Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [55]
After Pascal, all the suffering in the world was ready to surge into me. I began to close my shutters on Sunday afternoons to listen to France Culture radio (whereas beforehand, I was more top forty on RTL), to buy records by the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, to read Nietzsche, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and soon after, Balzac, Proust, all the rest.
There was another thing, too, and here my story becomes a little curious. At the time I had a friend named Jean-Robert Yapoudjian; we were actually very close, and since second form we had always sat together in class. I knew he was a Christian (and more than just a common or “garden-variety” Christian, his father was a general in the Salvation Army and ran a center in Villeparisis that took care of social cases). With the greatest possible tact, he had always refrained from talking to me about his faith, which, he knew, was completely at odds with my family upbringing.
That year, when we went back to school in September, I asked him to tell me a bit about Christianity. He gave me a present of a Bible in which he had copied out a passage from the Letter to the Corinthians on the flyleaf for me to read. I still have that Bible. I read and reread it for years, whereas I never even opened De natura rerum.
Things, in fact, went a little further than that, and I can remember myself—the memories are strange, floating, almost surreal—attending the optional religious education classes at the Lycée Henri Moissan de Meaux. I can see myself later, hanging around with a “Christian discussion group” at the Institut National Agronomique; I can even remember going on a pilgrimage to Chartres with them. (Here the memory is more precise; I remember, for example, that we spent a night away and had forgotten to bring a sleeping bag; I was therefore in a position to judge that famous “Christian charity” on actual evidence.) Mostly, I can picture myself on many Sundays going to mass, something I did for a long time, ten years, maybe twenty years, wherever I happened to be living in Paris. In the midst of congregations of BCBGs* and even aristocrats in the Seventh Arrondissement; in the midst of almost entirely African congregations in the Twentieth; with all of these people I exchanged the sign of peace at the appointed moment in the ceremony. And I prayed—prayed?—what or who I was thinking about I don’t know but I tried to behave in an appropriate manner, so that “our sacrifice may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father.” How I loved, deeply loved the magnificent ritual, perfected over the centuries, of the mass! “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” Oh yes, certain words entered me, I received them into my heart. And for five to ten minutes every Sunday, I believed in God; and then I walked out of the church and it all disappeared, quickly, in a few minutes of walking through the streets of Paris.
This is something few people know, almost no one in our circle, probably with the exception of Fabrice Hadjadj,† who works for Art Press these days, who must still remember his surprise when he came to the apartment I was living in at the time on the rue de la Convention and found bookshelves full of the Christian magazine Magnificat.
And then I chucked it in. I eventually chucked it in after one last derisory attempt to follow the preparation for adult baptism (this time in a parish in Montparnasse). You see, dear Bernard-Henri, what led me to tell you all this, what probably led me, as soon as I got your letter, to retrace my steps, to immerse