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PARTISAN REVIEW
few years older than he, Marie de Bondy. It was through her that he
came to know the remarkable abbe who would be his guide and
mentor for the rest of his life; and it was on an outing with the Bondy
family, the beloved Marie and her husband and children, that the
doting skeptic first visited the Trappist monastery where he would
soon choose to be immured.
He did not stay for very long in that particular house. His
seven years as a Trappist, except for the first few months, would be
spent at Akbes in Syria, followed by three years of more drastic but
self-appointed abjection in Palestine, mixed finally with studies for
the priesthood. Cousin Marie, his constant correspondent through
all this and for the rest of his life, in what could make a feast for
Freud-flies, had turned into "Dearest Mother," heading of all the
hundreds of letters. The little orphan has found a mother at last, has
turned this unavailable love of his life into his mother in Christ. But
there is one letter, the first of his Trappist immurement, written on
the evening of his arrival at the monastery, that stands apart from all
the rest and from any ordinary class of writing; hasty, tragic, a com–
pound of eloquence, commitment, and probity that forbids the most
crucial outpourings of a breaking heart, it is a document ranking
high in the love literature of the world. They had spent the last
precious hours in Paris together, earlier that day, and he is reliving
every minute of those hours in the anguish of permanent and total
loss. He has entered a house of God, said goodbye forever to the
usual human condition, but is not yet ready, that night, with her
presence so fresh in his eyes and nostrils (although this he may not
say), to suppress the almost explicit cry of his longing. It is, only in
part between the lines, not from the beautiful peaks of faith that he
writes, such as his name would come to be associated with on the
Assekrem, but from the all too human and intolerable, except that it
must be tolerated, abyss.
Soon, in his different immolations in the Near East, we find
him not only humble as can be but in love with humiliation. After
being out in the street one day, he came back radiant with joy be–
cause some children had jeered and thrown rocks at him. This was a
step forward in the imitation of Christ. He was extremely upset
when a new rule allowed a little oil and butter in the food, the "dear
diet" loved for its frugality; when he left the order at last, with all due
approval, it was because for him the regime was neither solitary nor
penitential enough. In Nazareth he was given a hut in a nunnery
garden and, wanting only the most menial work, was happy to serve
