SOURCE: "Francis Jammes," in Twentieth Century French Writers, W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1919, pp. 98-114.

In the following essay, Duclaux discusses Jammes 's conversion to Catholicism and its influence on his writing.

Francis Jammes is a Faun who has turned Franciscan Friar. As we read his early poems, his delicious rustic prose, we seem to see him sitting prick-eared, in some green circle of the Pyrenees, with brown hands holding to his mouth a boxwood flute, from which he draws a brief, sweet music, as pure as the long-drawn note of the musical frog, as shrill as the plaintive cry of some mountain bird who feels above its nest the shadow of the falcon.

And then he met Paul Claudel and was converted.

After all, little was changed, for his innocent paganism had been tinged with natural piety, and in his religion he might say, like the Almighty...