— No... I do not want to die... leave me in my father's house.

— But you are exposed to death here at every minute... I have come for your salvation, Blanche...

— My salvation!... And are we safe from death in the convent?...

— There is something more dangerous to the soul than death, Blanche...! I have come to save you from that danger...

— No... no... I will not return...

— Yes, you will return tomorrow... I am certain of it, Sister "Blanche of the Agony of Christ"!

XXXX

The final scene: the square of the Revolution — the guillotine...

The Carmelite nuns come down from the execution cart, dressed in white garments, their hair shorn so that the executioner's blade shall not touch it. They stand in a line singing the Veni Creator — I come to Thee, my God; and the melodies issue from their lips pure and steady. One after another mounts the steps of the guillotine and vanishes from sight, followed by the second and the third, down to the last — the youngest of them, Sister Constance, Blanche's intimate friend. She was climbing the ladder, her voice rising alone like a faint echo of the voices that had gone before her into eternity... She casts one glance behind her... A calm, faint voice rises, singing, from among the crowd...

Sister Blanche walks with steady steps toward the guillotine, takes up the hymn where it left off, and

mounts the scaffold with courage and calm. A hush falls upon the crowd, and all watch her with reverence and wonder. Her eyes meet Constance's, and on the face of each an angelic smile appears, accompanying them until they vanish from sight and hearing...

Martyrdom — sainthood — a subject that long occupied Bernanos. He wove works around it and left behind heroes of many kinds and circumstances, who ascended to the halo of sainthood after a long struggle between the forces of good and evil, after their souls were melted in the crucible of purifying suffering, and after they had known humility, poverty, abasement, and deprivation. Yet all these twisting paths, and this longing to slip free of the yoke of original sin, avail nothing unless they are completed by the blessing of grace which God bestows upon His creatures when He wills.

The heroes of his novels are marked by being deprived of the world's blessings; indeed they are for the most part afflicted with hereditary infirmities and with a weakness that robs them of the respect of the society in which they live, and sometimes drives them to the great temptation and to surrender to deadly despair. Among them are the consumptive, the cancer-stricken, the hungry pauper, the fearful, the ill-tempered, and the dullard who provokes the laughter and mockery of his companions. Yet these bodily and psychological infirmities, on account of which their bearers suffer racking pains — if a man accepts them and bears them with the strength of faith, as a share in the divine sufferings on the cross on the night of Holy Friday — work in him the ever-renewed miracle of salvation, and lift him from the mire of sin and its death-rattle

to the halo of sainthood and its grace... Perhaps the best key to lead us into the depths of this difficult literature is the Sermon on the Mount, where the covenant and the hope are for the pure of heart, for the poor, for the humble, for the despised, for the sorrowful, for those who hunger after righteousness... These are the faces that Bernanos crystallized in his literature; and the face of Blanche on the guillotine came to complete and crown the chain of saintly heroes whom this profound writer created in his modern literature. "Dialogues of the Carmelites" was the last piece the author unearthed from the depths of the spirit and from the Christian heritage in which he was raised and by whose grace he grew all his life...

This play was performed in France for the first time at the Théâtre Hébertot in 1951, and it was revived for a second run in 1957; it is counted among the foremost pieces the Parisian stage has known since the last war. The well-known actress and director Marcelle Tassencourt knew how to exploit the power of expression that distinguishes Bernanos's writing: the stage decoration was kept very simple, so as to leave the weight to the inner dialogue and to the simple, violent style that expressed the deepest and subtlest emotions in the fewest and simplest of words.