Born in Orleans in 1873, of peasant stock, Péguy had many of the fundamental qualities of the French peasant; the sturdy independence, the frugal tastes, the untiring industry, the close kinship with the soil. His father was a cabinet-maker; his mother that familiar figure of the cathedrals, the woman who lets the chairs. The great friend of his boyhood was an old republican carpenter with whom he used to talk, and to whose conversation he owed his first political ideas. This heredity and these influences gave to his thought and attitude a character which he never lost. In his mature work we see side by side the result of those two compensating elements in his childish environment; the mingled mystery and homeliness of that mediæval and intensely national Catholicism which finds in the French cathedrals its living symbols, the keen sense of social justice, of the need for social salvation, which inspired the popular republicanism of the years following the Franco-German war. These characteristics, which afterwards, in a sublimated form, came to dominate his mysticism and gave to it its special colour, its mingling of antique tradition with forward-looking hope, can be traced back to the blend of Christian and of democratic impressions which he received as a child. Perhaps only the son of French peasants could understand and reinterpret as he had done the figure of St. Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who saved France; and whose longing to mend and redeem, at once so practical and so transcendental, linked up the objectives of social endeavour and of faith. Brought up within the atmosphere of provincial piety, Péguy rose from the elementary school to the lycée; and at nineteen, through his own efforts and his mother’s sacrifices, passed from Orleans to the University of Paris. There his vigorous mind and positive character soon made him the centre of a group of students, over whom he quickly obtained influence. There, too, he made the transition—almost inevitable for an ardent young man of his world—from Catholic orthodoxy to humanitarian socialism: the first stage in his spiritual pilgrimage, and the first attempt to answer that question which underlies all his thought and act, his poetry and controversy—“Comment faut-il sauver?” These words, which Péguy puts into the mouth of St. Joan of Arc, and shows to us as the mainspring of her actions, define too the secret impulse of his own career. His mysticism was not that of the contemplative, the solitary and God-intoxicated devotee: it was that of a strong-willed man of action, who sees far off the “mighty beauty” and longs to actualize it within the common life. He saw that common life with the eyes of a poet who was also a child of the people; discerning beneath its surface the dignity and the beauty of its antique and simple types—the spinner and the tiller, the housewife, the mother and the child.