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| (Observer photo/S. Boehlefeld) |
For readers with a little imagination, it will be easy to envision the scenes in “Salt and Light” by Bernadette Chovelon as part of a mid-20th century Technicolor movie extravanganza.
With a backdrop of Paris during La Belle Époque at the turn of the last century, this tale of two lovers and their journeys of and toward faith come to life amid balls, worlds fairs, travels in Europe and North Africa, and more.
Chovelon’s book, however, is not a novel. It is a well-told recounting of the lives of Elisabeth and Felix Leseur, translated into English by Mary Dudro.
Evaluating the text of a translation isn’t easy for someone who hasn’t read the original in French. But the English version is easy to read, despite references to French history, arts and letters of the time. Precise knowledge of the war of 1870 and the people who led in French public spheres of the time is not crucial to understanding the story of Elisabeth and Felix.
Both were raised in the Catholic Church of the day. She felt her faith tested. He rejected it.
She was a daughter of privilege, born in 1866 in Paris. Her upbringing of private schooling prepared her for the society life she would eventually lead with her husband.
But faith touched her heart at a young age, and though it’s light may have faded at times, it was never doused.
Born five years earlier in 1861, Felix was also well educated in his hometown of Reims, northeast of Paris.
He, however, was especially influenced by the rational and secular trends in France and, by the time he married Elisabeth, he meant to persuade her to join him in his atheism.
Their travels, however, even as he hoped they might convince her that belief in God was pointless in the face of the realities of the world, reawakened and deepened her faith. She, in her turn, became convinced she needed to bring Felix to God.
Two trips to Rome — especially the second during Holy Week a few years after the turn of the century — both strengthened her faith and lit the flame of quiet evangelization in her heart.
In her diary, she adopted the counsel of St. Francis de Sales, whose “An Introduction to the Devout Life” convinced her she could by example show her husband and others that the love of God led to the happiest and most fulfilled life.
Felix, when he sensed her faith growing stronger, rather than lessening through his influence and that of his atheist and agnostic friends, resolved to strip her of the archaic influence of the Church.
Part of Elisabeth’s influence on her husband came during her life by her example of bearing the hardships of her own illness and those of others beloved to her. Part came in his later discovery of her extensive writing.
A key to her understanding of her faith came through in a letter she wrote to her niece when she received her first Communion. Chovelon writes: “To this end, she asks her niece not to become ‘this pathetic thing, this body devoid of soul, that we call a “practicing” Catholic’: ‘I wish, my darling, that you be, from an intellectual point of view, a conscious Christian and that you know the profound reasons for your faith.’”
Felix, for his part, found the fullness of his own faith after Elisabeth’s death. He went on to become a Dominican priest, and to begin writing his own appreciation for his wife’s efforts in bringing him back to the faith and to God.
Chovelon compares Elisabeth’s simple attempts to live a truly Catholic Christian life to the St. John Paul II’s “new evangelization,” when she quotes Elisabeth, who wrote, “To go more and more to souls and to approach them with respect and gentleness, to touch them with love. To seek always to ‘understand’ everything and everyone. Not to discuss, to act, above all, through contact, through example; to dispel prejudices, to show God and to make Him felt without speaking of Him; to strengthen his understanding, to enlarge his soul more and more; to love without tiring despite disappointments and indifference.”
Elisabeth and Felix lived in a time of social change that emphasized the secular and devalued the spiritual and religious. The story of their lives is an inspiration for anyone -- married or single -- who feels the challenges to faith in today’s world.
— Reviewed by Sharon Boehlefeld for The Observer
“Salt and Light: The Spiritual Journey of Elisabeth and Felix Leseur” by Bernadette Chovelon. Ignatius Press (San Francisco, Calif., 2020), 288 pp., $17.95 (paperback).
