Chapter X: On the Reign of the Heart 178 (4)

That ardent eye still shone. That spiritual voice still prevailed. One day the voice faltered and sank, like a ship disabled in a storm which gives up all resistance.

That day we were sad, sad, we who had not learned to renounce.

X

Delivered from romanticism, the nineteenth century toward its close and the twentieth century at its beginning, exalted an image full of the pride of physical life, of impetuous health.

Never had humanity seemed more intoxicated with its carnal development, with its splendid animality, than at the very moment when the war broke out. Our humanity! behold it now, covered with wounds so deep that for long decades the sight of them will baffle us and fill our pity with despair.

Behold it now, like a vast race of invalids. It creeps over a world where now there are more graveyards than villages.

We have had an unparalleled experience of sorrow and renunciation.

And yet the desire for happiness is deeply rooted: the unanimous voice to which our world listens repeats, from amid the sobs: “We shall renounce nothing!”

To him who listens with an attentive ear, it says again, it says particularly: “We shall renounce nothing, not even renunciation!”

But let us leave this immense grief to itself. Let us leave it to satiate and appease itself with its own contemplation--Silence!

VII
THE SHELTER OF LIFE

I

Two immense worlds remain faithful to me when the others discourage or betray me. Two refuges open to my heart when it is weary, faltering or harassed with temptation.

I should like very much to tell you about them, since you are my friend. I can tell you, since you have nothing to envy me, since you bear within yourself two such worlds, two kingdoms that will submit to you undividedly, without contest.

Yesterday I was watching some prisoners working. They were pushing the trunk of a tree lashed to a cart. Sweat was rolling down their faces, for the heat was great, the slope steep and the load heavy. An armed soldier was watching them. Large letters were printed on their clothes to proclaim their servitude. And I thought: they live, they do not look too unhappy, they do not seem crushed by their condition. And if this is so, it is not because they have the placidity of beasts. No! Look at their eyes, listen to their voices. It is precisely because they are men and they carry everywhere with them two refuges, whither the gaoler cannot follow them, two precious possessions that no punitive discipline can snatch from them: their future and their memories.

The longer I watch, from close by, those men who, for four years have led the inhuman life of the army, the better I understand the meaning of their incredible patience: between the future and the remembered past they have the air of awaiting the passage of a storm. They are gulping down, you would say, hastily and with closed eyes, this bitter and criminal present, in order to reserve their hearts all the better for the things of the future and the past. One feels in their conversation only these two luminous existences. They seek and unite them unceasingly above the bloody abyss. I have also observed that, in the concerts they give themselves to cheer their periods of rest, their souls always return, with the same rapture, to their former way of living, to their old sons, their familiar ways of being sad or joyous. The artistic attempts that are carried on to interest them, at the bottom of their hearts, in the formidable present, remain sterile and, as it were, dry.

They seem to reply, silently: “What have all these things to do with us? Isn’t it enough for us to live them? Isn’t it enough for us to do them, every day with our blood and tears? Give us back our dear kingdom. Give back to our souls that memory which is their most imperishable and marvelous possession.”

II

Between the future and the remembered past, man is left to struggle with what he possesses least, the present.

And yet this present is lavish of all sorts of materials that we can transform into riches. It is our liquid fortune, mobile and in circulation. It is the well-filled purse upon which we draw for our daily needs.

It reaches us out of the depths of time, like a great river, loaded with sailing-ships and steamers, deep, flowing, beautiful with all its reflections, and rolling gold in its sands.

But it has its rages, its whims, its cruelties. According to the season, it overflows and desolates the land or suddenly dries up and deserts the fields that it refreshed with its floods!

So be it! If the present refuses to yield its manna, we will draw upon our last resources. If the times overwhelm us with bitterness, we will flee to our refuges, where we have nothing to fear from intruders or masters or tormentors.

Common-sense folk, who have the secret of debasing life in the name of a reason that is more mischievous than actual stupidity, are in the habit of devoting an almost superstitious worship to the present reality. To tell the truth, they are greatly afraid that the taste for memory and hope will turn young men away from that immediate action which is necessary for the conquest and preservation of material wealth.

They honor with great pomp the origins in the past of those traditions that are favorable to them; and the way they invoke and prepare for the future loads the present with chains and shackles.

They dread, in reverie, an enemy of action. As if there were any great actions that have not their source in great dreams!

These people deceive themselves. They sacrifice an unequalled consolation to the needs of a fleeting fortune. But do not imagine that the failure of their fortune leaves these men utterly abandoned: the refuges open gladly, even for those who have despised them.

III

An intimate friend once said to me, as he watched his little son playing: “You see; he’s no longer the baby you knew last year. He’s another child. I have been cheated of the one I had last year. I shall never have him again. I have lost a child.”

O dear, big heart, how beautiful and how unjust those words are! How human! How they overflow with ingratitude and with adoration!

You know quite well that every object that appears on the horizon of our souls has, for us, two existences. One is sudden, sharp, almost always penetrated with an intense and, so to say, corrosive flavor: that is the existence of the present. Men agree in recognizing that its duration is hardly measurable. But the other existence is perennial, as ample as the measure of our life and our thoughts; in this sense it is almost infinite.

Thus each moment of the present survives in memory for years, and doubtless for centuries, since posterity can gather up and prolong the best of our acts and our works.

It is true, my friend, that each moment dispossesses us, even of the object we never withdraw our arms from. The miser, infatuated with his material riches, may well suffer agony of mind over them, but we, we? Do we not know that each moment restores to us, transfigured, all the treasures it has snatched away from us? It robs us of the frailer blessings, it offers us imperishable blessings, less mortal than ourselves.

You have conquered one whole happy day. Contemplate without regret the sleep that marks its end, for you will continue to live this day during all the rest of jour life. And if this day was truly beautiful, do you not know that others after you will continue to live it, down, ever farther down, the succession of the years?

Let your son grow, without too much anxiety, like a beautiful tree: the child he was once, the child he was but now, the child he is at present, you will not lose them, O insatiable heart! They will escort you toward old age, like a beloved multitude that increases every day and cannot die.

Owing to the war, I have seen my own child only seven times, and each time I have hardly recognized him. Seven times I have believed him lost. I know now that I have seven lovely images in my soul, seven children to adorn and hearten my solitude.

IV

There are beauties which the present fails to appreciate. That is natural, because it is greedy, disordered, care-ridden. Memory exists to see that justice is done. To it falls the divine rôle of restoring and, at times, pardoning. (It is memory which, in the last resort, vindicates and judges. It is in its light that things appear to us under the aspect of eternity.)

None of our thoughts would be really happy that had not received the approbation of memory, that did not find themselves sealed at last with its sovereign imprint. We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory. Like the images the photographer plunges into a golden bath, our sentiments take on color; and only then, after that recoil and that transfiguration, do we understand their real meaning and enjoy them in all their tranquil splendor.

Days of ours that had seemed to us dull and hopeless show themselves in memory luminous and decisive. Journeys undertaken without eagerness, without enthusiasm, and without any of the freshness of surprise, become, from a distance, fruitful in revelations and discoveries.

Every reality develops with time a thousand aspects of itself that are just as real, as charged with meaning and consequence, as the original aspect. We cannot foretell what memory will contrive for us. It is a treasure all the more precious and unexpected because it is so independent of our rudimentary logic. For the logic of memory is more subtle than ours; it seems entirely free from our miserable calculations; it draws its inspirations from our true interests, which we ourselves are forever misapprehending. The slow task it pursues testifies to so rare a virtue and so munificent a wisdom that man, struck with his own unworthiness, might well seek there the signs of a divine intervention.

Sometimes it is a friend, whom we have misunderstood or misjudged, who takes on in memory his true aspect and his true stature and reveals the profound influence which, without our knowing it, he has exercised over our thoughts.

Sometimes it is a word which we heard at first with an inattentive or distrustful ear, and which we find again engraved in letters of gold over the portico of the secret temple where we love to collect our thoughts.

Like some skilful goldsmith, memory seizes the materials that our life accumulates haphazard. It submits them to the touchstone, fashions them, embellishes them and imprints upon them that mysterious sheen which gives them their distinctive meaning and their value.

V

The cult of memory should not turn us away from the present out of which memory itself draws its nourishment.

We sometimes meet men of whom plain people say, with profound wisdom, “Their mind is elsewhere.” It is true; they are the timid and tormented souls who have early sought in memory a refuge which nothing, it seems, could ever make them renounce.

Let us beware of troubling this retreat. Some day, perhaps, we may long for one like it. But however deeply one may seem to have taken refuge in memory, one cannot escape the clutch, the invasion of the present.

It is best, therefore, and with all the strength that is in us, to accept, honor, love this present as the principal source of our riches.

If the true cult of memory were a less exceptional moral usage, many men would hesitate to create bad memories for themselves; for our worst memories are not those of our sufferings, our ordeals, our privations, but of our shameful acts, our cowardices and our betrayals.

Our weakness lasted only a moment; must we really, for thirty years, feel the hostile stare of that moment resting heavily upon us? Who knows? Hope, even so, in the clemency of memory, which is able to mitigate and pardon everything. It is indulgent and full of pity. In a world given over to spite and reprisals, it remains the only inviolable refuge of the outcast, as the cathedrals used to be in the days of the right of sanctuary.

For him who descends with true fervor into his own depths, memory always preserves some corner pure from all baseness. Do we not know, moreover, that in order to console us memory consents to work in concert even with its enemy, forgetfulness?

VI

Who can dispute with us the world of memory? No one! And who would dare, without fear, to do so? It is because we are more ardently attached to this possession than to any other.

At times, a clumsy or malevolent hand succeeds in smirching one of our dear memories. Then we experience an indignation and a despair as lasting and profound as if these sentiments recognized their cause in the loss or the fall of a loved being.

Happily this criminal work implies a rarely evil spirit, a sort of perverse genius of which humanity is none too prodigal. And then our memory is a territory too vast, too mountainous, too impregnable as a whole for the rage of hostile destruction to be able to defile or mar large portions of it. The best of our memories thus remain in safety and for us alone. Besides, we keep careful watch around this fortune.

Our great memories are actual moral personages, so necessary to our happiness that we bear them under a sacred arch, sheltered from all injury, from all contact. It is into this solitude that we go ceaselessly to question them, invoke them, call them to witness.

A past in common does not always give memories in common, so true it is that the heart defends itself, in its innermost retreat, as the physical self defends its flesh against the intrusions of the stranger.

It sometimes happens that men find pleasure in recalling in our presence the episodes of an existence that was passed, by themselves or by them and us, in companionship. It is then that we measure the road our soul has travelled on its solitary path: these things of which they speak to us, these deeds which, it seems, we have performed, these landscapes which they remember having crossed in our company, we no longer recognize; we do not even wish to recognize them. We smile in an embarrassed, awkward, unhappy way. Our whole attitude says: “Is it really true that we have drunk from the same cup? For all that, it was not the same wine we drank, and my intoxication is not yours.”

We cannot give to one who is dear to us a greater proof of love than to admit him to the intimacy of our memories. We have need of all our tenderness to help us to introduce another soul into the subterranean basilica, to lead that soul as close as possible to the refuge where, in spite of all, there is only room for one.

Perfect communion in memory is an extraordinary favor, and an admonition. If it is given to you to enjoy it, open your arms and receive one elect soul.

VII

No doubt you have had the experience, when passing through a country where you were travelling for the first time, of stopping short, as you rounded a mountain, before some unknown horizon, and finding it strangely familiar.

No doubt you have had the experience of arriving at night in a dark square where you knew you had never been before, and briskly finding your way through it, just as if you were resuming some old habit.

At times the spectacle of a smiling valley arrests you at the top of some hill. You thought you knew nothing of this country, and yet strange and sure impressions guide you; they are like old memories. You advance, and behold, you are looking at everything as if you recognized it. That road which winds between the pastures, as supple and sinuous as a beautiful river of yellow water,--you are almost certain you have followed it long ago, in some misty, far-off existence which, nevertheless, is not your own.

There are times, too, when you are dreaming, as you sit alone, and suddenly a memory passes over you: the memory of some act the man you are surely never performed. Yet it is not a fabrication, an invention. You know, you feel, that it is a personal memory. A memory of what world? Of what life?

Do not reject this shadowy treasure, and do not tremble! Do not accept complacently the explanations of the superstitious or of the pseudo-scientists. The flesh of your flesh was not born yesterday. Something survives in it that is contemporaneous with all the generations. Many a revelation awaits us. Let us keep for them a soul that is accessible, experienced, and not too distrustful.

VIII

Do not imagine that to possess memory is to possess a dead world.

Among your friends there is surely one who has a house and a garden. From time to time he invites you to visit him. Every time you enter his house you observe some striking change: he has connected two parts of the building which till then had no means of communication. He has planted some new trees. The old elms are flourishing. Some rosebushes have died. Urns have been set out on the lawn. The life of men, of animals, of plants has drawn the inanimate world into its toils, modeled it, sculptured it, forced it to take part in the movement of the soul.

It is in like fashion that the domains of memory cultivate themselves and live. They are not ruins, inalterable, rigid, fixed forever in the ice of some past epoch. Life still penetrates and moves them; they do not cease to share in its enterprises, its labors, its festivals.

When a man has opened for you several times the same gate in the wall, when several times he has related the same adventure to you, with intervals of a few months or a few years, observe closely the spots to which he leads you and the persons to whom he presents you. Every time you will find new things, you will find that roads have been laid out, underbrush cut down, windows opened and unexpected supernumeraries called in.

Is it true then that that was a dead tale, wrapped up in what we call the shroud of the past?

The world of “living memory” is so indissolubly bound up with our resolutions and our acts that in accumulating memories we feel we are preparing, erecting our future itself.

IX

There is another refuge!

“What makes hope so intense a pleasure,” writes M. Bergson, “is that the future, which we fashion to suit ourselves, appears to us at one and the same time under a multitude of forms, all equally smiling, equally possible. Even if the most desirable of them all is realized, we must have sacrificed the others, and we shall have lost much. The idea of the future, pregnant with infinite possibilities, is therefore more fertile than the future itself, and that is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in reverie than in reality.”

The idea of the future alone interests us: that alone is our treasure, that alone is endowed with existence. It is that indeed which we call the future. And if M. Bergson, at the end of these admirable lines, creates a distinction between the future and the idea of the future, he does not make us forget that he has just, and as if by design, caused the confusion; for what “we fashion to suit ourselves” is the idea of the future, and nothing else. But, following the example of M. Bergson, let us call our idea of the future the future itself.

This idea is our cherished fortune. Certainly we take a passionate interest in seeking, in what flows out of the present, something that resembles the realization of our dreams. And yet their realization, like their failure, marks, in every sense, their end, their exhaustion. And that is insupportable to us. Whatever fate the present reserves for our imaginings, we labor every day, as fast as time devours them and destroys them by making them finite, to push them further back into the infinite, to prolong them, to reconstruct them, so that we may never have less of a future at our disposal.

This need of a future, which has no other connection than our hope with the rugged actuality of the present, is so deep-rooted, so generally human a thing, that one cannot contemplate it without a respect which is almost religious. In order that this future, so pregnant with dreams, should be as necessary as it is to the moral life of most men, it must represent a truly incomparable treasure. The embrace we throw around it is the close and powerful embrace we reserve for those possessions that lie nearest our hearts. And, since we have already detached the word “possession” from the gross meaning that is usually attributed to it, let us say that the possession of a dream, when it assures our happiness, is a reality less debatable and less illusory than the possession of a coal-mine or a field of wheat.

But as there is no possession without conquest, without effort, we must merit our dreams and cultivate them lovingly.

If people who have taken the mould of reason reproach us with distracting for a moment the men of that practical reality which pretends to be preparing the future, we are ready to reply to them:

“Glance at those men to whom our words are addressed. You know that they are crushed with fatigue and privation. They have experienced every danger and every sort of weariness. By what right will you hinder them from taking refuge in a world which is henceforth the least contestable of their domains? Do not, on their account, be afraid of reverie; it could never fill them with as much bitterness as does this modern reality of which you are the unpunished builders.

“If you are not weary of glimpsing your future through the specifications, the account-books, the cage-bars, and the unbreathable fumes of industrialism, at least allow these to cherish a marvelous and, in spite of all its disappointments, an efficacious future. It is not a question of forgetting life,--that is too beautiful and too desirable, but rather of amplifying and fertilizing it. Whatever may be the outcome of a generous dream, it always ennobles the man who has entertained it. Allow the unhappy to be rich in a possession that costs them only love and simple faith. Do not let your reason dispossess them of the only treasure that your greed has not been able to snatch from them. It is the cult of the future and of memory that sustains man in the uncertainty of the present hour. If he walks by instinct towards these refuges, do not turn him aside, and think, O priests of reason, of the warning of Pascal: ‘It is on the knowledge of the heart and of the instincts that Reason has to lean, and establish there the whole of her discourse’.”

X

I have seen thousands of men suffer and die. Every day I see new ones enter the somber arena and struggle. My part is to help them in this torment, to assure them aid and hope. I have a wide experience of these things now and I know that men are never denied a future, even when life is on the point of betraying them.

Philosophers and poets, led astray by religion or by a mystical passion for death, have given the severe counsel that we should never conceal from the dying the approach of their annihilation. It is a theoretical view of charity, an artificial, mischievous doctrine that does not stand the test, that should not be put to the test. Its partisans suspect falsehood where there is only pity and modesty, for it is not the part of man to be so proud of his own judgment as to take away from someone with the certitude of life that fabulous future which is more precious than life itself.

I remember, in 1915, a wounded man, who had just received the visit of a priest moved by praiseworthy intentions and a clumsy exaltation, saying to me suddenly, “I know now that I am going to die!” and beginning to weep terribly. I went to see the priest and reproached him for his behavior. “What!” that eloquent man replied haughtily, “do you who are incapable of preserving this unhappy man’s earthly life blame me for assuring him his future life?” Alas! Alas! I still think of the sobs of that wounded man; they were those of one who has just lost his supreme wealth and to whom nothing else can make amends.

Soldiers who, in the full vigor of their youth, suffer a severe, a final mutilation experience at first that is like a veritable amputation of their future, so true is it that every part of our physical self is intimately bound up with the labors of our dream. Then, with surprising rapidity, and long before the disorder of the tissues has been exorcised, one sees them filling in the moral breach, raising up the crumbled wall, propping it hastily and reconstructing, quite as new but quite complete and tightly shut, the sacred fortress outside which their soul remains vulnerable and disarmed.

In truth, the man who is condemned to death is still rich in the future, even when his body sinks, ten times pierced by bullets, even when he has only one drop of blood left, one flickering spark of life.

XI

O present hour, magnificent, foaming fountain, you know very well that we shall be faithful to you! With your thousand animated faces, your landscapes, your problems, your combats and that heavy burden of jostling ideas you carry with you, you will always attract us, you will see us all together drinking of your waters.

But when you no longer contain for us anything but anger and hatred, greed and cruelty, then indeed we must each of us abandon you and turn to our refuges; we must each of us withdraw into the Thebaid where all things still respond to our voice, to our voice alone.

May our fate preserve us from the greatest of all misfortunes! May our refuges never lose in our eyes their virtue and their security! This supreme affliction at times befalls us, and it is then that our souls, exiled from their homeland, must set themselves humbly to the search for the lost grace.

VIII
THE CHOICE OF THE GRACES

I

What man, tell me, what man, were he suddenly delivered from disgust with himself, from terror of the world, from the sadness of an age that is without pity, from remorse for a thing he has done, from the fear of things he has to do, what man, suffering from one of these evils, or from several of them or from all at once, would not experience an immense relief, would not feel a certain absolution for the errors of the universe, a certain alleviation of his own in the contemplation of this little osier-bed which I descry this evening, at the turning of a lane?

What is there so profound, so divine in that scene?

Nothing, nothing, no doubt. Everything, perhaps. For who would venture to maintain that there is anything in the world that might not be a sign for my heart and yet be nothing more? I was following a stone wall, an indecipherable wall at present, without significance, without compassion, an enemy. It shut in my view and my thoughts, it was covered with cold mosses and all the dampness of winter. And then, all at once, the wall ended and there was a little valley crowned with these osiers. Yes, I mean crowned, for it seemed as if all its desires had been granted, all its aspirations satisfied, all its prayers fulfilled.

Thousands of crimson branches rose in a chorus toward heaven, like clusters of some smooth, straight, up-springing coral. All the branches rose together, with one brotherly impulse, like the desires of a world freed from ambitions and vowed to the one, the noblest ambition of all. But why seek for words, why strive to paint it? Surely it was not the flaming sap of the young shoots any more than the little rivulets smoking like censers at their feet,--it was neither of these things that promised relief and deliverance. It was the entire world that manifested itself in this, its smallest fragment, just as the most secretive man will betray himself by the trembling of his little finger or the flutter of an eyelash.

II

I was once saved by the tarpaulin of a humble delivery wagon. That tarpaulin certainly knew no more about it than did the men who owned it, or had the use of it here below. There are, in every object, qualities we are ignorant of and that are precisely those through which this object fulfils its most beautiful rôle in the universe, those to which it inclines as if toward some miraculous purpose, which are indeed its vocation and its true destiny.

I remember it was a morning in February, one of those hopeless mornings which we feel do not deserve the evening and will hardly attain it. I do not know what I had done to myself or to my men to have so completely lost all courage and purpose; but that morning I was certainly the most destitute of beings and the least worthy of an act of grace.

Yet for all that, grace was shown me, for that marvelous tarpaulin appeared. It was of heavy canvas, yellow and green. Its color, its folds, its whole appearance, the form it concealed, in fact I know not what element in it, showed me that I still could live, that my faults were forgiven me, that nothing about me was irremediable.

I am willing to pass for a man who is eager for forgiveness, a man who is satisfied with little. We wish to set our own value on everything, as if the things of the spirit meant the same thing as money, as if they did not depend upon quite another spirit than that of the accountants and geometricians.

I met a priest,--it was since the war began,--with whom I often talked about penance and contrition. I asked him one day what price he would ask for the remission of the heaviest burden on one’s conscience. He answered without hesitation: “Three paters and three aves.” This man was corrupted by the customs of the world and its authorities. He filled me with a sort of desire to insult him, and I confess I gave him some rude shocks. Since then I have reflected. I have not become reconciled to the memory of that priest, but I believe that grace touches us in a most unforeseen way; it shines out suddenly, without any reason, like the radiant blue in a sky where one has not expected it. It manifests itself without regard to the efforts we make to deserve it, and the occasions it selects are not in proportion to our distress. But how sovereign it is, how much the most desirable of all blessings!

Remember, remember! you were walking through the streets, a prey to some irremediable pain. Your poverty seemed unlimited, for it could not be palliated by more money, an improvement in your health or the renewal of a broken friendship. And yet, nevertheless, you suddenly breathed in the wind an imperceptible odor, familiar, charged with memories, you suddenly encountered in the color of a house, or in the look of an unknown face, some mysterious sign, and you felt that your wealth had been given back to you, that it flowed through you once more as the saving blood returns to the heart of the dying man.

I was walking one day along the banks of the Aisne, the prey of an illimitable mental torture which, just because there was no reason for it, seemed incurable. The image of a bridge in the water suddenly gave me back my confidence in myself and my accustomed joyousness. It was only a reflection; but never believe those who tell you that these things are nothing but reflections.

III

When a man who is cruelly wounded in his body or his spirit preserves a cheerful faith and never ceases to be the master of his misfortune, I say that he has grace.

When a true man is able, for an hour, to contemplate without uneasiness his own thoughts and actions, I say that he is touched with grace, and I hope that hour may last a day and that day an entire life.

Like a sailing-vessel that stretches through the air its slender, vibrant cables, probes the sky with its strong and supple masts, offers to the wind, at ever-varying angles, the white resistance of its sails and marvelously dominates all the forces of the air while seeming to obey them, the man who possesses grace enjoys a communion that is profound, perfect, exquisite, not only with whatever in the world is perceptible to us, but above all with what is unknown.

That man weighs much in the baskets of the winnower. That man does not see only within the limits of his own flesh. He fills in his own self almost the whole universe, participates gloriously in the infinite.

I know that it often happens that the beautiful ship sees its sails sinking in distress and no longer feels its ropes trembling in the wind. The time comes when it stops painfully in the stupor and indifference of noon.

The time comes when the rich man suddenly finds himself on Job’s dung-heap. The time comes when, without reason, grace deserts the heart.

Wait expectantly, with sails spread like an ear, with rigging firm, and perhaps, where others less trustful would find themselves abandoned, you will perceive a certain relenting breeze.

You must never lose contact with the universe if you wish to live in the state of grace.

IV

Welcome your own true thought, whatever may be the hour at which it visits you. If it chooses to rouse you in the middle of the night, rise to do it honor and look at it with clear eyes.

There are some who have just missed an hour of greatness because they preferred to slumber under the warm eiderdown. The spirit called them in a low voice, in the darkness of the cold room; they did not rise and they will never know what they might have become. They will try to console themselves by thinking they have dreamed; will they ever console themselves?

There are some who, suddenly, through the mist of tobacco smoke, have seen their souls, like some long-awaited supernatural being, watching them.

At the moment they were playing cards or reading their paper; they thought: “Wait, I’ll join you in a moment.” The game ended, or the paper thrown aside, the visitor had departed.

They rushed forth in pursuit, their hearts convulsed with shame and anguish. Alas! the deep melancholy glance will perhaps never shine upon them again. Perhaps they will never again come face to face with themselves.

In the midst of pleasure, when you are enjoying the company of a woman or the conversation of bold, intelligent men, if you chance to hear the voice of solitude singing like a siren at your feet, leave everything to flee with her.

V

When Epictetus said: “Our good and evil exist only in our own will,” he misstated the problem. That is one way of solving it, but more often it is a way of assuming that it has been solved, an expedient for passing it over.

I am not happy today; I am not pleased with myself, I am not pleased with anyone; I feel quite certain that everything I undertake will be a failure, above all, above all, I do not want to undertake anything; I view all things with an unprofitable eye, an irritable and apparently dried-up soul. I am driven to suffer myself and make others suffer. Oh! I am without grace! I know it and I am far from admiring myself. Secretly I long to feel grace at last descending on my head and shoulders like a mantle of soft sunshine, like the honeyed perfume that falls from the lime-trees.

What does that old man want? Why does he repeat with a sort of obstinacy: “It depends upon you to make a good use of every event”?

No doubt it depends upon me!

But what are we to do when nothing can be blamed upon events? And what when, indeed, there are no events.

Is it true that it depends upon me to be myself at such times also? Answer me, great, silent trees! Answer me, fir-tree, weighted down with sleet and dreaming--Heine has told me--of the palm consumed with burning heat in the tropics.

“Drive out,” replies the philosopher, “drive out your desires and your fears and you will never again suffer tyranny.”

True; but I have only one fear: not to be the best man I may; only one desire, not to give in to myself.

The sage shrugs his shoulders and then says in a gentle voice: “Bear and forbear.” And he is not thinking only of the storms that come from without.

He says this because he well knows that in order to be happy one must be visited by grace.

All the stoics have drawn up rules of virtue. Not one has suggested the means that will give us the strength to apply them. For the wish is not enough. The gift is necessary, that secret impulse which is grace itself.

VI

Praise be to thee, divine world, that hast delivered me from anger by revealing to me in time that trembling blossom of the convolvulus!

Praise be to thee, divine world, that, at the very limit of my fatigue, in the midst of my perils, hast chosen mysterious ways to light me with an inner smile!

Millions of unhappy men who are suffering at this moment on the fields of distracted Europe are aware that at the blackest moment of distress a strange consolation can penetrate them; it is as if the fingers clutching one’s heart suddenly relaxed their grip. There are some who call this God. Many others give no name to the miracle, but long for it on their knees all the same.

The voice no longer speaks from the burning bush. Sometimes it is the sound of last year’s leaves still rustling in the branches of an oak. Sometimes there is no sound; only the speaking glance of a veronica in ecstasy among the April fields.

I am quite willing to bear, but I do not wish to forbear. I do not wish not to meet grace halfway, not to seek for it in the night flooded with frosty perfumes, in the tossing forest where two interlocked branches groan through the long hours, on the plateau haunted with thistles that labor with feverish piety to perpetuate their innumerable lineage.

I ask only to be allowed to interrogate the earth like those who seek minerals and water-courses, and to experience every morning the green ascent of the spring-time over the rocky slopes.

I do not know by what path joy will come; I ask only to be permitted, none the less, to go to meet it, for truly I cannot sit here by this mile-post at the cross-roads, and placidly await it.

One joy has come to me during the war, one that is undoubtedly the greatest joy of my life: that of having a child. My reason did not revolt at it, it did not dare to tell me that it was foolhardy to desire a child at a time when the human world was left without defense against confusion, disorder and crime. Yes, I rejoiced to have a man-child born to me now when the future of men seems to be corrupted for long years to come. I even hailed the child as a savior. You see, the paths of joy are as unknown to us as those of grace.

I shall not forbear, therefore, and when I feel my heart bleeding from an unjust wound I shall go with respectful steps and recover myself in the world of solitude. I shall not ask in the name of justice, I shall not insist, I shall not importune; I shall wait until it manifests itself and sets me free, I shall wait until at last it bestows upon me the grace which, like a fine sap, like mother’s milk, it always contains.

Solitude! I can still conquer it among a hundred thousand chattering companions; I know how to sing to myself little songs that surround me with the silence of the steppes.

I will go back again to the ravine where, the whole summer long, a blackbird I know of whistles that same liquid song that grows purer and more perfect from week to week. Ten notes are his whole career and his reason for being. Perhaps on a day that music will be just what my soul needs to recover its flight, like a stranded bark which a lazy wave has just set floating.

I will go back to the spots where I have been happy, and I do not think this will be very imprudent; for, like the perfume a woman leaves in her garments, like a drop of wine in the bottom of a glass, a little happiness often remains attached to things.

I shall go out again behind the hamlet, where I know that every morning a couple of turtle-doves mingle a plaint that secretly cuts the silence, hollows it with a melodious tunnel.

And I shall stretch myself out there, my face to the sky, like a well-exposed vine that longs to ripen some fine fruit.

I am saying what I shall do, with the sole purpose, with the deep desire, that you will all do the same, and that you will each turn to your favorite star; and all this with the earnest desire that you will not be content to remain sheep marked, without redemption, for the knife.

It requires little at times. The soul is not more exacting than the body. I have seen exhausted soldiers whom a single swallow of brandy raised up again to the heights of courage. I have seen seriously wounded men brought back to life when their bodies were turned a little in order to facilitate the uncertain flow of the blood.

The soul is no less fragile, no less sensitive. If the western view keeps you sad, turn lightly to the south. We do not know what the divine world holds in store.

VII

Happy are those who are able to pray. It is thus that Christians solicit grace.

It is easy to fall on one’s knees; but to be able to pray one must already possess that grace which one implores. It is so great a gift, the gift of prayer, that it is almost indelicate to desire anything else from it.

To drink is a small matter. To be thirsty is everything.

Why do the Christians, who counsel us to pray in order to obtain grace, never tell us what we must do in order to be able to pray? It is not for nothing, nevertheless, that they arrange the play of light and shade through their stained-glass windows, the odor of stones and incense, the silence of the vaults and the propitiatory sights of the organ, all those harmonious snares set for the wandering prayer.

As for me, I shall take a staff and go out seeking the solitude of the world. If this world is a city street at dawn,--that will do! A misty dock, its outline broken by rails and masts,--that will do! A sunken road, lighted by the flowering broom,--that will do! The court of a barrack, the muddy enclosure of a prison-camp, oh! pitiful as it may seem to me, may it still seem good!

If I can walk, straight before me or far and wide, I can pray. If I can see a scrap of the sky, I can pray. And with all nature offered to my soul, I can pray, I can pray in spite of everything and as if without willing it. I must see that osier-bed, or the radiant awning of that wagon, or the image of the bridge in the water. I must hear the moaning of those interlaced branches; then I am able to feel myself bathed in grace.

Grace! It is indeed the fleeting consciousness man has of his divinity.

And now, now especially, and more than ever, we say to ourselves, man must have faith in his divinity!

IX
APOSTLESHIP

I

The beautiful legend of the multiplication of the loaves of bread is miraculous only in the material order to which we try to confine it. But the infinite multiplication of moral nourishment is our daily spectacle, our joy, our encouragement.

We know that the possession of material goods inclines us to exclusiveness, solitary satisfaction: if I wish to share with you this beautiful apple I hold in my hand, I must make up my mind to enjoy only half of it myself. And if there are four of us the part each one has will be proportionally reduced. Ah! blessed would be the wonder-worker who could refresh us all with a single glass of water, stay us all with a single mouthful of bread.

That miracle flashes forth every day before our eyes. All moral wealth seems to increase by being possessed in common. The more a truth is spread abroad the more its beauty, its prestige, and in a way its efficacy, grows. The veneration a hundred peoples throw round a painting of da Vinci’s, a song of Glück’s, or a saying of Spinoza’s has not partitioned these lovely treasures but has added to their importance and their glory, has developed and opened up the whole sum of joy that lies latent in them. Great ideas have such radiant strength! They cross space and time like avalanches: they carry along with them whatever they touch. They are the only riches that one shares without ever dividing them.

This fact invites each one of us to make himself the modest and persevering apostle of his own truths, the propagator of his discoveries, the dispenser of his moral riches. Our own interest demands it imperatively, no less than the interest of others. We shall never be really happy until we have admitted and converted to our joy those whom we love; and we shall love them all the better for having brought them some joy, for being among the causes of their comfort.

The journeys we have made alone without companions leave us a memory that is melancholy and without warmth. It is because we have had no one to whom we could communicate our admiration, our wonder. Seated alone before the most majestic landscapes, we have had no one to whom we could express our enthusiasm, and deprived of this expansion it has been stunted, it has remained, we might say, poor. Sharing it would have enriched it.

We love solitude, indeed; it is the cold and silent fountain at which our soul is purified and confirmed. But what would it profit us to have amassed great riches, by the help of solitude, if we had no one to whom to offer them?

It is because he feels this anxiety that man seeks a lasting union. Among a thousand generosities, love offers him the opportunity to enjoy companionship without renouncing solitude. A happy home is the solitude of many a soul. The man who has entered into a beautiful union is sure of at least one person to whom he can give the best that he possesses.

II

Perhaps you will say to me: “How can I be an apostle when I have in myself only a wavering faith? I would enjoy being generous, but I am obliged to beg from the generosity of others. Such advice is for those rich souls who, precisely because they are rich, have no need of advice. It is with this kind of fortune as it is with money, it crowns those who already possess it! My soul is poor and timid; what sort of comfort would it be for other souls that are poor and timid also?”

O my friend, how deceived you are in yourself! How much like ingratitude your modesty seems! First of all, let me tell you that the heart that doubts its resources is rich without knowing it. The passion of humility weighs it down; let it free itself without becoming proud! In the realm of the intelligence, you have surely observed, it is only actual imbeciles who never doubt their faculties. The man who can admit his own insufficiency at once gives proof of a rare perspicacity. In the same way, if you think you are poor it is because you are not. The only natures that are truly arid are those who do not recognize and never will recognize their own sterility.

This morning you went out at dawn to take up your duties. In the marsh that slumbers along the edge of the road there were such delicate green and purple reflections that you were struck by them. You spoke to me about them, very subtly and sensitively, as soon as you were able to see me. You were generous with me. You shared your good fortune with me. Thank you!

Who spoke to me about Faisne’s unhappiness? Who suddenly opened my eyes and made me realize the profound misery of that soul? It was you! I am still touched by your affectionate insight, I still marvel at your fortune.

You remember that night when we were lying stretched out together in the fields, looking up at a sky that was rippling with milky light. You said nothing to me, but I understood that evening that you were possessed, to the point of intoxication, with an immense, terrible idea, that of infinity. Thanks to your silence, I shared with you that overwhelming treasure.

Who lent me that beautiful Swedish book I did not know? Who spoke to me so enthusiastically about it? It was you, you again!

Who sings to me, when I am tired, that song as poignant and serene as a breath that has come from beyond the midnight oceans? You know very well, my friend, it is you.

I could tell you of a thousand instances of your generosity, a thousand apostolic words that have issued from your lips.

Ah! my friend, can you disavow such riches? Can you show at the same time such bitterness and such prodigality?

Every day you discover a means of transforming into happiness the elements that others possess and neglect. Do not hesitate, therefore: show them the fruitful use they ought to make of their blessings.

And do not ask any other recompense than the pleasure of having been the giver, the initiator.

The total amount of joy that prevails on the face of our world is of great importance to you and to me. One must always labor to augment it, whoever the direct beneficiaries may be. There is no one who, in the end, will not catch its echo, who will not receive his own personal profit from it.

And that is also why, in the present immense misery of the world, the selfish pleasure-seekers feel themselves ill at ease, even when their untimely pleasures are seen by nobody.

III

If you will, we can begin with the resolution never to undeceive anyone who thinks he possesses anything.

There are some who make it their care and pride to deprive their neighbors of those illusions that Ibsen calls “the vital illusions.” The characteristic of these illusions is that they cannot be replaced. To tear them away leaves a man mutilated, without any possible reparation.

Young people, assuredly, have a very exuberant sap and all sorts of encumbering shoots. Skillful and careful shears may well cut off, here and there, these over-greedy branches--and the tree will bear heavier and more fragrant fruit.

But can you without guilt take away his wealth from that old man whose illusion is his only pleasure? Beware of cutting off all its leaves from that old trunk that will never bring forth again and has nothing but its foliage with which to subsist and feel the sun.

Distrust those men who have what is like a false passion for truth. They are swollen with presumptuous vanity. They do not know that real truth exists only where there is faith, even faith without an object. Of what importance is the object? It is in faith itself that our grandeur lies.