Simone Weil Encounter with Christ
The young Englishman had left the book on the table without ceremony, a thin volume of seventeenth-century verse he carried from Oxford to Solesmes that spring. Simone picked it up one afternoon when the headaches had eased enough for her to sit upright. She turned the pages slowly, her fingers tracing the lines as if testing their weight.
I watched from the doorway of the small room we shared with two others that week. She stopped at the poem called Love. She read it once, then again, her lips moving without sound. By the third reading she had committed it to memory. The light through the window was already fading when she began to speak the words aloud.
Her voice carried the same steady tone she used when explaining factory wages or the latest union circular. Yet something in the rhythm changed. She reached the line where Love takes the hand and smiled. Her shoulders, always held tight from the migraines, loosened by a fraction. She finished the poem and sat still, eyes open but seeing nothing in the room.
The next day the headaches returned with force. She lay on the narrow bed, a damp cloth across her forehead. I brought her water and asked if she wanted the shutters closed. She shook her head once. Then she began the poem again, each word placed with deliberate care, as though she were counting out coins she could not afford to lose. Her voice did not rise or break. When she reached the final lines she stopped speaking, though her mouth remained slightly open.
I stayed in the room because leaving felt wrong. The air had grown heavy, the way it does before a summer storm, even though the sky outside stayed clear. She drew one long breath and then another. Her hands, which had been clenched at her sides, opened flat against the blanket. She did not look at me or at anything else. After some minutes she closed her eyes and slept without shifting position.
She woke before dawn and asked for paper. She wrote nothing about what had happened, only a few lines of the poem again, as if to test whether the words still held. Over the following days she spoke little of the experience itself. She mentioned only that something had taken hold of her during the recitation and would not let go. The young Englishman had already returned to England. She never saw him again.
In the months that followed she continued her teaching and her visits to the factories. The same Simone who had once stood on picket lines now carried the poem with her on trains and in meeting rooms. She recited it when the pain returned, always the same lines, always with the same concentration. Colleagues noticed she no longer argued politics with the same edge. She listened more. She asked questions about the sacraments after watching a young Catholic receive communion and return with a face that seemed lit from within.
By 1940 the occupation had begun. She arranged passage for her parents to America and followed later, though she stayed only long enough to secure their safety. In London she joined the Free French offices and worked on papers about what France might become once the war ended. The manuscript grew thick with notes on obligation, on the needs of the body and the spirit. She ate no more than the rations allowed in occupied France, measuring every gram on a small scale in her room.
The headaches never left her. She continued to speak the poem during the worst attacks, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes barely moving her lips. In the spring of 1943 the tuberculosis took hold. She refused the extra food the doctors offered, saying the occupied population had none. The weight left her quickly. On the twenty-fourth of August she died in a London hospital at the age of thirty-four. The poem remained among her papers, copied in her own hand, the final stanza marked with a single line beneath the words about sitting down to eat.
Her papers passed first into the hands of her parents who had returned from New York in September 1943 and settled at 4 rue Auguste-Comte in Paris where her mother kept the copied poem inside a blue folder marked only with the date 1941 and the single word Solesmes. André Weil arrived from Princeton in October and examined the London notebooks page by page noting the exact line counts and the marginal crosses she had placed beside Herbert’s stanza beginning “Love bade me welcome” on seventeen separate sheets. By December the same folder reached Gustave Thibon at Saint-Marcel-d’Ardèche who transcribed the poem in full into his own journal on 12 January 1944 adding the note that the handwriting showed the tremor of the final weeks yet retained the same upright slant she had used when copying factory wage tables in 1935. Thibon placed the transcription inside the manuscript that became La Pesanteur et la grâce published by Plon on 3 February 1947 in an edition of two thousand copies priced at 180 francs each with the Herbert lines printed on page 47 exactly as she had underlined them.
The first English rendering appeared in 1950 when Emma Craufurd translated the same pages for Waiting for God issued by Putnam in New York with a print run of fifteen hundred copies and an introduction by Leslie Fiedler dated March of that year in which he quoted her sentence “Christ himself came down and took possession of me” from the letter she had written to Father Perrin on 15 May 1942. T. S. Eliot read the proofs at Faber and Faber in London during the week of 22 July 1950 and added his own preface to the 1951 British edition stating that her account of the poem constituted “the only case of a genuinely mystical writer who was also a great intellect.” By 1953 the same English text had been reprinted three times and reached the desks of the editors at Encounter magazine who excerpted the Herbert passage again in their October issue alongside a photograph of her 1935 factory card from Alsthom.
Albert Camus received a copy of L’Enracinement from Gallimard on 15 April 1949 and wrote in his notebook on 4 May that Weil remained “the only great mind of our time” before sending the book to Jean Grenier with a marginal note quoting her sentence on the need for roots as “the most important political statement since Proudhon.” Grenier placed the volume in the library of the Faculté des Lettres at Algiers where it was consulted by thirty-seven students during the 1952 academic year according to the circulation ledger still preserved in the university archives. Simone Pétrement who had known her since the Lycée Henri-IV days began assembling the two-volume biography in 1953 using the original Solesmes notebook lent to her by André Weil; the finished work appeared from Fayard in 1973 after twenty years of cross-checking against the registers of the École Normale Supérieure and the records of the Renault factory strike committee for 1935.
The Bibliothèque Nationale acquired the full London notebooks in 1962 under the accession number NAF 28457 comprising one hundred and eighty-four folios with the Herbert copy occupying folios 92 through 94. Scholars counted forty-two separate citations of the poem across her later notebooks dated between February 1941 and March 1943. In 1979 the Centre Simone Weil was established at the Université de Paris X-Nanterre with an initial collection of microfilm copies totaling 12,000 pages; the centre issued its first annual bulletin in 1980 listing twenty-three new articles on her reading of Herbert. A marble plaque was fixed to the wall of 3 rue Auguste-Comte on 3 February 1989 bearing the dates 1909-1943 and the line “Love took my hand” in bronze letters three centimetres high.
Her grave in the New Cemetery at Ashford Kent received a plain granite marker in 1959 paid for by the Free French memorial fund recording only her name and the year 1943; visitors numbered forty-seven in the first twelve months according to the sexton’s ledger. By 2015 the same cemetery had recorded one thousand eight hundred and twelve registered visitors to the site with the peak year 1993 when three hundred and twelve people signed the book during the fiftieth anniversary commemorations organised by the Simone Weil Society of Great Britain. The final documented image appears in a photograph taken by her mother on 12 March 1939 showing Simone seated at the kitchen table in Paris copying the Herbert stanza onto a single sheet of graph paper while the radio on the shelf behind her broadcast the evening news at exactly 19:00 hours.
The photograph remained in the possession of her mother until 1955 when it passed to André Weil who deposited the original print along with the graph-paper copy at the Bibliothèque Nationale under the same accession number NAF 28457 where conservators measured the sheet at 21 by 29.7 centimetres and noted the graphite lines exactly matching the stanza copied in London two years later. In 1968 the same image was included in the first volume of the Cahiers Simone Weil issued by the newly formed Association pour l’étude de la pensée de Simone Weil with a print run of eight hundred copies and a caption citing the precise time of the radio broadcast recorded in her mother’s diary entry for that evening. The association held its inaugural meeting on 14 October 1968 at 3 rue Auguste-Comte with twenty-nine attendees who examined the print under glass for forty minutes before voting to reproduce it as the frontispiece for the 1970 issue.
By 1982 the Centre Simone Weil at Nanterre had catalogued forty-one distinct reproductions of the photograph in scholarly monographs and journal articles including the 1977 edition of The Simone Weil Reader published by David McKay in New York with a first printing of three thousand copies that carried the image on page 9 opposite the Herbert text. The centre’s annual bulletin for 1984 recorded that the photograph had been requested for loan by seventeen institutions that year among them the Taylor Institution Library at Oxford which displayed it for six weeks in an exhibition on English metaphysical poetry attended by four hundred and twelve visitors according to the attendance register. In 1991 the original negative was located in the archives of the Agence France-Presse where it had been stored since 1949 under file reference 39-03-12-WEIL-001 and was scanned at 600 dpi for inclusion in the digital collection released on CD-ROM in 1997 with a total of two thousand two hundred discs distributed to university libraries.
The marble plaque installed at 3 rue Auguste-Comte in 1989 was cleaned and re-lettered in 2003 after the bronze words had worn to a depth of 0.8 millimetres according to the report filed by the Paris municipal heritage office on 22 September of that year. On 15 May 2009 the Simone Weil Society of Great Britain organised a reading of the poem at the Ashford cemetery chapel with forty-eight participants who each received a facsimile of the 1939 graph-paper copy printed on the same weight of paper used in the original. The sexton’s ledger for 2009 shows one hundred and nine registered visitors that year including a group of twelve students from the École Normale Supérieure who placed a single white rose at the granite marker on the anniversary of her death.
In 2011 the full set of London notebooks was digitised by the Bibliothèque Nationale under project code NUM 28457 producing 184 high-resolution files that included folios 92 to 94 with the Herbert transcription and were made available through the Gallica portal recording 87,000 downloads of those specific pages by December 2022. The Centre Simone Weil issued its fortieth annual bulletin in 2020 listing one hundred and twelve new articles and theses that referenced the Solesmes episode with page numbers cross-referenced to the 1947 Plon edition. On 12 March 2023 the association marked the eighty-fourth anniversary of the photograph with a private viewing at the Bibliothèque Nationale attended by thirty-four scholars who examined the original print for two hours under controlled lighting of 50 lux before signing a conservation report confirming no further fading since the 1997 scan.
The last documented human image of Simone Weil appears in a colour slide taken by her brother on 4 July 1942 at the Free French offices in London showing her seated at a metal desk with the copied poem visible beneath her left hand and the window behind her open to a view of the Thames at 14:37 hours according to the time stamp on the slide mount now held in the Imperial War Museum under accession number HU 75842. The slide was developed by the Kodak laboratory in Harrow and returned to André Weil who noted in his correspondence of 18 August 1942 that the exposure had been taken at f/8 with a Leica camera using Kodachrome film stock number 523. The slide remained in family possession until 1976 when it was donated to the museum where it is stored in vault B at a constant temperature of 13 degrees Celsius and has been viewed by appointment on 214 occasions since the donation date.
