Translating a great writer from one language to another is a difficult enterprise, fraught with pitfalls, foreseen and more often unforeseen, and in the case of a writer as idiosyncratic in his own language as Charles Péguy, it can be downright hazardous. This translation has benefitted greatly from the careful scrutiny of two francophone philosophers, who are thoroughly familiar with Péguy in the original French: Lucien Pelletier of the Université de Sudbury and Alexandre de Vitry of the Université de Paris–Sorbonne. Their clarifications and suggestions in several instances about what Péguy was saying in French have been invaluable; as for any errors or infelicities in expressing this in English, the responsibility is entirely mine. My thanks also to Graeme Ward for his help with Péguy’s Latin and Greek phrases.
I am grateful for the courteous help received from the staff of the Centre Charles Péguy in Orléans, France, where I consulted a number of manuscript sources important to this translation, especially the Péguy–Bergson correspondence.
Annette Aronowicz’s remarkable commentary on Péguy’s reflections on history, “The Secret of the Man of Forty,” which constitutes the Appendix to this book, is reprinted with the permission of the journal History and Theory.
I am thankful for the encouragement and advice I received at the very beginning of this undertaking from Benoît Chantre, President of the Association Recherches Mimétiques, and for the support of Conor Cunningham and John Milbank in getting the translation to publication.
It has been a pleasure working with my Wipf and Stock editor, Robin Parry, whose capacity for combining a keen sense of grammatical precision with an openness to Péguy’s idiosyncratic grammatical style has been a boon to this project.
My deepest thanks, finally, to Nancy for her loving support in this and in all things.