I remember, in 1915, a wounded man, who had just received the visit of a priest moved by praiseworthy intentions and a clumsy exaltation, saying to me suddenly, “I know now that I am going to die!” and beginning to weep terribly. I went to see the priest and reproached him for his behavior. “What!” that eloquent man replied haughtily, “do you who are incapable of preserving this unhappy man’s earthly life blame me for assuring him his future life?” Alas! Alas! I still think of the sobs of that wounded man; they were those of one who has just lost his supreme wealth and to whom nothing else can make amends. Soldiers who, in the full vigor of their youth, suffer a severe, a final mutilation experience at first that is like a veritable amputation of their future, so true is it that every part of our physical self is intimately bound up with the labors of our dream. Then, with surprising rapidity, and long before the disorder of the tissues has been exorcised, one sees them filling in the moral breach, raising up the crumbled wall, propping it hastily and reconstructing, quite as new but quite complete and tightly shut, the sacred fortress outside which their soul remains vulnerable and disarmed. In truth, the man who is condemned to death is still rich in the future, even when his body sinks, ten times pierced by bullets, even when he has only one drop of blood left, one flickering spark of life. XI O present hour, magnificent, foaming fountain, you know very well that we shall be faithful to you! With your thousand animated faces, your landscapes, your problems, your combats and that heavy burden of jostling ideas you carry with you, you will always attract us, you will see us all together drinking of your waters. But when you no longer contain for us anything but anger and hatred, greed and cruelty, then indeed we must each of us abandon you and turn to our refuges; we must each of us withdraw into the Thebaid where all things still respond to our voice, to our voice alone. May our fate preserve us from the greatest of all misfortunes! May our refuges never lose in our eyes their virtue and their security! This supreme affliction at times befalls us, and it is then that our souls, exiled from their homeland, must set themselves humbly to the search for the lost grace. VIII THE CHOICE OF THE GRACES I