Paris: November 2, 1915

(After a few moments spent in arranging familiar objects)

AS a strong breeze passes over the sea and crowns with foam its countless waves, so a great breath passed over the memory and awoke the multitude of its remembrances. Intense, complex, crowded, the past lived again in a flash, having lost nothing of its savour, its richness.

Then was the whole being lifted up in a great surge of adoration, and gathering all its memories like an abun-dant harvest, it placed them at Thy feet, O Lord, as an offering.

For throughout its life, without knowing it or with some presentiment of it, it was Thou whom it was seek-ing; in all its passions, all its enthusiasms, all its hopes and disillusionments, all its sufferings and all its joys, it was Thou whom it ardently wanted. And now that it has found Thee, now that it possesses Thee in a supreme Peace and Felicity, it wonders that it should have needed so many sensations, emotions, experiences to discover Thee.

But all this, which was a struggle, a turmoil, a per-petual effort, has become through the sovereign grace of Thy conscious Presence, a priceless fortune which the being rejoices to offer as its gift to Thee. The purifying flame of Thy illumination has turned it into jewels of price laid down as a living holocaust on the altar of my heart.

Errors have become stepping-stones, the blind grop-ings conquests. Thy glory transforms defeats into victo-ries of eternity, and all the shadows have fled before Thy radiant light.

It is Thou who wert the motive and the goal; Thou art the worker and the work.

The personal existence is a canticle, perpetually re-newed, which the universe offers up to Thy inconceivable Splendour.