Bernadette Chovelon - Salt and Light: The Spiritual Journey of Élisabeth and Félix Leseur

Salt and Light

Bernadette Chovelon

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Original French edition:
lisabeth et Flix Leseur
2015 Groupe Artge, Paris

Cover design by Enrique J. Aguilar

2020 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-62164-264-0 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-64229-136-0 (eBook)
Library of Congress Control Number 2020934679
Printed in the United States of America

When it was suggested to me that I write a biography of lisabeth and Flix Leseur, I was disconcerted at first because I was not familiar with the incredible journey of this ordinary twentieth-century Parisian couple. I was told that their influence stretched far beyond the borders of France and extended to England and the United States.

However, the psychological and spiritual path of a couple at once so close and so disparate, so loving and so different, a twentieth-century couple, attracted me right away. The thought of diving into new research, a lot of reading, an in-depth study of the history of the beginning of the twentieth century, crossed by so many different spiritual and atheistic movements, so many discoveries and changes, excited me.

I am very fond of lisabeth and Flix. With them, I was able to live their everyday lives marked by significant hardships: the major health issues from the first months of their marriage, the loss of close relatives, profound differences about faith, the daily encounter of two worlds in their relationship, that of atheism and that of faith. Their human love was profound and fruitful beyond all hope.

However, their life was not extraordinary; they lived as many other people live nowadays, with the same plans, the same joys, the same suffering.

They were very much in love right to the end. They loved comfort, travel, evenings with friends. They lived through the advancements of their century with enthusiasm. They were a happy couple in a world where progress was advancing by leaps and bounds. They knew how to sample and fully benefit from the comfort that stemmed from new technologies.

They suffered from radical differences of faith like many couples who daily meet with hostility or indifference from their spouses.

lisabeths long illness was a major trial in their life as it is for many homes that walk a similar way of the cross.

They lived an ostensibly ordinary life.

From lisabeths writings, always filled with a very strong admiration and love for her husband, I could see how well she had known how to sow the seeds of faith, silently and gently, in his heart. Until the end, she had the courage to believe that their profound human love could have no other source but God, who is love, and that it would be powerful beyond her expectations.The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how (Mk 4:2628).

This image from the parable perfectly expresses what happened in the Leseur couple. The seeds sown by lisabeth were long in germinating, but, by the strength of her faith, she knew that they would sprout one day. In her lifetime, she did not see them bloom, but other people, unknown to them, have gathered the fruit.

If certain pages of lisabeths writings sometimes seem marked by the religious expression of the last century, their content, clearly inspired by the action of the Holy Spirit, remains profoundly alive and moving.

From the beginning of her marriage, lisabeth wanted, and was convinced, that the militant atheism of her husband would fall down upon him as a shower of graces on a day appointed by the Lord. She was very strong in persevering in her faith despite all the obstacles placed in her path. She always believed, as Saint Paul says, that love believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things and that love and respect would be her only weapons for preserving their relationship and making her husband grow in faith.

Flix, in turn, after the death of lisabeth, at last understood that the great love his wife had for him could only have come from God. This discovery allowed him to have the humility, courage, and love necessary to make a radical change in his life.

This couple was the salt of the earth, the salt that gives good taste to everything. They were that first of all for each other, but they were also that for those around them: their families, their Christian and atheist friends, and their believing and unbelieving correspondents.

Their relationship was also the light of the world for all those whom their message touched, through lisabeths actions, before her death, as well as afterward through the mission to which Flix devoted himself in publishing her writings.

Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house (Mt 5:15).My work consisted simply in putting their light, the light that their relationship radiated, on a stand so that it might shine before men.

Bernadette Chovelon

On Wednesday July 31, 1889, on a particularly glorious morning, a young couple solemnly advanced down the long nave of the old abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prs. Surrounded by a large crowd of relatives and friends, certain of the happiness that awaited these two very similar people, they slowly crossed the abbey between its multicolored pillars. Before God and before men, they were going to consecrate their great love by giving each other the sacrament of marriage.

lisabeth Arrighi, the young bride, so beautiful and elegant in her white gown, glowed with happiness. She was twenty-three years old. She was marrying a man she admired and loved, with whom she shared a fondness for literature, art, and, above all, music. She was happy to build a home with him and dream of the many children that their love would raise.

They had known each other only a few months: visiting mutual friends, they had met by chance while on vacation in Passy, where the two families usually spent the summer. The houses were sufficiently close to allow the young people to visit each other easily, thanks to the complicity of the grooms uncle.

Flix Leseur, a medical student, was very quickly charmed by lisabeths culture, by her grace, beauty, lively intelligence, and erudition; he deeply admired her capacity for kindness toward others and her love for those she met. He appreciated her gaiety, her spontaneous and interesting conversation. The harmony between them was so obvious that their mutual friends understood right away that wedding plans for them would become increasingly natural. During the winter that followed their first meeting, Flix accompanied lisabeth to many parties where they frequently danced together and talked at length with lively, mutual pleasure. Very soon Flixs parents, seeing him so in love with a young woman whose choice could only fill them with joy, asked lisabeths parents for her hand, according to the custom at that time.

The official engagement took place the following May 23, in the intimacy of the family.

The Nuptial Blessing was given to them by a priest friend: Father Bordes, of the Oratory, a teacher whom Flix had esteemed at the high school in Juilly, where he had pursued his secondary education, and for whom he had a trusting affection.

However, there were a few shadows over their happiness: the grooms father was absent, detained at Reims by a serious health issue. lisabeth was also thinking about her young sister Marie, who had died, in a saintly way, two years before, carried off in a few days by a violent typhoid fever. She had been the youngest of the family, cherished and admired. She was barely twelve years old. It was a loss from which her family, her parents, her brother, and her two sisters, could not recover.