15

From the Cahiers “boutique,” on the other side of the road, Péguy apostrophized the Sorbonne as leading us astray and preventing us from hearing the “youthful maiden” that is Hope. Until 1902, when he came up against the “vexations of history” which the collapse of Dreyfusism made apparent to him, this good student from the age of the “black hussars” was too much in debt to the École and the University to consider cursing them. After 1902, however, he lambasts those from across the road who were handing out moral and political dividends from the Affaire, an “intellectual” and “modern” group which, now in power, was able to exercise its dominion over minds from within the University, and to establish an academic tyranny. Their modernity, he says, no longer means “being up with the times.” From then on, and drawing freely on a Bergsonian notion of duration in order to shake up the positivist conception of history, the anti-modern Péguy follows the example of Augustine and Pascal by passing over from the pagan Clio to the Christian Eve, dreaming of the day when the “tree of knowledge” and the “tree of the cross” will meet.