For those who surrender themselves to his great breath, liturgical artwork blows away all pedagogy, bigoteries and religious knick-knacks.

Mother Geneviève Gallois (1888-1962)
Nun and artist

“My mother had chosen our school with great care. I spent the last three years of my schooling with the Dominicans of the Holy-Name-of-Jesus. In ninth grade, Mrs. Fourcade had a hard time giving me the key to what a dissertation was. Once, I had a “14/20” on an assignment about Mrs. de Sevigne. That day, my professor wrote on my assignment: “This goes to show how love, even that of an old marquise, can help to do things well”. Miss Pinsolle, my eleventh grade literature teacher, was also our librarian. She had such a way of speaking about books she had enjoyed that we always had a desire to read them and especially the courage to persevere in reading them, even if the first pages discouraged us a bit. At the age of great literary enthusiaisms, it was thanks to her that I discovered several of the works that were to mark my youth: all of the novels of Pearl Buck, Archibald Cronin, Alex Munthe and Elizabeth Goudge; but also The Star on the Open-Sea by Guy de Larigaudie; Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s books Southern Courrier, Night Flight, Land of Men; narratives retracing the adventure of the great pioneers of aviation, Guynemer, Mermoz… I admired Guillemet’s courage, especially while his plane had landed in the Andes and he said: “What I have done, no other living creature in the world would have.” I was fascinated by the personalities of Blessed Charles de Foucauld and of Lyautey, whose writings I had read long before setting out for Maroc or Indochina.”

Geneviève de Galard (1925)
French nurse