could hear the voice, but he might
never see the face of the aunt who spoke to him. At night at home, as
he lay in his comfortable bed, he used to think of his aunt and the
other nuns 'rising three times in the night for prayer in the church,
from the hard boards which formed their couch, even the luxury of a
straw pallet being denied them.' 'Which is the real life,' he used to
ask himself, 'the easy comfortable life that goes on round me every
day, or that other, difficult life hidden behind the folds of the
thick curtain?'

Child though he was, Etienne felt that his aunt loved him, although he
had never seen her. This helped him to feel that, although unseen, God
was loving him too. As he grew older he wondered: 'Perhaps everything
we see here is like the bars of a grating, or a thick curtain. Perhaps
there is some one on the other side who is speaking to us too.'

Etienne was only about five or six years old when he made the great
discovery that GOD IS THERE, hidden behind the screen of visible
things all round us. After this, he longed to be able to speak to God
and to listen to God's voice, as he was able to listen to his unseen
aunt's voice speaking to him from behind the curtain in the convent.

No one ever taught him to pray; but presently he discovered that too
for himself. One day, when he was only six years old, his tutor gave
him a Latin lesson to learn that was much too difficult for him.
Etienne took the book up to his bedroom, and there, all alone, he read
it over and over and did his very best to learn it. But the unfamiliar
Latin words would not stay in his memory. At last he closed the book
in despair and went to his bedroom window and looked out. He gazed
over the high roofs of the city, away over the wide plain in which
Limoges lay, to the distant mountain, blue against the sky.
Everything looked fair and peaceful. As he gazed, the thought came to
him, 'God made the plain and the river and the mountains. God made
this whole beautiful world in which I live. If God can create all
these things, surely He can give me memory also.' He knelt down at the
foot of his bed and prayed, for the first time in his life, that his
Unseen Friend would help him to master the difficult lesson. Taking up
the book again, he read the hard Latin words once more, very
attentively. This time the words stayed in his memory and did not fade
away. Often afterwards, he found that if he prayed all his lessons
became easier. H