Romain Rolland, _Péguy_

 HAVING NOW READ Charles Péguy's fascinating but highly idiosyncratic play Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d'Arc, I have been looking for help in understanding what Péguy may have been up to, and found this two-volume study by another important French writer not much talked about in the USA, Romain Rolland. 

I've just been looking at Rolland's Wikipedia entry. I knew he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1915) and that his chief work was a roman-fleuve in ten books titled Jean-Christophe (about a Beethoven-inspired German composer, but set in the early 20th century), but I had not read a word of him, nor did I know that he was a highly active in politics as he was--a defender of Stalin right through the 1930s, for instance, and a very vocal anti-fascist. But he also corresponded with Freud and with Richard Strauss, and had a part in expanding the renown of Swami Vivekananda. Interesting person. 

Péguy was published in 1944, thirty years after its subject's death, and in the year of Rolland's own death. (I haven't found out where Rolland was during the war...Switzerland, perhaps? Hard to imagine him being welcome in Vichy France.) It's a biography, in a way, but also in a way a memoir, since Rolland was a long time friend and associate of Péguy, and also to some extent a critical analysis of Péguy's chief works, and also a bit of a contextualizing of that work within the intellectual climate of France in the early 20th century.

I have not read (and probably will not read) the whole thing, but the discussion of Mystère de la Charité was substantial, about twenty pages, and worthwhile. I don't know how orthodox Rolland's reading his, but he sees Jeanne as an embodiment of authentic Christianity debating and winning a debate with the Church, as embodied by Mme. Gervaise. Christianity is true, is real, but its chief steward, the Roman Catholic Church, has been remiss, half-hearted, compromised...and has been so from the very beginning, as one of Jeanne's chief points is that Peter and the other disciples' abandonment of Jesus during his trial was cowardly and inexcusable.

Jeanne is sure that she would not have abandoned Jesus--"Moi, je suis sûre que je ne l'aurais abandonné"--and Rolland emphasizes that Péguy writes that Jeanne says this humbly, "humblement." 

"Humility in pride--or all armors, the most unbreakable [I am translating Rolland here]. Whatever Mme Gervaise may say, she is vanquished, and she knows it. Joan has stripped her implacably of all her veils, one after the other, of her eyes-shut optimism: she is forced to see in its bare reality the wretchedness of the world, the suffering of the world, the christianity that has sunk into perdition...her resistance is futile, her denials also. [..] Joan, weary, dismisses her with a brusque 'Adieu.' This young girl has sent packing that imperious woman. And that woman lets herself be dismissed, without protest."

And it's at this moment that Péguy gives Joan a vision of Orléans.