“I think that asking to be victorious, but not wanting to fight, is just bad manners.”

Charles Péguy (1873-1914)
Writer, poet

“Coming into this class was the discovery of a new world. The grammarian who first opened the Latin grammar on rosa, rosae (the rose) never knew, said Péguy, to which garden of flowers he had opened the soul of the child. Throughout his long studies – what am I saying? – throughout his life, he had a retrospective angst thinking about the enormous danger from which he escaped thanks to his elementary-school teacher Mr. Naudy who, one might say, caught him by the collar, the moment he was about to sink in school. When he thought about how he might not have gotten into that blessed sixth grade, in both the pagan and Christian sense, he was taken by a real vertige. Are not all his works, after all, nothing other than a continual confrontation of modern thought with that of antiquity, of the pagan world with the Christian? (…) Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, weren’t of another world for him – they were his close friends, his companions of the rose court. (…)”

The Tharaud brothers
Writers