EBAF

On vient de retrouver un passage très sympathique dans les Mémoires de Ronald Storrs, premier gouverneur de Jérusalem, concernant les frères de l’École :

 » Dante’s  » holy athlete  » St Dominic was brilliantly represented by the Convent and Ecole biblique de St Etienne. The Dominicans constituted the intellectual aristocracy of Christian Palestine. Supreme as classicists, orientalists, Assyriologists; witty as well as profound, and entirely detached from the scrimmage of the communities, these delightful Frenchmen were a spiritual haven of which I must have taken all too frequent advantage. They welcomed to their hall Sir Herbert Samuel’s lecture on the Centenary of Lord Byron’s death, mine upon the League of Nations, with a humanism we could all appreciate, for, over and above the erudition of Peres Vincent and Savignac, did not Pere Abel habitually smoke an English pipe and tobacco, and had not the illustrious Pert Lagrange sailed so close to the wind that some of his works had only just escaped the Index? »

Tiré de Orientations, p. 418.