The Statement by Brian Moore

under three cardinals, not, of course, in a truly important position. He was not a principal secretary, but a more humble functionary, one who arranged episcopal meetings and schedules, a screen for interviews, sometimes almost a valet who dealt with details of the Cardinal’s wardrobe and arranged for his medical check-ups. As Private Secretary, in Lyon and later in Rome, he had been able to use the prestige of the Cardinal’s name to further his long crusade to obtain a presidential pardon for Pierre Brossard. The crusade was, he suspected, congenial to his dark angel: not, of course, that it was ignoble work. But there was in it, perhaps, a hint of personal ambition, some hidden desire to be seen as the saviour of others and a healer in the cause of national reconciliation. He had always had a weakness for that role of saviour. Monsignor Maturin, Vicar General of the Diocese of Lyon, once said of him that he had set himself up as ‘a welcoming committee for every form of distress’. That was true in the days before he took up the cause of Pierre Brossard. It was also true that as Cardinal Villemorin said of him, he later seemed to have made Brossard’s cause ‘his principal aim in life’. Indeed, he had spent the past two decades in an endless round of correspondence with leading religious and political figures, visits to those who might help by testimonials, studies of legal documents, appeals for Christian charity and forgiveness for his protégé. He had occupied himself with these matters to a point where in forgetting the life of the spirit he had incurred the disapproval of the angel on his right shoulder, the white guardian angel of his soul.
     
    The white angel, of course, approved of his living in Caunes. The retreat house here was like a small monastery. The Sisters of l’Enfant Jésus, who ran it as a home for retired clerics, belonged to an old-fashioned Order: the nuns wore long habits, confined themselves to work and prayers within the convent walls and obeyed the local bishop in every way. Caunes, a village which had changed little in appearance over the centuries, was a daily reminder of that true France, La France profonde , of values, beliefs and customs fast disappearing in this end-of-century turmoil. In Caunes, in the silence of the village church, he would kneel for hours, ignoring the pains of his joints, his eyes fixed on the altar, seeking, through prayer and meditation, to forget his efforts to save Pierre and instead to enter a state of devotion in which he, Maurice Le Moyne, had no wishes, no ambitions, save to worship Jesus Christ, Our Lord.
    These last days of his life, in the broken corridors of memory, Rome and Lyon came rarely to mind. What had he accomplished in his life as a priest? In truth, nothing seemed to have succeeded. Nothing. Perhaps, over the years, he had managed to show a few sinners the light of God’s grace. There were those who had profited from his counsel, yes. But to take credit for bringing sinners back to God was in itself a sin: the sin of pride. And to be honest, that had not been the driving force of his ministry. His dream of national reconciliation, of obtaining a pardon for his protégé which would serve as an example of how we French must forgive and forget the errors of our country’s past, had, in the long run, failed, failed completely. And yet he had been skilful, resourceful and tenacious. Not for nothing was he the son of a former President of the Marseille bar. He had himself studied law before entering the priesthood and those legal skills had served him well in his crusade. How much of his life had he wasted, yes, wasted, on that crusade? Imagine: to have achieved success on the highest level, a pardon signed by the President of the Republic himself, and now to see it, years later, in essence revoked. The enemies of national forgiveness had once again triumphed. Poor Pierre was now hounded more than at any time in the past. The Jews want my