“We are men eager to obey in order to be free.”

Ernest PSICHARI (1883-1914)
Officer and writer, Dominican Tertiary

“You don’t know what it is to be an old woman who has lived through important events; a whole past to live up to, without being able to get used to anything other than grandeur. Some people say that I am still young and beautiful, and assuredly, I would be so, despite all that I have suffered, if my sons consented to believe it. Over the centuries my body has been beaten too much to leave my soul unwounded, and it is your role to make it flourish again. I used to have sons whose soul was linked to me so strongly that their least gesture was made of my substance… It was beautiful, in their impatient hands, to be a living creature becoming aware of its form and, little by little, feeling the joy of its rising strength. I was giving them everything; but on their part, what great works they made of me! Everything they touched seemed to be snatched from time to be vested in the folds of an eternal robe. I was giving them my slow yet always noble waters, or my violent yet noble waters; my hills rose like a beautiful mountainside where light and shadows sketched the palpitation of joy; my powerful plains which are like the bursting assertion of certainty even with their secret folds, their springs hidden in the grass, and the murmur of the shivering line of poplar trees; my forests with their great and straight alleys, which are no wild dens but the resorts of deep silence like a soul which listens to its interior melody… What I bore hidden within myself would be inscribed as neatly as on a day of May even onto the façade of the humblest church and in the chanting of the Alleluias. My grace would blossom in the poets’ songs; and this grandeur above all, so unified that it looked easy, where nevertheless I hide the most secrets, so grave, I would find it again in the powerful movement of mere prose. I was thus bursting with works. And so many saints, dear God, have they given me! However, as you know, nobody feels like becoming a saint, and my sons were not better than others: why did they always have, at the right time, the saints that they needed? That is my greatest mystery…
You who still love me with pure love in this world where everything is impure, you must know that through you my vocation can regain its purity today. Only a few can understand this, but my whole strength resides henceforth in your small and obscure army… And maybe then will you know me truly, as a mother wants to be known by her children.”

André CHARLIER (1895-1971)
Professor, director of the school Roches, then of Maslacq, writer