About that famous Léon Bloy quote
From my “Sent” folder. The friends I sent this email to have yet to supply an answer. Perhaps a reader or Google ultra-sleuth or Catholic scholar of French literature can?
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I've got a question for y'all. You know the famous Léon Bloy quote, almost always rendered this way in English:
The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.
It's rarely attributed to a text, but when it is, it's to La Femme Pauvre. In English, the last line evokes the famous quote, but it's much briefer, at least in translation. So I found a French text online. Here's the French (all caps original):
Il n'y a qu'une tristesse, lui a-t-elle dit, la dernière fois, c'est de N'ÊTRE PAS DES SAINTS.
If you Google French versions of the Bloy quote, it comes up with all kinds of riffs:
Il n'y a qu'une tristesse, c'est de ne pas être un saint.
Il n'y a qu'un seul motif de tristesse, ne pas être un saint
Il n'y a qu'une tristesse au monde, c'est ne pas être un saint
La seule tristesse, c'est de ne pas être un saint
Il n'y a qu'un seul malheur : ne pas être un saint.
La plus grande tragédie est de ne pas être un saint.
So the question is: Did Bloy say (in print or at some public event) the larger form of the quote? Or has it somehow expanded over time in a generously paraphrased version? One of the French (Canadian) sources I consulted (which had the 'la plus grande tragédie' version) referred to the Maritains (who converted under Bloy's influence, no?) hearing Bloy say a version of the famous quote, an experience that had a lasting impact on them. So perhaps it's something Bloy wrote or spoke regularly, in essays and speeches and not just the novel, in which case the popular English version is not inaccurate?
Any help at all on this would be much appreciated. I'd love to know the truth about this English rendition.
(As a postscript, there's a parallel quote in the English translation of Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest, so I looked up the French. I've bolded the relevant echo below. It's much less of a verbal echo in French than in the English, loosely rendered by Pamela Morris shortly after the novel’s original publication.)
Détrompez-vous, lui dis-je, je suis le serviteur d’un maître puissant, et comme prêtre, je ne puis absoudre qu’en son nom. La charité n’est pas ce que le monde imagine, et si vous voulez bien réfléchir à ce que vous avez appris jadis, vous conviendrez avec moi qu’il est un temps pour la miséricorde, un temps pour la justice et que le seul irréparable malheur est de se trouver un jour sans repentir devant la Face qui pardonne.
