After all, you, my Lady, made the first move.

For I was only one of those “standing around” in the sullen inattentive crowd,

One element, “standing around,” lost in the center of the trampling crowded mob,

That mass of bodies of the people under their clothes and of flaccid hearts which held me pinned against that pillar.

It was the darkest day of winter, and the blackest rainy afternoon in Paris, vespers in the semi-night of Christmas,

And the sanctuary in the middle lighted up with gold and linen, and the great carpet with the arrangement of celebrants gold and lace up to the altar,

The ceremony sideways from my position and the lighting up of that group of people in white singing and accomplishing something during the hour of time.

They sing, but it would be more accurate to say they recite and release something with animation and fervor,

The vociferation of a long powerful sentence which begins and grows and rolls and unfurls in a gigantic curve!

And there is a moment just for the organ which meditates, and then again it’s the big sentence and the wave, the long irresistible sentence upright which rises and begins all over! The roar of Israel toward its God from the beginning of time to the end! in the smoke rising up and spreading,

Our Lady, the Woman-Church, with cries, large with God, erecting Her own Magnificat!

And that wretched child I was!—Yes, myself, I repeat!—what did I do to be so carried away?

And whence comes the reservoir of powerful tears which collapses? the wild cry and the heart which suddenly is outside of me?

All that I was is over! and all I learned in school is over!

Wretch that you are, someone looked at in the crowds, all is over! and there is nothing to do to ward off the wild overflow of hope!

Nothing to do to ward off that eruption of Faith, like the world in the depths of my being!

Nothing to do to stop that voice before the world was which says to me: you are mine!

Nothing to do to fight the impulsiveness, like someone who splits himself open, of the beast who says: I believe!

So, my Lady, everything that has happened since, can’t help it, you are responsible!

All the groping search I have tried to carry out from one end of the world to the other through a terrible disorder and relentlessness and filth!

The groping search all alone through the glory of God’s justice!

The questioning with the Mother of the Father we have in heaven,

The questioning with the world, and with all that is and with sin,

And with this end of deciphered and broken ground to the end of the horizon,

Of this Someone who when you push Him to the wall is not embarrassed by an alibi,

And it’s suddenly a smile for an answer in our arms that child who leaves us defenceless and speechless!

And so, if I have not done better, it is not my fault!

And let me tell you that probably you would have done just as well to go to someone else!

All this paper I have piled up behind me is good for tears and laughs!

If I had to reread it, you would see the face I would make!

Oh if it could come about that there might be between us an agreement,

My Lady, that all I have done and all I have written, you might be willing to consider it as nothing at all!

And that I might come before you, blessedly intact and empty,

Basically stripped of all my insipid literature!

Let me pause and collect my thoughts in the expectation of what will not fail to happen in a short time,

Like someone to whom something terrible is going to happen—for example, raising his eyes and seeing you! and pretending not to be afraid!