Josef Pieper once memorably said to me in a conversation in the library of his home: “You find the most precious truths in unlikely places.” (And he often manifested the implications of that insight, in his attentive receptivity and buoyant expectancy. In his early 90s, he even once said to a group of students and professors in Germany: “May I tell you a love-story?” And he suddenly returned to a gracious nun he had known many years earlier, when he had traveled to Iceland as a young adolescent with two of his friends.)
Such a precious and abiding discovery of truth also came to me suddenly in France in the late 1980s — in the home of another beloved mentor, Arnaud de Lassus. Through my mentor’s generosity, he took a book in French and pointed me to one sentence. It was a sentence from François Furet’s book on the French Revolution, Penser la Révolution française (1978), specifically to be found in his concluding chapter on Augustin Cochin (1876-1916), the admired young Catholic historian who died at the battle of the Somme in World War I. (As a young historical scholar Augustin Cochin had also already written much on the French Revolution and especially on Les Sociétés de Pensée et La Démocratie Moderne, an analysis of influential and well-organized, revolutionary oligarchies which was highly esteemed by Furet, who was himself then (in 1988) a well known leftist-leaning intellectual historian, surprisingly.)
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