ELEANOR CLARK
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tual supremacy, and makes a very cogent plea for the case to be
judged accordingly. There was Ernest Renan calling Mohammedan–
ism the enemy of scientific inquiry and source of intellectual stagna–
tion, and Cardinal Lavigerie, one-time Archbishop of Algiers, say–
ing the mission of France was to save North Africa from barbarism.
It
could be added too that the contents of the Biblioteque Nationale
and the Louvre as well were apt to be pulled down on the heads of
any so benighted as to disagree; also that the far from unenlightened
St. Simoniens, those pre-socialists drawn in many cases from the
prestigious intellectual ranks of the Hautes Ecoles, while often differ–
ing from their country's officials on motives and tactics, were all for
its spreading the blessings of its superior culture wherever possible.
On the purely religious side of the picture an odd note, proba–
bly not unique to this case, is that Foucauld stood in some degree of
debt to the heathens, those "barbarians," in his own Christian con–
version. Most likely the actual text of the Koran had little if any part
in the matter. What did deeply affect the young Charles de
Foucauld, as army officer first and then probably far more in his
year as explorer in Morocco, under more frequent solitudes and
silences, was the quiet religiosity of the desert-dwellers he was see–
ing, whatever their characters and occupations otherwise. He re–
turned from that often perilous sojourn, in the kind of landscape
once dear to Christian saints, in a state not yet of readiness to believe
but of some kind of awakened sensibility leading that way.
Actually it led first to his getting engaged to be married- an
unfortunate and it would seem rather cruel little episode lasting a
couple of weeks in the immediate sense and a lifetime for the lady in
another sense . She did eventually marry, but long after Foucauld's
death, in response to inquiries in connection with the opening moves
for his beatification, would speak of him as the abiding adoration of
her life. He has been charged with throwing her over under pressure
from his family, because although she was from a respectable French
family in Algiers, she was not of the nobility and lacked a
de
to her
name, which hardly holds water, as various Foucauld relatives had
married outside the aristocracy. In speaking of the engagement as a
stupid mistake, which had cost him some pain to get out of, he
sounds self-centered not to say self-enclosed, perhaps not too un–
common a prelude to the most extreme monastic discipline . From
that much self it must indeed be a relief to be divorced.
He also had to deal with what cries out to be taken as nearly
ruinous frustration in his love for a married and ultra-pious cousin a
