‘Je la possède. Je suis dans la vérité puisque la sécurité où je suis est si bonne! Il n’y a rien dans le monde à quoi je puisse comparer le bonheur que ma foi me donne. J’y tiens davantage qu’à la vie elle-même. J’ai été comme un verger où le vent a passé, maintenant je suis un verger doré avec de beaux fruits.
‘Et comme j’esquissais un discret sourire de scepticisme, M. Francis Jammes me regarda avec infiniment de générosité.
‘Je vous souhaite le bonheur que j’ai.’
‘I was converted on the 7th of July, 1905,’ began M. Francis Jammes, when I asked him if I were not indiscreet in seeking to trace the progress of his mind from indifference to fervour.
‘You were not always a Catholic?’
‘I was christened a Catholic, but that was about all: that, and a sort of sympathy for the fine literary themes afforded by the Church, mixed by much disdain for what I no longer call the “churchiness” of old women. I was a Pagan, a veritable Faun! Flowers, forests, women—I was in love with all that lived! In all Nature there was not a merrier young vagabond alive. Life was so delightful in my eyes that the very idea of one day quitting all that, seemed to me a frightful blasphemy.’
‘And you are no longer so much in love with Life?’
‘Not in the same way.’
‘You were changed by a sudden flash of grace?’
‘No; there were trials before the Grace of God touched me; and there was Claudel, too, ... Claudel with whom I made friends (through one of his old schoolfellows, Marcel Schwob) when I was still a Faun, haunting the thickets.