Not yet in English
No public-domain English edition of this book exists. The original is free to read below, and our English edition is still to come.
Read the original ↗1916 · French original
Le Voyage du centurion
by Ernest Psichari
Ernest Psichari was the grandson of Ernest Renan, whose Life of Jesus had done more than any other book to unsettle French belief, and he was raised in that household's unbelief. He found his way back to Catholicism as a colonial officer in Mauritania. Le Voyage du centurion is the account, cast as the story of an officer named Maxence — desert, discipline, silence, and the slow arrival of what he had been raised to think impossible.
The convert behind the argument
Psichari was the son of Renan's daughter and grew up inside the most famous sceptical household in France. He enlisted after a breakdown in his early twenties, served in Africa, and was received back into the church in 1913. He was killed at Rossignol in Belgium in August 1914, aged 31, and this book was published posthumously.
Summary
The book takes its title and epigraph from the centurion of Matthew 8 — 'Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst enter under my roof' — and casts Psichari's own experience as the journey of an officer, Maxence, through the Mauritanian desert.
Much of it is landscape: the Adrar, the light, the emptiness, the small colonial posts. Psichari treats the desert as the condition of the conversion rather than its backdrop — the place where a man raised on his grandfather's certainties finds them thinning out. The military vocation and the religious one are deliberately braided together throughout.
It was published posthumously in 1916, with a preface, and became one of the emblematic books of Catholic France in the war years: the grandson of the great sceptic, converted and then killed in the first weeks of the fighting. The symbolism was almost too convenient, and contemporaries said so.
Who was Ernest Psichari?
Ernest Psichari (1883–1914) was born in Paris, the son of the Greek scholar Jean Psichari and Noémi Renan, daughter of Ernest Renan. He was raised without religion in the circle of the Sorbonne intelligentsia.
After a severe personal crisis in his early twenties he enlisted as a private soldier, served in the Congo and then in Mauritania as an artillery officer, and was received into the Catholic Church in 1913, having considered the Dominican life. He was killed in action at Rossignol on 22 August 1914.
Common questions
- Who was Ernest Psichari?
- A French army officer and writer (1883–1914), grandson of the sceptical historian Ernest Renan, who was raised without religion, converted to Catholicism in 1913 while serving in the Sahara, and was killed in Belgium in the opening weeks of the First World War.
- Is Le Voyage du centurion available in English?
- Not in the public domain, as far as we have found. The French text is free at Project Gutenberg.
A note on the text. Le Voyage du centurion is in the public domain. Its public-domain text is the Frenchoriginal — the English translations still in print are under copyright, so we can't reprint them. Our own English edition is still to be made. The original text is also available free here.