtled round about me, occasionally pushing me out of the way like an awkward piece of furniture. From time to time I would run through the courtyard like a maniac, just to give myself the impression that I was taking part; I put so much energy into creating this illusion that twice I fell and split my eyebrow.

I gave up first running, then studying. I developed a certain skill in slinking off to wander through the streets or sit and daydream on park benches in the company of Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. My escape route was into philosophy, and it is a fact that I read not a single novel before I was thirty, saving only those of Voltaire, which are of course political tracts. I was dazzled by the author of Candide. Nobody ever had so penetrating an eye, so keen a wit. I could see him in my mind’s eye as an unconquerable duellist, striding sword in hand down the years of his century, driving before him a raging but terrified flock of tyrants, corrupt judges and ecclesiastics. I truly believe that I must have read his Dictionnaire Philosophique ten times, in raptures over definitions that I now have to call the basest of caricatures but which then seemed to me the height of elegance.

I was, however, more attracted by Rousseau. He had rather less of that kind of wit that keeps you at a distance like a drawn sword, and beneath the tattered rags of author’s vanity one could discern the pain of an outsider of genius who was reduced to changing the world simply in order not to feel a stranger within it. He attributed to himself a degree of goodness with which in reality he would probably have felt uncomfortable and was far less at ease in good society than Voltaire. His experience of rejection endeared him to me. I used to imagine him being even more unhappy than myself at the lycee which saw me less and less. At the cost of a short-lived violent effort at the year’s end I did for some time manage to go up to the next class; but finally the shortfall became too great and I had to repeat a year. My mother became worried. The Deputy Headmaster, a man of Assyrian aspect with a chest of impressive depth, raised his arms to heaven and explained to her in a voice resounding within his colossal torso that I was equally absent whether present or elsewhere, so that comments left me unaffected since they were never able to reach me. While he was talking, I could not call to mind a single occasion on which I had received from anybody the least rebuke or the faintest sign of interest, which only went to show how right he was.

At home my father took to eying me with increasing concern. One morning he summoned me to the foot of his bed; he used to spend a great deal of time in it, reading, writing or composing his speeches and surrounded with a snow-drift of newspapers; he addressed me with an appeal to reason, which at the time fell on deaf ears.

It was not till much later that I understood what a disappointment I had been to him and what distress I must have caused him. Children know a great deal but they do not know what it means to be a child.

My mother refused to admit that I was educationally handicapped; she put everything down to some problem of growth, to my teachers’ inability to understand me, to the climate of Paris, to anything whatsoever capable of disproving any inferiority in a being who, like her, loved painting and music. My mother’s love accepted in advance all the explanations I had to offer and occasionally added some that I would never have thought of. If I was unable to endure being at the lycee, that must mean that the lycee was all wrong.

I lived for nothing but drawing and to certain extent I lived by drawing. With paper, a pen and some Chinese ink I was happy. I would as it happened always draw the same thing, doubtless under the influence of the Iliad which neither Rousseau nor Voltaire had managed to make me forget: Greek temples in a style taken from an architectural textbook. The white page took the place of light, and the tiny pen-strokes I made in countless thousands effected an abridgement of space such as to compel the emergence and manifestation of form. In my eagerness to compel it to emerge even sooner, I would in my inexperience over-elaborate and let my pen run away with me, a fatal mistake that would suddenly transform my patient cross-hatchings into a hedge behind which the expected form would remain obstinately hidden. What I wanted was to lead things to disclose themselves, to confess their identity, an intention that could be ruined in a few millimeters with the pen: the tiny surplus stroke operated as a kind of negation, spoiling the whole effort. I would then add others in the hope of negating that, and the white column I had hoped to create would soon vanish in a thicket of erasures. I would then tear up that page and start again, ten times, a hundred times, with incredible obstinacy.

My mother never underestimated me and, seeing my faculty of perseverance, recalled that Courbet was a native of Franche-Comte and that our village boasted an excellent painter of the Hoggar whose successor she now considered me to be. Our home region was plainly destined to furnish France with artists. Another native of Franche-Comte, resident in Paris, who had in his time composed some pleasing love songs, advised her to put me in for the entrance examination to the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs, which he thought to be within my range. And in fact I was accepted at a satisfactory level and a few months before I reached the required age. My father decided to make the best of the little that there was to be got out of me and showed his satisfaction in his own understated way, that is, he said nothing at all but took me with him, man to man, on a visit to the distant constituency in Martinique that he had represented for the last two years.

During the twelve or thirteen days of the crossing we exchanged five or six words loaded with such a backlog of feeling that they sank without trace in the customary silence of our relationship.

At Fort-de-France hundreds of little boats decked with banners were awaiting us beneath a scalding sun and we were literally unable to touch the ground till evening, carried from one rostrum to another by a crowd full of enthusiasm, cheerfulness and—I hope I shall not be misunderstood—an exquisite dignity despite its destitution. On the morrow and the days following, while my father was getting on with his difficult job, with speeches and addresses, here managing an increase in salaries, there overcoming an administrative obstacle, I was looked after by a devoted geography teacher, a man of erudition and good humour, who took it on himself to show me round the island, to tell me its history, to point out the bread-fruit tree, the butter tree, the crockery tree, to teach me to recognize the manchineel tree that sends you blind. He showed me one of the prettiest sights there are, namely, a plantation of pineapple trees at dusk, and one of the most frightening, Mount Pelee discharging into the night rivers of molten rock. I filled my notebooks with uninspired sketches and inept commentary, all of which gave me a great deal of satisfaction.

Every evening, amid the flutterings of multicoloured cockchafers going from one blind to another beneath verandas wreathed in blossom, we were served at table by enchanting young girls. I was in admiration of their figure, girdled at the waist like a spray of flowers, their delicate profile outlined in the shadows by a gleam of light, and I could have imagined no happier lot than to live at their feet, lost in contemplation of the precious matter they were made of.

A delight and a burden, our stay lasted a month, during which I had ample opportunity to understand why my father spoke so little at home; he had no strength left to do so. After learning to respect his silence, I began to respect him as a person. On the boat which took us back to France we each retreated into our respective silences. These few weeks spent in each other’s company had helped us to a better mutual understanding. We no longer needed words; a gesture, a glance were enough. The experience each of us had henceforward of the other allowed us to cut back any outlay of expression.

Back in Paris, I put no more into my work at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs than I had at the lycee. My years of indiscipline had rendered me incapable of conforming to a time-table or putting up with any kind of restraint; that included the copying of the prescribed models furnished to us by a system of teaching that was unable to provide us with talent but tried at least to provide us with technique. I had no desire to become an interior designer; my taste was neither sufficiently confident nor sufficiently bad. I would have liked to become an architect, so long as there were Greek temples needing to be built and even though the title of “architect” was the most ferocious term of abuse in the vocabulary of hack artists. Supervision at the Ecole was even easier to get round than that of the lycee and I used to spend my days in gardens, swimming pools, museums, exhibitions in which I would go straight to the architectural section and immerse myself in blue-prints. Their subject was of no importance; all I wanted was that they should be composed of elegant rectangles, of curved lines delicately traced at the frontier where empty space met mass and weight, of those perfect squares with lines deliberately extended beyond where they met so as to form latticed corners that attached the design to the space surrounding it. In the painting galleries of the Louvre I would seek out compositions with an underlying motif of the monumental, preferably Attic.

I also used to seek out, though timidly, the company of young girls on whom I would lavish platonic attentions whenever their celestial transit brought them by chance for a moment within range of my devotion. Nonetheless, on the day I became fifteen, having some cash in hand, I thought it a mark of my status to spend the evening with a lady of the street, and I took the metro to Montparnasse. When I got there, I noticed, at the far end of a deserted corridor, an emaciated beggar who looked as if painted in bitumen on the white tiles of the wall like the figures painted by Matisse on the walls of the chapel at Vence. At the very moment I passed in front of him I knew that, on this evening, I would go no further. Was it pity, the harshness of the contrast between this wretched individual, reduced to holding out his hand to the empty air, and the furtive blushing pleasure-seeker I was trying to make of myself, was it the desire to perform a spontaneous act, or was it the cowardly relief of postponing an experience that was too much for me? I do not know, but the fact is that the handful of notes that I was clutching in my pocket went into the hat of that poor man and I turned back to get my ticket punched for the return journey. Alas, there would not always be poor men to stop me on the path of evil.

My good actions were meanwhile getting rarer. My inability to integrate myself into a milieu or group reduced me little by little to a state all but feral, and my mother had many occasions to complain about my character. It was impossible to recognize the silent gentle child on whom she was formerly so often complimented in the tall aggressive lout, obsessed with muscle-building, who spent his mornings flogging up and down luke-warm swimming baths, who could endure neither advice or comment, who showed patience with nobody except his young sister and who seemed to think he could acquire an education by standing around daydreaming and by random reading of heterogeneous philosophers, from which, as it happened, he retained nothing at all.

My mother was like all mothers in feeling more responsibility for my failures than ever she took pride in my successes and she did all she could to persuade my father that my disorderly life was the effect of art. He remained unconvinced. He took the view that I would never achieve anything.

He did try nonetheless to get me to do something. He had reconstituted the socialist party after having for some years attempted to acquire the spirit of mortification required of communist functionaries by their Grand Master and he therefore suggested to me that I should found a socialist youth branch in the small mining town in the East where he had become both mayor and deputy. I prepared the rule book and the membership cards, I made a speech on the theme “we are entering the struggle when our elders are still in it” to a gathering of some thirty young men in a municipal hall. When the meeting ended, I dealt with applications to join. Everybody joined. The branch had got off to a good start. I watched its subsequent progress from a distance; I was never again seen either at its head or its tail. I had been regarded before with desperation but now it was with despair.

I am sorry to have had to trouble the reader at such length with an account of my hesitant and idle beginnings but, since I have to describe a grace that came as a complete surprise, I have also to show that there would have been no difficulty in finding a person more worthy than myself to receive it. I say this for the benefit of those whom I have sometimes heard to complain of not having experienced the encounter that was granted to me; the likelihood is that they were judged more capable of discovering for themselves what to my weakness needed to be revealed.

My father was pursuing a career that everybody believed would necessarily take him to the highest political appointments. And indeed he soon was for the first time a minister. It was in a coalition that lasted twenty-four hours; but they were deeply impressive hours, for him and for all of us who went to gaze at him in his new dignity, beneath the painted ceilings of a delightful mansion situated on the left bank. He was, at heart, disconcerted to be lodged in the eighteenth century rather than the eighteenth arrondissement. He was utterly indifferent to honours, took no pleasure in the tapestries and gilded ornamentation of the furniture provided by the state. It was out of modesty that he had accepted to be a minister, as if, having already made his name but unaware of the fact, he thought it necessary to add to that name an official address. But I am in no doubt as to where he spent the best moments of his political life; it was in a little café in his commune, at a table between the counter and the glass door, where in the evening before dinner he would play cards with miners just up from the depths, their eyes getting slowly used again to light and space. That is where he was himself, I know it and so did they.

However distracted he might have been with other matters, he was nonetheless permanently on the watch for any sign of hopeful developments in me. A well-known left wing cartoonist had taught me that a newspaper is first of all a picture in black and white so that a drawing intended for it should take its inspiration from the typography surrounding it. With this in mind I tried my hand at some cartoons of political figures. My father took them to the party’s newspaper which accepted my contribution all the more willingly because it badly wanted his. One of my victims thought fit to have me approached for the original of his portrait and thanked me for it with a letter in his own hand. He was a former President du Conseil, which earned me a degree of respect. Since I could draw, it followed that I could write. A short story I had written at the age of fifteen was accepted by a prominent weekly and appeared on the right-hand page. It was quite forgotten that I owed this distinction to my father’s influence and those about me began daydreaming that some great writers had been as devoid of university qualifications as I was and that I would stay that way for some years more until gripped by the ambition to become a naval officer. In sober truth the list of these self-taught authors was a short one but to get my name on it all I would need was a little good will. People decided to wait and see.

But I was only too well aware of my gift for disappointing. Was anyone interested in my Greek temples? I did cartoons in order to be able, once they were published, to write stories. I was seen as a novelist; I devoted myself to canoeing on every stretch of water to be found in the region of Paris. The upshot was that at long last my father could bear no more and served me notice that I had to earn my own living. As I had not the faintest idea how to do so, he got me a position, at the age of seventeen, on an evening paper run by the friend of a relative. I was put in the news department and told to learn the job by helping out the professionals. It contained a number of seasoned reporters and several sons of celebrities, considerably older than myself. Some of them took me with them to the police station or the scene of crime and good-naturedly helped me to acquire that blend of scepticism and naivete which makes the journalist the sort of fellow who has seen everything but retains the ability to feel shock and surprise at things that no longer shock or surprise anybody else. Others, doubtless foreseeing that life had little enough in store for them, devoted themselves to abusing those freedoms that life still afforded them in their youth and they carried me off to places of ill repute, into which I gratefully followed them.

I was the baby, the last born of the editorial team. They treated me kindly, giving me from time to time an article to write on the autumn fall of leaves or on cat shows. They dispensed me at the earliest possible moment from criminal matters; my investigations never yielded anything. Chance always happily arranged things so that the victim would turn out to be in the best of health and the suicide would bungle it. I enjoyed journalism, at least when it did not expose me to the hostility of concierges who were deeply distrustful of newspapers, particularly evening newspapers with their huge headlines that must have felt like an undesirable night-time disturbance. I learned about the world in the disillusioned company of experts whose knowledge of it principally consisted of the abnormal, whether in the form of crime or some sort of triumphant success. I was leading the life of an adult well before adulthood, in the style of those youngsters who are never more puerile than when refusing any longer to be children and for whom the legal age of majority is the ideal frontier beyond which one can do whatever one likes. This is pretty well what I was doing, but thank God there was not all that much I actually wanted to do apart from getting what I could from associating with girls who were probably taking pity on the brutish personality I dreamed of constructing as a means of self-assertion and which was unmistakably beyond my power.

Morally, the good examples I had been given and which, unbeknown to myself, still held sway over me protected me from the worst excesses, but I was nonetheless well on the way to furnishing my contemporaries with a specimen of asocial socialist when a subtle conspiracy of chances brought me into the divine ambush of which I now have to speak.

The first thing was a meeting on the banks of the Seine, underneath the iron bridge that crosses the river up by the gare d’Austerlitz. There, between the noise of the metro and the gentle glide of barges, stands the little brick building that houses the Institut Medico-legal. I was leaning on the parapet, watching the water go by in its slow sad waltz when a colleague as yet unknown came to keep me company.

He was a lad of about twenty-five or twenty-six, with a crew-cut and a wicked look to him. The smoke of a cigarette that he held almost vertically between lips tight closed forced him to narrow his eyes and created ironic wrinkles on a countenance whose every line combined to suggest question marks. His entire person gave one the impression of laughter kept in and controlled with the greatest difficulty, laughter that managed to escape from time to time from a corner of his mouth or from the suddenly opened window of a sparkling blue eye. Once we had got past the exchange of well-worn professional details, he moved on—I won’t say to the object of his visit but to the most direct form of questioning, one for which I was entirely unprepared, questions on my past, my present, my future. In fact he wanted to know what ideal I was pursuing in my life.

I had a few ideas that came straight from my father’s stock, spiced with a touch of scepticism from Voltaire’s, but an ideal? What exactly was an ideal? I wasn’t sure that I knew. Taken by surprise, probably inspired by the boats going down the Seine beneath us or thinking of my favourite recreation, I answered: “Rowing!” Put differently but no more spiritually, the oar. My answer had a shattering effect.

My questioner laughed so hard that, if it hadn’t been for the balustrade, he would have fallen in the water. His face contorted, his chin touched his knees, he laughed till he cried, till he lost his breath, till he almost worried me, and with such simple candour that the comical side of my profession of faith became suddenly clear even to me. I had a vision of myself, everlastingly rowing at the level of the ideal and going nowhere, and I started to laugh myself, even if with a bit more restraint. Outbursts of laughter are not frequent near the morgue. Its door opened, the doctor appeared on the threshold. I was afraid for a moment that he was going to take offence but he had come simply to tell us the result of his investigations. We took a few notes and then we parted. As my comrade was moving off, I could see his back still shaking with little convulsions of laughter. We were not to meet again for a whole year until chance brought us together again, this time in the same newspaper. But chance, said Napoleon, never did anything.

The advantage of being the son of a celebrity is that finding a job presents no problem. The trouble is that losing it is just as easy as finding it. Your life is organized out of your sight. One fine day the newspaper that employed me sacked me without a word of explanation. Next day my father got me onto a rival newspaper, the property of a big ship-owner with left wing sympathies; he gave me a fatherly talking to in a bleak office near the Stock Exchange before having me taken to the newsroom that he never visited. There I discovered, among the salaried idlers of the place, my laughing friend from the morgue, who gave me his name. He was called Willemin, had the same forename as myself and a kind of immediate complicity took shape between us; I have often asked myself why but never found an answer. We were as unlike as it was possible to be. I was lethargic and vaguely cultivated the sort of bitterness which at the age of twenty can seem to go with one’s complexion, unsociable, one of those dreamers without dreams who always find any request inconvenient even though having nothing to do. Willemin was full of vitality, hugely talented, living life to the full and gifted with a sense of humour about it which made living with him a sort of fantastic poem in which the demands of its rhyme scheme took priority over those of logic. He was the third son of a schoolmistress from Lorraine who had been left a widow with three sons and a daughter, all of them scholastically brilliant.

The eldest took the lead always and in everything and endlessly added to his collection of laurels. He was expected to make his mark in the world of scholarship, revolutionizing mathematics or philosophy, getting into the Academy of his choice at the same age as the generals of the Revolution. He caused a certain disappointment when he discovered a vocation as a vet and a taste for events connected with folklore.

The second was that professor of medicine who one day diagnosed himself, before a lecture hall of his students pale with emotion, as suffering from a cerebral tumour. The evolution of his illness and the terrifying operation that he underwent, in part under his own direction, gave him the material for a series of lectures that have not their like in the world. Then he died. He was a hero.

The daughter, with a brilliant academic record, married a mining engineer and disappeared with him in the direction of Ales. The youngest—my one, so to say—had a slightly less straightforward adolescence. He gave up his study of medicine in favour of the Conservatoire, then gave up that in favour of journalism after having won an award for his flute playing. His mother had begun to worry and followed him to Paris, bringing with her ample supplies of love, wisdom and a certain rustic simplicity which led her to thank the gentleman of the talking clock, whose willingness to be of service never ceased to amaze her; she could not bring herself to hang up when faced with a person so obliging as to give her, after the hour and the minute, the detail of the seconds. She was absolutely certain that her ugly little duckling was a swan just like the others. If he was taking his time about showing the fact, it was because she had somehow not managed to care for him enough in the nest; she therefore never missed an opportunity of covering him with a wing while he took pleasure in ruffling her feathers. In any case, the unsettled years were coming to an end. He could see his profession packed with young people of whom nearly all had taken early leave of their studies. He decided to return to his own and while we idled away our time in the armchairs provided by our ship-owner, waiting for some volcano to take the trouble to erupt, he would work away in a corner of the newsroom, stuck between two piles of medical textbooks, his sleeves rolled up, his brow determined. A grey thread of cigarette smoke rising in front of the thicket of his eyebrows made him look like an abandoned camp-site with a fire still smouldering.

That being the sort of people we were, something precious, intimate and utterly unpredictable grew up between us; we were like a pair of non-matching Siamese twins. It was within this friendship that I lived the best years of my youth, the happy possessor of an elder brother devoted to me, watching over my work and my health.

He had digs on the Quai de Bourbon which could not quite manage a view out over the Seine but did at least look down on the library of Leon Blum; in the evening, if he did not feel like cooking for us there, we would go out and dine on a bag of printed chips—by which I mean chips marked with ink from the newspaper they were wrapped in—under one of the bridges of the Ile Saint-Louis.

He was a cradle Catholic who had “lost his faith” about the age of fifteen and recovered it in circumstances sufficiently unusual to suit his particular genius. He went one day to listen to a lecture given by a Christian philosopher, Stanislas Fumet, and it seemed to him that the speaker attached a great deal of importance to nineteenth century writers such as Ernest Hello, of whom he had never heard, whether in class or elsewhere. “If I don’t even know the names of such important thinkers,” he said to himself, “that must mean that I don’t know much, in fact I know nothing.” At which point he went off to a church to make an act of humility and was much the better for it. The faith returning brought with it two unexpected gifts: joy and freedom of heart. This at least was what he told me but he did not convince me.

Since humility had done so much for him, he made it his business to inculcate it in others. His method was extremely simple; it consisted in making them realize just what donkeys they were as they confronted life and the world, walking blind on the cliff edge of the infinite, and just how much they would gain by recognizing the fact without more ado, taking advantage of the opportunity to humble themselves which he, out of love for his neighbour, thought it his duty to afford them. He put into this enterprise a great deal of imagination and of energy but not a scrap of pride or self-importance, being himself perfectly humble both by grace and by nature. It just so happened that his humility was self-sustaining and in a sense “diffusive of itself,” to use an expression theology employs of charity. He was not an unqualified success. The donkeys lived up to their reputation and proved stubborn; of all the virtues they may have lacked, humility was without question the one whose absence troubled them the least.

It naturally follows that in his eyes my status was that of donkey, and a donkey of a particularly wretched species, that of republican donkeys, godless donkeys, painted red and full of braying propaganda. He had not the least respect for my opinions, nor did I for his. I suspected him of being both base and summit of the edifice of “anarcho-royalism” to which he proclaimed allegiance. This ideological combination specific to himself alone had the not inconsiderable advantage of being self-contradictory and thus escaping the limitations of systematic argument. Humour filled the gap. In the evenings, beneath our bridges, we had long conversations that went nowhere. All around us people were talking of war, the one that was still an unfailing source of stories and the one that was on the way. The world presented us with its normal merry-go-round of crime and folly; from the disastrous current of events each of us drew the moral appropriate to our respective convictions; he saw it as presided over by the left, I as presided over by the right. Once we had worked out all we disagreed on, we each of us stuck to our guns, further than ever apart, more than ever inseparable.

In sober truth I believe that politics and its daily to and fro occupied no greater place in our minds than the notional topic of those paintings by Brueghel in which what is theoretically the subject of the composition gets relegated to one corner of a canvas dominated by mountains, sky and ocean. That did not stop us everlastingly harking back to the left, the right, the monarchy, the republic, without moving a single step towards each other, and I think it was in the hope of dealing a mortal blow to my obstinate socialism that my Siamese twin lent me one day a book by Nicholas Berdyaev, entitled “The New Middle Ages.” This book, which completely failed to do what it was intended for, was the cause of the misunderstanding that is at the origin of my conversion.

This is the point at which occurred the event which is at the centre, I ought to say the beginning of my life since that life, thanks to the grace of baptism, was to take the form of a new birth. An event that was going to effect in me so extraordinary a revolution, changing in a single moment my way of existing, of seeing, of feeling, so radical a transformation of my character, causing me to speak in a way so utterly unexpected that my family took alarm. The day before I was a youth who, granted that he had a rebellious streak and was inclined to insolence, was from the statistical point of view entirely normal, moving within the confines of a set of well known opinions and, so far as concerns emotional development, showing the sort of misbehaviour which is said to belong to that age, in short, capable of anything perhaps but not of causing surprise. The following day I was a child, gentle, wondering, full of a solemn joy which he could not stop overflowing onto those around him, all of them disconcerted by the eccentricity of a thistle on which quite unexpectedly roses were blooming.

The general opinion was that I was bewitched and it seemed a good idea to have me examined by one of our friends who was a doctor, an atheist and a confirmed socialist. He had the good sense not to summon me to his office where I should not have opened my mouth but to pay a friendly visit to our house and to question me indirectly, without any obvious pressure or probing, coming back to the points that interested him only after long digressions. After two or three such relaxed conversations he was in a position to report his conclusions to my father; it was, he said, “grace,” an effect of “grace,” and nothing more. There was no need to worry.

He spoke of “grace” as if it were a peculiar sickness, showing various easily recognized symptoms. Research had not as yet managed to discover the nature of the disease but the work was making progress. Was the illness grave? No. Faith did not attack the reason. Was there a remedy? No, the illness ran a natural course towards recovery; these crises of mysticism, at the age I had reached, generally lasted a couple of years and left neither damage nor trace. Nothing more was needed than patience.

My mother was completely satisfied with this. The change in me restored her hopes and, if credit had to be given to religion, well, she was enough of a realist to be unreservedly grateful to it. My father, to begin with and before he had recourse to medical advice, had shown himself less accommodating. I had asked for absolute confidentiality from those few persons who had undertaken to instruct me, to explain the Church to me and to baptize me. It was easy for me to understand just how irritating it would be for a socialist militant of my father’s kidney to endure contradiction under his own roof from his own son and I thought I had taken sufficient precautions to prevent the modest event of my conversion to Catholicism from becoming an item of political news.

Unfortunately the secret leaked out and it was in the pages of a daily on the extreme right that my father learned all about it, all save the essential, that is to say, the exact circumstances of my conversion. The newspaper’s interest in my soul was limited to stressing how little respect I seemed to show for my socialist upbringing, given what it called my preference for “the company of Saint Francis of Assisi” rather than that of my father’s friends. The approach was not particularly elevated but hit its mark. My father drew the inference that the right, assisted by some sly priest, has taken advantage of the weakness of my character and my lack of discernment in order to further a campaign against him. His anger was such that he refused to see me; refusing to speak to me would not have represented much of a change in our Belfort life-style.

For some time my mother had to bring my meals to my room, but finally my conditions of arrest were relaxed and it was then that recourse was had to the doctor. A modus vivendi was arrived at. They would put up with my being a religious crank provided I was discreet about it as they would be with me. I was asked to abstain from any kind of proselytism with regard to my young sister (she did nonetheless convert, as did my mother, although long after her). Faithful to the convention thus established, I took refuge in a sort of interior catacomb, living there with my certitudes and that happiness I would so much have loved to share, to spread around, to give up to be ransacked. When we were living in a ministry, something that occurred more and more often, I would sneak out every morning long before the concierge had taken up his post and make my way to where my beloved Siamese twin was waiting for me at a street corner with his decrepit motorcar to take me for a mass at dawn to Notre Dame or elsewhere. One or two old ladies, church caretakers, grey hair beneath black straw hat, were all the company we had. I would gaze at them, fixed each on her prie-dieu as if on a miniature Jacob’s ladder, and I would tell myself that perhaps it was thanks to the faithful service, maintained from age to age, of old people such as these that I had found, at the appointed hour, a religion still intact. I felt a great wave of gratitude carrying me towards them and towards all who had kept the faith—I almost said, who had kept the faith for me; the thought that religion might have vanished from the world before I entered it gave me a retrospective shudder of dread.

Straw hats, straw chairs, the grain of the gospels, the wheat of the host, how good it was to be there under the arches of grey stone in the solitude of those cells in which the priest, to the imperceptible accompaniment of the music of the awakening day, performed at the altar his quiet miracle.

After mass we would move on to our shift at the newspaper, compelled to keep hidden all the wealth which so obviously was of no interest to anybody. We were like two Christopher Columbuses returning from the Americas to be greeted with universal indifference. Some escaped our attentions by flight, others by asserting they had discovered America before us and left it long since. Could that be possible? They spoke of it so little, so poorly. The great shipowner had me summoned to his presence; it was to admonish me with affectionate insistence as to the dangers of mysticism, once one had got past certain limits that were in fact easy enough to reach. Above all, I was not to go off and enter a monastery; I would be taking an irrevocable step, sure to bring despair to my parents and ultimately to myself. He had only my good in mind. Did I understand this? Yes, I did but I heard it very faintly; his voice came to me as if from far away, from the depths of a sunken world. I would have liked to help him. He would have been surprised to know it.

With whom then could I share what had been given to me, had transported me? At home our socialist friends considered me a little weak-minded and treated me with an appropriate considerateness. At the newspaper it became obvious that after having initially been objects of curiosity we had become a bore. We were reduced to sharing our thoughts only when alone together and the newsroom corridor became the cloister in which we exchanged antiphon and response of our utterly new joy. To keep people quiet we used to invent romantic assignations with imaginary persons, the opposite of the long established convention of covering up affairs of the heart with a respectable alibi.

There was a single one of our colleagues who showed an eagerness to learn what we used to talk about, laugh about, whisper together about. In order to stimulate his curiosity we would answer his questions in a tone half serious, half joking, telling him that we were talking about things which, about things that, in fact about things that he would never be able to understand because he was neither baptized nor a believer nor interested in becoming one. As he continued strongly to assert his good will, we told him that, if he truly desired the gift of faith, he should go and seek it at the church of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs where he would certainly obtain it. All he had to do was to go every morning for one month to the six o’clock mass; we would guarantee the result. It must be remembered that we were very young and, needless to say, no shadow of doubt crossed our mind. Our colleague followed our instructions to the letter. Every morning he went to mass. “Well?” we would ask him when he arrived at the newspaper. Mournfully, “Nothing,” he would answer. Nothing at the end of a fortnight, nothing at the end of three weeks. We began to feel a little anxious. Day by day the month approached its end; we were deeply apprehensive. Had he finally received the faith we had so rashly promised him? “No,” he said, his face contorted. He simply had to admit that he still could not believe, despite all we had said, despite our own confidence. We were in consternation.

But to our amazement we learned next day that our catechumen, as an apprentice Christian was called in times past, had gone again to church. He did not have the faith but he could no longer do without the mass, so much so and to such good effect that he ended up by becoming a Christian in the oddest way imaginable, out of covetousness and obstinacy. In his own time, not ours. His obstinacy won for him the gift of a faith as fresh as the early morning, and the habit of proceeding by way of challenge to God. His family name was that of a little fish. He is still in the net.

We did not always act in this extravagant manner. But whatever efforts we did make were in vain, very few were interested. For my part it was soon born in on me that nobody would believe me or even listen to me, so long as I failed to prove myself a person of common sense, to show that I could live like other people, which meant passing exams, earning my living rather than living off my relatives, in short, by so acting that one day people might be willing, if not to follow me, at least to listen to what I had to say. I concluded that before I started proving the existence of God, I had to prove myself. The narrative you are about to read was therefore postponed till at long last the moment came when I realized that, by dint of showing myself a reasonable being, I ran the risk of being too reasonable by half. If I am allowed one last conceit, I might say that after my conversion I spent so much time proving myself balanced that I almost got fixed that way.

I hope I have by now established that there was not a single thing that predisposed me to religion, barring only the fact that I had no religion. If my parents, from whom I never had anything but affection and good example, had been believers, they would have passed on the faith to me quite naturally. Since they were not, and despite the failure of socialism to extinguish absolutely my mother’s Protestantism, they naturally raised me in that conception of the world which was theirs and which was mine till I became twenty. So far as concerns my early years I have passed over nothing that needed to be said though remaining silent as to things which, pursuant to a kind of good manners now somewhat out of fashion, should remain unspoken. I mean those experiences and upheavals of adolescence concerning which I have absolutely nothing to say which could cast light on anything for anybody.

In conclusion I regret having spoken so often in the first person, but how was I to escape this uncomfortable necessity? I recall a great man with a great talent to whom I told my story; once I had finished, he was quite unable to contain his astonishment and exclaimed, “I really do like you a lot but, when all is said and done, why you?” The only answer to his question is that there is no answer. I was a commonplace young man, give or take a few additional weaknesses, with nothing remarkable about me except a foot wounded by a bomb splinter and a marked propensity for absence, intellectual, moral and, so far as possible, physical absence. Scripture tells us that grace is no respecter of persons and I believe I have shown that, when grace came to me, it came to just anybody. What happened to me can happen to everybody, to the best, to the less good, to the one who knows nothing and even to the one who thinks he knows something; to my reader tomorrow, perhaps this very evening; one day, for sure.

Nicholas Berdyaev was a man of magnificent intellect, a mind so overloaded with ideas that their weight sometimes caused him to stammer. I subsequently learned to admire him but at the time he had, so far as I was concerned, a critical defect; he believed in God and spoke of Him not as a scientific hypothesis, which would have been allowable, but as truly existing, which so far as I was concerned still had to be proved. Having recourse to a God in order to make sense of the world and of history was in my view a subterfuge unworthy of a philosopher. What would be the point of a detective story in which the classic puzzle of a murder within an enclosed space was artificially solved by the intervention of a supernatural being capable of going through walls? That was my reasoning at the time and that is why the reading of “A New Middle Ages” made on me not the slightest impression. This writer was a religious author; the conclusions he drew from his faith in respect of Marxism, the Russian Revolution or the French Revolution were irrelevant to me, could not reach me. This was the spirit in which I answered Willemin when he asked me what I felt about the book; the book “was not open to argument.” Once granted the premise of God’s existence, the rest logically followed. No discussion was possible.

He understood the position completely back to front, namely, that Berdyaev had convinced me. This made him so happy that he wanted us to celebrate the occasion by having dinner together, something I was always ready for. I delighted in his company, his quickness of mind, his gift for excellence, whether in playing the flute, in medicine, journalism, country cooking or mimicry, and even if I did not share his views, I was happy to be with him laughing at the same time and at the same things. It may have been my distaste for having things too clear cut or the fear of spoiling his joyful mood but I had not the courage to disabuse him and I left him to his happiness. Since we were going to dine together, I thought, there would be time enough to point out his mistake when we got to the dessert. This was the absolute misunderstanding which, as I said a few pages back, was at the origin of my conversion.

The newspaper was put to bed shortly before five o’clock in the afternoon and we set off in his old car—a luxury unheard of at the time for young people like us—one of whose doors had to be kept shut with an elbow. We crossed the Seine, a long way from the Ile Saint Louis; so we were not heading for his place. Place Maubert, so I presumed we were going to the Rue Mouffetard where we got the printed chips. That meant dinner under the bridges. I saw nothing wrong with that. It would cost us one franc, plus a few sous for the wine-bottle filled to the top with a dark blue liquid which, once poured, became a pleasantly translucent mauve. Once, however, we had roared through the crossroads at the end of the Rue Mouffetard, I gave up speculating. Perhaps after all we were going to have dinner at the restaurant, though it did seem a bit early for that. I am giving a lot of detail which may seem insignificant. My reader must allow for the fact that one is very inclined to go into detail when one has had the extraordinary good fortune to be present at one’s own birth.

I was asking no questions. I let myself be carried on by this friendship, careless of the direction it had chosen. The route he had taken became in any case less and less intelligible; we circled round the Latin Quarter and retraced our steps up the Rue Claude-Bernard, then up the Rue d’Ulm. What on earth was taking us to these areas currently depopulated by the school holidays? We stopped a little way beyond the Ecole Normale Superieure in front of my old Ecole des Arts Decoratifs. My companion got out and addressed me through the car window: I could either follow him or wait for him a few minutes. I would wait. Presumably he had some kind of visit to make. I saw him cross the road, push open a little door near a large wrought iron portal above which one could make out the roof of a chapel. Fair enough, he was going to pray, to go to confession, to perform one or other of those activities that took up a lot of time for Christians. That was one more reason for staying where I was.

It is the 8th July, a marvelous summer’s day. In front of me the Rue d’Ulm lies open like a sun-filled channel stretching up to the Pantheon which from this angle has the advantage of being seen more or less face on. What were my thoughts? I don’t remember. Doubtless vague as usual, wandering along the walls in search of some projection, angle or geometric design on which to fix my attention for a moment. My inner state? Judging by such account as one’s conscious mind can give of itself, my inner state was perfect, by which I mean it showed none of those disturbances which are assumed to predispose one to mysticism.

My love life is trouble-free. That very evening—I say this for the benefit of those who profess that sort of insight which explains religion by its contrary, the spirit by the body, the greater by the less and, in particular, the higher by the lower—I have an arrangement to meet a young German girl, a student at the Beaux Arts, a blonde with the delicate features often seen on girls that are just a little overweight. She has given me to understand that she would not be mounting too vigorous a defence of her frontiers. In a moment she will be so completely forgotten that it will not even occur to me to call off our meeting.

I am free of metaphysical anxieties. My last such experience had been when I was around fifteen; it took the form I described at the beginning of this book, the feeling that the universe, besieging me, deafening me with what I can only call its dumb spate of information, will any moment now reveal to me the secret of its existence, the key to its codes. The universe had in fact revealed to me nothing at all and I have given up further questioning. In company with our socialist friends I believe that the world consists of politics and history and that nothing is more a waste of time than metaphysics. In any event, if I were to believe in the existence of truth, the last people I would approach to ask about it would be priests, while the Church, known to me only in terms of its various temporal deficiencies, would be the last place I would go to look for it.

My job has done nothing to diminish my skepticism but a lot to alleviate the fears inflicted on my parents by my worrying adolescence. I am too young and have been at it too short a time for journalism to have brought me disappointments of the kind that create a void, a feeling of solitude such as might favour the emergence of religious feeling. I have no worries and create none for other people; my friendship with Willemin has freed me from the bad company I had kept for a while. Generally speaking, the year is calm, the nation without disturbances within or threats from without; the alarm has not yet sounded and I have no corresponding anxieties. My health is good; I am happy, so far as one can be and know that one is. The evening promises to be pleasant and I am waiting.

To sum up, I feel absolutely no curiosity whatsoever about anything to do with religion, all of which is simply out of date. It is ten past five. In two minutes I shall be a Christian.

As a contented atheist, I obviously had not the faintest idea of this when, tired of waiting for the end of the incomprehensible devotions that were holding up my friend a bit longer than he had expected, I in my turn push open the little wrought iron door to take a closer look, for the sake of art or idle curiosity, at the building in which I am tempted to say he is dawdling (in actual fact I can have been waiting for him at the most for three or four minutes).

What could be seen of the chapel over the doorway had not been particularly exciting. I hope that the little sisters for whom I am going to become a little brother will forgive me if I speak ill of their home but it gains nothing by being inspected on foot. It stands at the end of a short yard, one of those buildings in the English Gothic style of the end of the nineteenth century, the work of architects resolved to put some order into it and thereby taking all the life and movement out of it. I do not write this for the dubious pleasure of criticizing an art form whose reputation needs no comment but simply to make clear that artistic emotion had nothing to do with what follows.

The interior is no more uplifting than the exterior. It is like a banal stone ship beached for careening with its dark grey lines going hither and yon without ever achieving the Cistercian marriage of the austere and the beautiful. The nave is sharply divided into three parts. The first, starting at the entrance, is reserved for the faithful who say their prayers in semi-darkness. Windows, neutralized by the mass of buildings all around, leak a feeble light onto statues and a side altar decked with flowers.

The second part is occupied by nuns, their heads hidden in black veils, like rows of patient birds settled in their varnished wooden benches. I shall learn later on that they are sisters of the order entitled “Adoration Reparatrice,” a congregation founded as a response of piety to certain excesses of the revolutionary spring of 1848. Relatively few in number—it will later emerge that this detail has its importance—they belong to one of those contemplative orders which choose imprisonment so as to make us free, choose obscurity so that we may have light, and invite from the materialist morality that will still be mine for another minute or two, the judgment that they serve no useful purpose. They are saying a sort of prayer with the voices from one side of the nave answering those on the other and coming together at regular intervals in the chant of “Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto” before resuming the alternating murmur of the quiet stream of prayer. I have no idea that they are singing the psalms, that we are listening to Matins and that I am being borne up on the gentle tide of the canonical hours.

The far end of the chapel is quite brightly lit. Above the high altar draped in white, a vast arrangement of plants, candlesticks and ornaments is dominated by a large ornate metal cross with, at its centre, a dull white disc. Three other discs of the same size but not quite of the same appearance are fixed at the extremities of the cross. I have before now been inside churches out of interest in art but I have never seen a monstrance with a host in it, indeed I believe I had never seen a host, and I have no idea that I am in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, towards which rise up two ranks of burning candles. The presence of the supplementary discs and the florid complications of the décor make it even more difficult for me to make sense of this distant sun.

All this has a significance that escapes me, the more so in that I am paying it hardly any attention. Standing near the door, I am looking around to find my friend but I cannot make him out among the kneeling forms in front of me. My gaze moves from shadow to light, returns to the congregation without inspiring any particular thought, goes from the faithful to the motionless nuns, from the nuns to the altar and then, I know not why, concentrates on the second candle burning to the left of the cross. Not the first nor yet the third but the second. And that is the moment which without warning sets off the series of wonders that with inexorable violence are going to demolish instantaneously the absurd being that is myself and bring to dazzled birth the child that I had never been.

First of all, these words are put to me: “spiritual life.” They are not spoken to me, I do not utter them myself, I hear them as if they were uttered near me in a low voice by a person who has to be seeing something that I have not yet seen myself.

The last syllable of this murmured prelude has no sooner entered my consciousness than the avalanche begins. I cannot say that heaven opens; it does not open, it is hurled at me, it arises like a sudden silent thunderbolt from out of this chapel in which one would never have dreamed that it was mysteriously enclosed. How can I describe it in these reductive words that refuse to serve me, threatening to intercept my thoughts and consign them to the realm of fantasy? The painter to whom it was granted to catch a glimpse of unknown colours, how would he paint them? It is like a crystal, indestructible, infinite in its transparency, almost unbearable in its brightness (a fraction more would annihilate me) and, as it were, blue, a world, another world of a brilliance and density such as to reduce ours to the faint shadows of unfinished dreams. It is reality, it is truth, I see it from the dark bank on which I am still held back. There is an order in the universe and, at its summit, beyond this veil of dazzling mist, the evidence of God, evidence become presence and presence become the person of the One whom a moment ago I would have denied, the One whom Christians call “our Father” and from whom I learn that He is gentle, with a gentleness like no other, not the passive quality sometimes so described but active, breaking open, far beyond any form of violence, capable of shattering the hardest stone and, harder even than stone, the human heart.

This overwhelming flood that breaks over me brings with it a joy that is nothing other than the exultation of a man saved, the joy of one brought off from a shipwreck just in time, but with this difference, that it is only at the moment when I am lifted up towards salvation that I become aware of the mire in which, without realising, I am buried and I cannot understand, seeing myself still half caught in it, how I have ever been able to live and breathe there.

At the same time I am given a new family which is the Church, She having the task of leading me where I must go, it being understood that despite appearances I have a certain way still to travel, a distance that cannot be abolished and has to be covered.

All these sensations that I am labouring to express in the defective medium of ideas and images come simultaneously, enfolded one within the other, and after many years I have not exhausted their content. The whole is dominated by the presence, beyond and through an immense multitude, of the One whose name I can never write again without feeling the dread of wounding His tenderness, the One before whom I have the happiness of being a forgiven child, waking to learn that everything is gift.

Outside it was still a fine day and I was five years old. The world that once had been made of stone and tarmac was a great garden in which I was to be allowed to play for as long as God was pleased to leave me there. Willemin was walking beside me and seemed to have noticed something utterly unusual in my face; he gazed at me with medical thoroughness. “What is going on with you?”—“I am a Catholic,” and then, as if afraid of not having been sufficiently explicit, I added “apostolic and Roman” to complete my confession of faith. “You’re goggle-eyed!”—“God exists, it is all true.”—“If only you could see yourself!” I could not see myself. I was like an owl at midday, facing the sun.

Five minutes later, on the terrace of a café in the Place Saint-Andre-des-Arts I was telling my friend everything, that is to say, everything that I could say as I struggled with what was inexpressible, about that world suddenly revealed, that blazing reality which had soundlessly demolished the house of my childhood and reduced to a drift of mist the territory which had been mine. The ruined structures of my inner life lay all around me. I watched the passers-by who walked on without seeing and I thought of the amazement they would feel when they in their turn experienced the encounter that had just been granted to me. Certain that one day it would come to them as it had to me, I was smiling in advance at the thought of the surprise awaiting unbelievers and those who doubted without being aware of it. One of us recalled the posturing dictator who gave Heaven two minutes in which to strike him dead, failing which he would consider himself entitled to make a public declaration that Heaven was empty. The absurdity of this challenge to the Infinite by a grain of dust left us helpless with laughter. God existed and indeed He was present, simultaneously revealed and masked by that wordless imageless light employed by Him to give me everything to understand, everything to love. I can see well enough just how exorbitant all these assertions must seem but I cannot help it if Christianity is true, if truth exists, if that truth is a person, a person who truly wills not to be unknowable.

The miracle endured for a month. Every morning I encountered with utter joy that light which made the sun seem dark, that sweetness that I shall never forget and which is the sum total of my theological learning. It did not seem at all clear to me why it was necessary to continue my stay on this planet when all that heaven was close enough to touch, but I accepted it out of gratitude rather than conviction. Nonetheless every day that light and sweetness lost a little of their intensity. Finally they disappeared but without my being returned to solitude. The truth was to be communicated to me otherwise, I would have to seek after having found. A priest of the Holy Ghost order undertook to prepare me for baptism by instructing me in that religion of which I can only say that I knew nothing. Nothing that he told me of Christian doctrine came as a surprise and I received it with joy; the teaching of the Church was true to the very last comma and I took it to heart line by line, greeting each with the sort of applause you give to some master-stroke. Only one thing did surprise me, the Eucharist, not that it seemed to me unbelievable but that divine charity should have found this astounding means to communicate itself filled me with wonder, and above all that in order to effect it bread was chosen, the staple of the poor and the favourite food of children. Of all the gifts heaped up before me by Christianity, this one was the most beautiful.

Thus overwhelmed with blessings, I believed that my life would be an unending Christmas. I had placed myself in the hands of persons of experience and they did indeed warn me that this privileged state would come to an end, that the laws of spiritual growth were the same for everybody, that after the sweetness of my excursion into the green fields of grace emotionally experienced there would come the rockface, the climb, the risk and that I would not always be the happy child. I listened to them hardly at all. I had firmly decided not to make a second time the mistake of growing up; that was my wisdom but it was less sure than theirs. They were right, I was wrong. After the songs of Christmas I had to journey through things, the stone and asphalt of a world that little by little surreptitiously recovered its solidity. And there was a Good Friday, there was a Holy Saturday, the silence that swallows up a cry.

The greatest suffering that can be inflicted on human beings was twice visited upon my household. All fathers will understand me, all mothers even more, without need of further words. Twice I made my way to the provincial cemetery in which my own place is marked, trying to find in the midst of horror the memory of mercy. Incapable of revolt, excluded from any recourse to doubt (whom would I be doubting if not myself?), I had to live with this sword in my heart, knowing that God is love.

I am not writing to tell my own story but simply to bear witness, and my witness demands that one further thing must be told. The grave that will be mine is at the junction of two alleys. One day I was moved by casual curiosity to look and see whose tomb it was that lay exactly beside my own; it was the sepulchre of the sisters of l’Adoration Reparatrice. I am well aware of what differences and what kind of certainty can characterize the interventions of the Holy Spirit, so I do not use the word “sign.” The coincidence is enough for me. At a distance of five hundred kilometers the little sisters who were present at my birth will be present also at the hour of my death and I think, I believe, that these two moments will be identical, just as loved ones lost and sweetness rediscovered will at the last be one reality.

Love, to speak your praises, eternity will be too short.

AFTERWORD

The publication of this account won me a fair number of confidences, a good few questions—and some reproaches.

A Christian weekly, without disputing (so they said) the authenticity of my spiritual experience, declared it to be of marginal significance, too personal to be useful to everybody. They also gave me to understand that I was not “a convert of the Council” in the sense that my account gave no answer to the questions that confront the man of today.

I cannot myself see how an interior experience can be anything but “personal” if it is an experience at all nor why its being so should deprive it of significance. What can happen to one person is applicable, in whatever degree, to all others and it seems to me that Christianity is built on a series of asserted experiences quite as “personal” as my own: “Jesus has risen, his tomb is empty, I have seen him.” This is called bearing witness and all that can be said is what I myself said at the beginning of the book: the witness a man bears is only as good as the man bearing witness. I know this perfectly well. It is possible to impugn both simultaneously. But one cannot simultaneously approve the witness himself by recognizing that his account is faithfully given (as the above mentioned journal courteously concedes) and invalidate the witness he bears by declaring it inadequate, as if the still fundamental question to which the title of this book gives an answer is any less important to the man of today than it was to the man of yesterday or the day before.

I fear that Christian publications may sometimes entertain a peculiar idea of the questions posed by our contemporaries. There was an occasion at Mons, in Belgium, when at the close of a conference followed by a long discussion, I was waylaid at the exit from the hall by three young people, two boys, one girl. The one most confident came forward and said to me on behalf of all: “Sir, we did not feel able to speak up in public and we thought it better to wait till everyone had left. But we have a question to put to you. A serious question which is: “Why should one live?”

Their twenty-year old faces were indeed serious and their eyes watchful. It was perhaps only a problem of metaphysics, of the kind one forgets before finding the solution; it was perhaps only the expression of a transient distress, one of those that fade away with the memory of certain conversations. But it could also be deeper and more dangerous. I do not believe that they had put on hold an option for death, pending my answer, but in the end there was something already far away in their eyes which put me on my guard. I acted as if everything depended on what I was going to say and I talked to them for a further half hour.

These young people who were asking themselves the question “Why should one live?,” were they not “men of today”?

A different reproach. A priest, as it happens imbued with psychoanalysis, makes it a complaint against me that I have written a book of pure “description” from which, he said, all “reflexion” has been banished. And it is true that, having a simple “fact” to report, I did stick to it as closely as I could, denying myself any commentary and even any analysis, in such a way as to leave each reader free to consider it and come to his own conclusions. I had to give an account of an experience in the fullest sense of the term and not to give a demonstration. This book is not meant to be a demonstration of God’s existence; it tells of an encounter with a Person, and an encounter is something to be described and as simply as possible. But the idea that no intimate “reflexion,” implicit and understated, can enter into a “description” would come as a great surprise to artists.

A third and final reproach, at least so far as I know, was formulated by a priest who belongs to a religious order and is well known in France for his persistence in declaring that “God died in Jesus Christ.” There could be, according to him, no private revelation either to be expected or to be hoped for in a church. That leaves unexplained how it happened that I, having entered a church in what I might call a pure state of unbelief, managed to come out of it a few moments later a convinced Catholic. Did I dream it? In that case, I am still dreaming. Did I have a hallucination? I should have had a few more. Could my story be false? Nobody goes that far but it is nonetheless firmly asserted that there is not, that there cannot be any private or individual revelation.

Here again the facts are inconsistent with the theory. That is bad luck for the theory. But how many theorists do we have today, doing their utmost to make of our living faith an ideology like all the others, a system of ideas, an intellectual prison, with the superficially laudable intention of expressing the faith in terms and in a form acceptable to contemporary ways of thought! They are the same ones who daily insist on the revolutionary aspect of Christianity; it seems they do not notice the contradiction that exists between simultaneously proclaiming Christianity as a revolution and yet as a system of thought which involves no challenge to anybody’s way of thinking. One must opt for one or the other. If the apostle Paul, who is indeed the first of theologians, had been concerned, like a number of his successors, to present Christian truth in a form duly “acceptable” to his pagan listeners—I am thinking in particular of the Athenians—he would have had to play down the incarnation, the resurrection and life everlasting to such an extent that there would have been no Christianity at all for the last nineteen centuries.

It is the subtlest minds who generally fail to notice the grossest errors; and the error that consists in attempting to fit Christianity into the framework of current pagan thought is probably one of the most monstrous ever committed.

It is not out of any concern for personal justification that I am driven to opening this “postface” with a list of criticisms. They are useful in allowing me to establish certain points that I am the first to admit are not points of history and to reply indirectly to some of the questions that have been put to me in the course of the last two years. The most frequent had to do with the late date of my book’s publication, the most insistent for young people had to do with what freedom is left to a convert by a revelation on which he did not have to deliberate, and the most difficult was the identification of the Person encountered.

I have given above a preliminary answer to the first question, when I spoke of “dream” and “hallucination.” I had to prove that I did not easily abandon myself to the former and that I was not subject to the latter; if I had been so subject, the “phenomenon” could not have failed to repeat itself—which turned out not to be the case. And if I was a dreamer to the extent of having dreamed my own conversion, I would by now long since have woken up.

The second question would not be surprising if it came from convinced Marxists for whom it is already an “alienation” to be a creature in the image and likeness of One other than oneself. It does somewhat surprise me, coming from young Christians. “The truth will set you free,” says the Gospel. Divine truth does not destroy the freedom of the person it visits; it brings freedom by teaching him that there is only one true freedom, the one which on the model of God’s freedom delivers you from yourself for the love of another or others. Can it be that Christians do not know that God is love, that love is gift of self, that love is ipso facto liberating and that liberty is, so to say, only the “nom de guerre” of charity?

Giving an answer to the third question is a little awkward. By what, by what sign, by what means can one recognize, in an encounter such as that which is the subject of this book, that there is no mistake of identity? In such circumstances, what is the basis of our certitude? I think it derives quite simply from the fact, little known or little understood, that a revelation of this kind does not simply furnish to the person it affects an objective evidence to be recognized but also gives him, at the same time, the means of grasping it, a means which he does not possess naturally. It follows that the necessarily perfect correlation of the evidence and of the means of grasping it, both arriving simultaneously, creates certainty. In this connection I have adopted in my book the analogy of colours.

Let us suppose that some miracle confers for a moment on your eyes the capacity to see infra-red and ultra-violet, colours normally invisible. You would no more be in doubt as to these colours than as to those you normally see and the correlation between these colours and the supplemental capacity conferred on you would leave no hesitation in your mind. But I shall come back to this difficult point in my next book.

I say this because it has become clear to me that I have to write another book, to explain certain pages in this one. Confidences made to me as a result of this one have taught me two things at least. The first is that conversions are much more numerous than people think and are very often kept secret, either out of timidity or for fear of causing raised eyebrows in a hostile audience or again by the difficulty of finding a language appropriate to the nature of their experience; if the great mystics have always complained of their failure to do so, how can ordinary folk such as ourselves feel any confidence that they will manage it? The second thing I have learned is that there is at least this point in common with all converts, that all of them have met Somebody, not an idea or a system. They have not, for the most part, felt the attraction of an ideological structure; they have with wonder, sometimes with astonishment, discovered a person, most often the Second Person of the Trinity, like the pilgrims of Emmaus whom we see going over the events that had just taken place in Jerusalem without any understanding of what had happened, who hear the mysterious companion on their journey “explaining to them the Scriptures” and who still fail to understand, yet who suddenly recognize Jesus “in the breaking of bread.” There is in every conversion that moment of “the breaking of bread,” the transition from idea to reality, in which is revealed a person whom perhaps one did not expect. A person who is to be adored.

And have we ever had a greater need of adoration than we have today?

Click HERE to reach the associated topic for this webpage.
For more topics click HERE.