The Famous Conversion of Paul Claudel, Eighteen Years Old

"I had completely forgotten religion and had the ignorance of a savage regarding it. The first glimmer of truth was given me when I encountered the books of a great poet to whom I owe eternal gratitude, one who has had a major influence on my thought, Arthur Rimbaud. The reading of his Illuminations and, a few months later, A Season in Hell, was a major event for me. These books opened, for the first time, a crack in my materialist prison giving me a vivid impression, almost physical, of the supernatural. But my habitual state of suffocation and despair remained the same.

“Such was the unhappy adolescent who the twenty-fifth of December, 1886, took himself to Notre Dame there to follow the offices of Christmas. I was beginning then to write, and it seemed to me that in the Catholic ceremonies, considered as a higher form of dilettantism, I was finding of means of excitation which happened to be possessed by some decadent services and rites. It was in such a mood that, elbowed and pushed about by the crowd, I attended with only a moderate amount of pleasure the High Mass. Then, not having anything better to do I returned to Vespers. The choir boys in white robes, and the young men of the junior seminary of St Nicholas du Chardonnet, who accompanied them, were just about to sing that which I learned later to be the Magnificat. I was myself not sitting, but erect, standing by the second pillar at the entrance to the choir, at the right, on the sacristy side.—And it is then that was produced the event which dominates all my life. In an instant my heart was touched and I believed. I believed with such a clinging force, such a lifting up of my being, with so powerful a conviction, with such a certitude void of any kind of doubt, that since that time, not all the books, nor all the reasonings, nor all the vicissitudes of an agitated life, have been able to shake my faith, nor indeed to touch it. I had had all of a sudden a heart-rending sense of Innocence, of the eternal infancy of God, an unspeakable revelation.”