“A Christian is someone who lights an entire candle-light procession with one candle.”

Paul Claudel (1868-1955)
Writer

“That unforgettable day when the Dominicans of Saulchoir introduced me to Claudel! Claudel had arrived the night before. When I found him in the chapel that evening at Compline, his head was bowed and gently leaned on the pew in front of him, while the monks sang the Salve Regina as they left their choir stalls. Looking at him then I imagined him back in Paris, standing in the crowd in Notre-Dame de Paris – next to the second pillar on the right, near the sacristy – Christmas Day 1886, the day everything was changed by an event that was to dominate his entire life. On that memorable day his heart was touched, and in the blink of an eye he believed. Claudel belonged to the generation who had had a faith to be rediscovered, an edifice to be rebuilt on the ruins of what their fathers had left them. Even after his illumination on December 25th, 1886, at Notre-Dame, in this old cathedral which had been for him “the asylum, the chain, the house, the doctor, the nurse,” even after this event that was the most unforgettable of his life, his resistance was to last for four years! It was the grand crisis of his life, the agony of the mind which Rimbaud speaks of when he says, “Spiritual combat is as brutal as battle.” Ah! The rugged man, with strong neck, rich blood, muscles and nerves that I saw at Saulchoir bent before his God – that man must not have given up without a fight! His face and his body carried the marks, lit up by his eyes which were so clear and so honest, and filled with such tender filial love! Yes, that is what I was thinking about that first evening as we walked up the long hall together which led to our cells.”

Henri Massis (1886-1970)
Literary critic, political essayist, and literary historian