ELEANOR CLARK
665
a life so much given to them, in so much love. They are called in–
variably filthy, busy with their "disgusting courts of love," commit–
ting infanticide as a matter of course. Of Foucauld's assassins, one
such biographer writes that all the Tuaregs (sic) in the group were
black, none were white, whatever that may mean when the blacks in
the region were not Tuareg at all, and no targui comes under any
usual meaning of white .
With such admirers, to borrow the old gag, who needs detrac–
tors. But of course not all who have found a good deal to praise and
even to be awed by in the life of Foucauld, the burning, God-bitten
bachelor of the Sahara, are either sloppy or bigoted. Even quite pro–
found appreciation can stop short of idolatry. Of downright denigra–
tion there seems to have been less than one could expect in print,
given the holy man's role in sustaining and fostering the French co–
lonial grip on the area. A power in that respect he certainly was, in a
way and to a degree far beyond the common period picture of the
priest with cross and holy water giving supposedly divine sanction to
the troop movements of some advanced nation or other, against the
benighted heathens of a less sophisticated or, anyway, less techno–
cratic one. For that role he had extraordinary qualifications; he was
a superstar and, proportionately, more guilty than an ordinary cleric
by the anti-colonialist lights of later generations and of many in his
own time, no doubt, insofar as they had ever heard of him. After all,
he was killed just two months before the start of the Russian Revolu–
tion. Plenty of able thinkers and organizers had been railing for
decades against just such stooges of imperialist occupations, not to
mention religion itself as the opium of the people. Between that
minority and the hermit of the Haggar, ignorance was probably mu–
tual, not that Foucauld was a stupid or ignorant man. He showed
himself a fine student and scholar when his interests required. But
except for his ground-breaking work in
tifinar,
the written form of the
Tuareg language, after his conversion at the age of twenty-eight, the
incipient Trappist, subsequently ex-Trappist and priest, seems, out–
side of his own enormous correspondence, to have read little if any–
thing except the gospels, and breviary, and military reports- not
that he showed himself all that dedicated to the army during his
regular youthful military service.
There was still a good deal of the spoiled brat about him at that
stage. The early deaths of both parents, the father's of what sounds
like some kind of cerebral corrosion, left the little boy and his sister
