Free The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition by Thomas Merton

and I was, thank God, never sent there. As a matter of fact it was not so much a school as a kind of Protestant residence where a lot of youths (who belonged, mostly, to fairly well-to-do families) boarded and received religious instruction and supervision and, for the rest, attended the classes of the local Lycée.
    And so I obscurely began to realize that, although Father was anxious for me to get some kind of religious training, he was by no means in love with French Protestantism. As a matter of fact, I learned later from some of his friends, that at that time there had been not a little likelihood that he might become a Catholic. He seems to have been much attracted to the Church, but in the end he resisted the attraction because of the rest of us. I think he felt that his first duty was to take the ordinary means at his disposal to get me and John Paul to practise whatever religion was nearest at hand to us, for if he became a Catholic there might have been immense complications with the rest of the family, and we would perhaps have remained without any religion at all.
    He would have felt far less hesitant if he had only had some Catholic friends of his own intellectual level—someone who would be able to talk to him intelligently about the faith. But as far as I know, he had none. He had a tremendous respect for the good Catholic people we met, but they were too inarticulate about the Church to be able to tell him anything about it that he could understand—and also, they were generally far too shy.
    Then, too, after tie first day, it became clear that Montauban was no place for us. Then; was really nothing there worth painting. It was a good enough town, but it was dull. The only thing that interested Father was the Musée Ingres, filled with meticulous drawings by that painter, who had been born in Montauban: and that collection of cold and careful sketches was not enough to keep anyone at a high pitch of inspiration for much more than fifteen minutes. More characteristic of the town was a nightmarish bronze monument by Bourdelle, outside the museum, which seemed to represent a group of cliff-dwellers battling in a mass of molten chocolate.
    However, when we happened to inquire at the Syndicat d’Initiative about places to live, we saw photographs of some little towns which, as we were told, were in a valley of a river called the Aveyron not very far away to the northeast of the city.
    The afternoon we took the peculiar, antiquated train out of Montauban into the country, we felt something like the three Magi after leaving Herod and Jerusalem when they caught sight once again of their star.
    The locomotive had big wheels and a low, squat boiler, and an inordinately high smoke-stack, so that it seemed to have escaped from the museum, except that it was very sturdy and did its work well. And the three or four little coaches sped us quickly into a territory that was certainly sacramental.
    The last town that had a brick campanile to its church, after the manner of all Languedoc, was Montricoux. Then the train entered the Aveyron valley. After that, we were more or less in Rouergue. And then we began to see something.
    I did not realize what we were getting into until the train swept around a big curve of the shallow river, and came to stop under the sunny plane trees along the platform of a tiny station, and we looked out the window, and saw that we had just passed along the bottom of a sheer cliff one or two hundred feet high, with a thirteenth-century castle on the top of it. That was Bruniquel. All around us, the steep hills were thick with woods, small gnarled oaks, clinging to the rock. Along the river, the slender poplars rippled with the light of late afternoon, and green waters danced on the stones. The people who got on and off the train were peasants with black smocks, and on the roads we saw men walking beside teams of oxen, drawing their two-wheeled carts: and they guided the placid beasts with their long