Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of FranceGosse, Edmund
Philosophy
Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France
Gosse, Edmund
La Bruyère, Jean de, 1645-1696; La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de, 1613-1680; Vauvenargues, 1715-1747; World War, 1914-1918 -- France
When all is of so inspired an order of feeling, it is difficult, it is
even invidious, to select. But the figure of Paul Lintier, whose
journals have been piously collected by M. Edmond Haraucourt, stands
out before us with at least as much saliency as any other. We may take
him as a peculiarly lucent example of his illuminated class.
Quartermaster Lintier died on March 15, 1916, struck by a shell, on
the Lorraine frontier, at a place called Jeandelincourt. He had not
yet completed his twenty-third year, for he was born at Mayenne on May
13, 1893. In considering the cases of many of these brilliant and
sympathetic young French officers, who had already published or have
left behind them works in verse and prose, there may be a disposition,
in the wonderful light of their experience, to exaggerate the positive
value of their productions. Not all of them, of course, have
contributed, or would have contributed, durable additions to the store
of the literature of France. We see them, excusably, in the rose-light
of their sunset. But, for this very reason, we are inclined to give
the closer attention to Paul Lintier, who not only promised well but
adequately fulfilled that promise. It seems hardly too much to say
that the revelation of a prose-writer of the first class was brought
to the world by the news of his death.
His early training predicted nothing of romance. He was intended for a
career in commerce, but, showing no aptitude for trade, he dallied
with legal studies at Lyons, and "commenced author" by publishing some
essays in that city. At the age of twenty he joined a regiment of
artillery, and seems to have perceived, a year before the war, that
the only profession he was fitted for was soldiering. Towards the
close of September 1914, in circumstances which he recounts in his
book, he was severely wounded; he went back to the front in July 1915,
and, as we have said, fell fighting eight months later. This is the
history of a young man who will doubtless live in the annals of French
literature; and brief as it seems, it is really briefer still, since
all we know of Paul Lintier, or are likely ever to know, is what he
tells us himself in describing what he saw and practised and endured
between August 1 and September 22, 1914. This wonderful book, "Ma
Piece," was written by the young gunner, night after night, on his
knee, during seven weeks of inconceivable intensity of emotion, and it
is by this revelation of his genius that his memory will be preserved.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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