Le Chemin de la Croix-des-âmes. Articles de guerre (1942-1943)
One of 120 deluxe copies on “papier spécial” (no. 20), signed by the author.
Presentation copy inscribed by Bernanos to Jean Désy, Canadian ambassador:
“pour Jean Desy, ambassadeur du Canada. Cher ami, qu'il me soit au moins permis de dire, dans une modeste dédicace sans prétention, que je souhaite pour mon pays vous voir bientôt représenter en France votre grande nation, à la fois si jeune et si traditionnelle, si hardie dans ses buts, si prudente et si patiente pour les atteindre, si prodigue de son travail et de son sang, mais si justement soucieuse de n'être pas dupe de sa générosité, votre nation toujours fidèle au Ciel, mais fidèle aussi à la chère terre des vivants… Ah! oui, votre place et celle de Madame Désy est bien dans notre Paris retrouvé! G. Bernanos.”
When he began writing what would eventually amount to some three hundred articles, Bernanos was in Brazil. Writing for Brazilian newspapers and for the BBC, he denounced the responsibility of Vichy France for the French defeat, condemned collaboration and supported the Resistance and de Gaulle. A few months before the Appeal of 18 June, in Les Enfants humiliés, he had prophesied: “My country is carefully kept in ignorance of what it is defending, of what it stands to lose, of what it is almost certain to lose unless some miracle at the last moment produces a man who finally speaks to its heart, to its very core.” He went so far as to denounce, and foretell, a society whose sole aim “is the mere consumption of what exists […] as the awaited, infallible day of the absolute liberation of man draws near — not the Homo sapiens of ancient philosophy, but total man, who knows neither God nor master, being unto himself his own end.”
It was in 1942 that Bernanos met Jean Désy and his wife, Corinne. At the end of 1943 he received them at his house on a hillside called “Cruz das Almas” (“Croix-des-Âmes”), in Minas Gerais, at Barbacena, and on that occasion gave them a first book, an inscribed copy of Monsieur Ouine. The volumes of Le Chemin de la Croix-des-Âmes followed, down to this third volume, published after the Liberation of Paris, which he accompanied with a strikingly prescient inscription, since Jean Désy would indeed be posted to Paris from 1954. He had been, since January 1939, Canadian ambassador first to Belgium, then to the Netherlands, and in 1941 became the first Canadian ambassador to Brazil, where he remained six years. He was subsequently appointed to France, a prestigious posting he held until his retirement in 1957.
Bernanos’s texts published in Brazil were issued by Charles Ofaire [in fact Höfer], a somewhat eccentric Swiss exile, part adventurer, part man of letters, then head of the powerful Atlantica Editora, whom Bernanos had met at one of his lectures in Rio. After Monsieur Ouine, Höfer went on to publish the volumes of Le Chemin de la Croix-des-âmes.