c.1905–1920

The priest who sat up with the old papers

Some time about 1905 a Frenchman came to this parish and stayed the better part of fifteen years. What he did with his evenings the Jesuits' own magazine records without ceremony: Fr Adrien Caussanel wrote “diaries, a history of the country”, and he “searches out the old manuscripts and deciphers them”. Somewhere in this village lay older papers: registers, letters, whatever two centuries of priests had left behind. He sat down with them, night after night, and worked out what they said. He was the parish priest of an inland village a long way from anywhere, and he spent the hours he had left gathering up its past, so that the people among whom he lived would not lose it. The book he made out of those papers outlived him, and is kept in the Society's archive still.