Life of St. Francis of Assisi | Page 9

give it a false
value.
When I began this page the sun was disappearing behind the rains of
the Castle of Crussol and the splendors of the sunset gave it a shining
aureola; the light flooded everything, and you no longer saw anywhere
the damage which wars have inflicted upon the old feudal manor. I
looked, almost thinking I could perceive at the window the figure of the
chatelaine ... Twilight has come, and now there is nothing up there but
crumbling walls, a discrowned tower, nothing but ruins and rubbish,
which seem to beg for pity.

It is the same with the landscapes of history. Narrow minds cannot
accommodate themselves to these perpetual transformations: they want
an objective history in which the author will study the people as a
chemist studies a body. It is very possible that there may be laws for
historic evolution and social transformations as exact as those of
chemical combinations, and we must hope that in the end they will be
discovered; but for the present there is no purely objective truth of
history.
To write history we must think it, and to think it is to transform it.
Within a few years, it is true, men have believed they had found the
secret of objectivity, in the publication of original documents. This is a
true progress which renders inestimable service, but here again we must
not deceive ourselves as to its significance. All the documents on an
epoch or an event cannot usually be published, a selection must be
made, and in it will necessarily appear the turn of mind of him who
makes it. Let us admit that all that can be found is published; but alas,
the most unusual movements have generally the fewest documents.
Take, for instance, the religious history of the Middle Ages: it is
already a pretty delicate task to collect official documents, such as bulls,
briefs, conciliary canons, monastic constitutions, etc., but do these
documents contain all the life of the Church? Much is still wanting, and
to my mind the movements which secretly agitated the masses are
much more important, although to testify to them we have only a few
fragments.
Poor heretics, they were not only imprisoned and burned, but their
books were destroyed and everything that spoke of them; and more
than one historian, finding scarcely a trace of them in his heaps of
documents, forgets these prophets with their strange visions, these
poet-monks who from the depths of their cells made the world to thrill
and the papacy to tremble.
Objective history is then a utopia. We create God in our own image,
and we impress the mark of our personality in places where we least
expect to find it again.
But by dint of talking about the tribunal of history we have made most

authors think that they owe to themselves and their readers definitive
and irrevocable judgments.
It is always easier to pronounce a sentence than to wait, to reserve one's
opinion, to re-examine. The crowd which has put itself out to be
present at a trial is almost always furious with the judges when they
reserve the case for further information; its mind is so made that it
requires precision in things which will bear it the least; it puts questions
right and left, as children do; if you appear to hesitate or to be
embarrassed you are lost in its estimation, you are evidently only an
ignoramus.
But perhaps below the Areopagites, obliged by their functions to
pronounce sentence, there is place at the famous tribunal for a simple
spectator who has come in by accident. He has made out a brief and
would like very simply to tell his neighbors his opinion.
This, then, is not a history ad probandum, to use the ancient formula. Is
this to say that I have only desired to give the reader a moment of
diversion? That would be to understand my thought very ill. In the
grand spectacles of history as in those of nature there is something
divine; from it our minds and hearts gain a virtue at once pacifying and
encouraging, we experience the salutary sensation of littleness, and
seeing the beauties and the sadnesses of the past we learn better how to
judge the present hour.
In one of the frescos of the Upper Church of Assisi, Giotto has
represented St. Clara and her companions coming out from St. Damian
all in tears, to kiss their spiritual father's corpse as it is being carried to
its last home. With an artist's liberty he has made the chapel a rich
church built of precious marbles.
Happily the real St. Damian is still there, nestled under some
olive-trees like a lark under the heather; it still has its ill-made walls of
irregular