Péguy saw France in the laborious and heroic past, with her ancient traditions of culture, liberty, and order: patient, scrupulous, diligent, tending her seedbeds and weeding her fields—for good work was always in his eyes the earnest of a healthy soul. He hoped for her in the future: a future to be conditioned, not by the progressive character of her political institutions, but by her freshness, her eternal youth; above all, by her spirit of hope.
“Peuple, les peuples de la terre te dirent léger
Parce que tu es un peuple prompt....
Mais moi, je t’ai pesé, dit Dieu, et je ne t’ai point trouvé léger.
O peuple inventeur de la cathédrale, je ne t’ai point trouvé léger en foi.
O peuple inventeur de la croisade, je ne t’ai point trouvé léger en charité.
Quant à l’espérance, il vaut mieux ne pas en parler, il n’en a que pour eux.”
Owing everything to the love and industry of his mother and grandmother—for his father died before his birth—it was natural that Péguy should find in faithful and laborious womanhood the ultimate types of human truth and goodness. Two such types appear again and again in his poems, as living symbols of the national soul: St. Geneviève, “vigilante bergère, aïeule et paroissienne,” whose prayer and fortitude saved Paris, and, above all, St. Joan of Arc, “enfant échappée à de pauvres familles,” in whom the dual love of God and man, carried into vigorous action, availed to change the history of France. In the three Mystères which he wrote in her honour, he extols the three qualities in which he found the secret of St. Joan’s holiness, significance, and power; her ardent charity, her unquenchable hope, the childlike innocence of her soul. Charity, the passionate longing to help and save, urged her to rescue France from its miseries. “Il y a tant de manque, il y a tant à demander.” In this profound sense of ill to be mended, her mission, and in Péguy’s view the mission of all Christians, takes its rise. Hope, the ever-renewed belief in a possible perfection, “invisible et immortelle et impossible à éteindre,” gave her courage to obey her Voices and strength to perform apparently impossible acts. Because she was a child at heart, with a child’s unsullied outlook, simplicity and zest—its entire aloofness from the unreal complications of adult existence—she had an assurance, a freshness, a power of initiative, which carried her through and past the superhuman difficulties of her task:
“Ce grand général qui prenait des bastilles
Ainsi qu’on prend le ciel, c’est en sautant dedans,