SOURCE: "Letter to Frances Jammes," in Second Thoughts: Reflections on Literature and on Life, The World Publishing Company, 1961, pp. 128-31.

In the following essay, presented as a letter to Jammes, Mauriac praises Jammes's poetry and sensibilities.

Dear Jammes: I have followed a shaft of moonlight down through the black arbors to this terrace from which I look out toward you. We are separated only by the vineyards, heavy now with grapes, and by a thirty-league accumulation of fields and pine groves, of simple churches where God keeps watch, and sleeping farms. This is what you called in one of your elegies an océan de bonté, but it is really you, your heart and your love that break at my feet like a wave in the darkness.

You have given us this world, this murmurous night that surrounds the bed on which you lie stretched out in pain...