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Updated: May 26, 2025
The Abbé Chesnais had divined this impassioned nature, and watched it with troubled sympathy. "His eyes vividly expressed the headstrong, fighting nature of the boy," he says of his pupil. "He did not care for quiet games, but was devoted to those requiring skill, agility, and force. He had a decided preference for a game highly popular among the younger classes la petite guerre.
In his very precious notes, Abbé Chesnais shows us the boy constructing a little airplane of cloth, the motor of which was a bundle of elastics. "At the next recreation hour, he went up to the dormitory, opened a window, launched his machine, and presided over its evolutions above the heads of his comrades." But these were only the games of an ingenious collegian.
On November 26, he wrote Abbé Chesnais: "I have the pleasure of informing you that after two postponements during a vain effort to enlist, I have at last succeeded. Time and patience ... I am writing you in the mess, while two comrades are elaborating social theories...." Would he be able to endure this workman's existence? His parents were not without anxiety.
He believed in the presence of God in this holy place and respected it.... His Christian sentiments were to be a sustaining power in his aërial battles, and he would fight with the more ardor if his conscience were at peace with his God...." These words of Abbé Chesnais explain the true vocation of Guynemer: "The chances of war brought out marvelously the qualities contained in such a frail body.
The author of the Débats article, who is a scholar, recalls Michelet's mot: "The Frenchman is that naughty child characterized by the good mother of Duguesclin as 'the one who is always fighting the others...." But the best portrait of Guynemer as a child I find in the unpublished notes of Abbé Chesnais, who was division prefect at Stanislas College during the four years which Guynemer passed there.
An excellent French critic, M. P. G. La Chesnais, has ingeniously considered the finale of this play as a confession that Ibsen, at this end of his career, was convinced of the error of his earlier rigor, and, having ceased to believe in his mission, regretted the complete sacrifice of his life to his work. But perhaps it is not necessary to go into such subtleties.
Now, in the drama which was to impassion Guynemer even to complete sacrifice, it is not the vocation of aviator that we should remark, but the absolute will to serve. Abbé Chesnais, who does not attach primary importance to the vocation, has understood this well.
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