June 26th

On this day in 1885 the French writer and politician Andre Maurois was born.

Maurois spent time in Britain before the fall of France in 1940 and was a pronounced Anglophile who wrote biographies of Disraeli, Dickens, Shelley and Byron as well as Balzac, George Sand and Victor Hugo.

A French Academician, he moved to America to work against Nazi propaganda. Born Emile Hertzog, he changed his name to Andre Maurois in 1947.

Here is a poem by the English poet that Maurois most admired – Percy Bysshe Shelley, Love’s Philosophy:

 
The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another’s being mingle–
Why not I with thine?
See, the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;–
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?

Today I will remember the words of Andre Maurois:
“Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. We lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year’s time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody.”