Blessed are those

A mighty guidance leads us through all...

Andre Morisset, from Sri Aurobindo Circle Magazine

My earliest remembrances date back to the very beginning of this century and lack clearness. They centre round two spots. One is Beaugency, a little town on the river Loire where I lived with two aunts my father's sisters, my grandfather and my nurse. The other is 15 rue Lemercier in Paris where my mother and father had a flat and their painters' studio which I considered the most wonderful place of the world.

Beaugency is still vivid in my mind for the garden which was at the back of the house and separated from it by a small courtyard. I also have a recollection of my foster sister: Genevieve; but what struck me most were the visits which mother and father paid to us in their motor car. It was a Richard Brazier and had not to bear a number plate because it could not do more than thirty kilometers per hour. I cannot remember if I took this fact as a big advantage or, on the contrary, the sign of an irretrievable inferiority. My parents used to carry with them a couple of bicycles "just in case." As a matter of fact, on the first hundred and fifty kilometers trip to Beaugency, the steering gear broke after fifty kilometers, at Etampes, and the car stopped inside a bakery. They stayed there overnight, used the cycles to visit the place and left the next day, the car having been repaired by the local blacksmith.

In Paris, my parents leased a flat on the first storey of the house, a fairly large garden at the back of it and a big studio in the garden. The studio had a glass roof high enough for a foot-bridge to link the flat and the studio at first storey level. An inside staircase climbed from the studio ground level to the foot bridge. It was therefore possible to reach the studio from the outside either through

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the hall of the house and the garden, or by climbing to the first floor of the house and getting in the flat, crossing a small drawing room and catching the foot-bridge. It was in this drawing room that Mother introduced me to Madame Fraya who was to become a very renowned seer. She appeared to me a very pretty lady with a very big hat and a pleasant way of talking.

While Mother was still living at 15 rue Lemercier, I was brought to Lausanne, in Switzerland, to meet my great-grandmother : Mirra Ismalun. My grandmother, Mathilde Alfassa, was to introduce me to her and I was rather impressed by her "service" given to Mirra Ismalun at Grancy Villas, a good residence ,in Lausanne. I was duly introduced to my great-grandmother who then addressed me more or less like this: "Bonjour, mon petit Andre, tu me trouves bien vieille, n'est-ce pas?" ("Good morning, my little Andre, you find me very old, do you not?"), to which I replied with all truth in my voice: "Oh! Oui!" ("Oh! Yes!") The interview did not go much further.

Later, my father and mother divorced, and mother married Paul Richard. They came to live at rue du Val de Grace and I used to go and have lunch with them every Sunday. After lunch, especially when the weather was bad, we went to the studio, Paul Richard stretched on a couch, lit his pipe, and they started working. That is, my mother wrote in her own handwriting what he dictated. I could not help but notice that mother was rectifying most of Paul's dictation. This small house, at the back of a garden, or more precisely of a fairly large courtyard, with a few trees, stretching in front of a big apartment house, was strikingly cozy and very comfortable.

Then the Richards went to Pondicherry and came back in 1915, Paul Richard having been called as a reservist at Lunel, in the South of France. When he was freed from military service, they settled nearby, at Marsillargues, where I came to stay during the school holidays in July and August. There I heard of Sri Aurobindo for the first time and I learned to play chess with Paul Richard.

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The First World War was going on; in the spring of 1916 the Richards went to Japan and I joined the army in October. From then on I always felt protected and the continuous play of "luck" was amazing. Letters from my mother came regularly from Japan but the military rule forced me to destroy them soon after they were received. Otherwise they would now be a priceless collection. I shall only mention two cases of this amazing "luck" which are probably important as regards their consequences but are only two cases out of many.

First, I caught the flu in May 1918 and was treated, as several others, with a heavy dose of aspirin, and we all fully recovered after forty-eight hours of rather high fever. None of us caught later the Spanish Flu for which aspirin was not any more a cure. It seemed that we had been more or less vaccinated by the first attack of what was not yet called the Spanish Flu.

The second case is more directly linked with the War. During the night of the 15^th July 1918 the battery of 6" howitzer in which I was serving was submitted to a very heavy gunfire. The way from the Command post to the battery was limited to a narrow footpath by rolls of barbed wire. While I was walking there I was caught in one of the rolls which had been thrown on me by the explosion of a shell. As I was trying to extricate myself from the mess, a further roll, thrown by another shell, was dropped on me, then some more, during about two hours. Three months later, when we were progressing some two hundred and fifty kilometers on the North-West of our 15^th of July site, we found a German battery which had obviously been left in a hurry. In a batch of maps I found one of La Main de Massiges - where we were in July -and the location of our battery shown as a target, but with a mistake, the four guns being shown at both ends of the footpath so that the very place where I had been pinned to the ground was shown as the actual target.

Then there was a period of at once high relaxation and heavy intellectual work. I was admitted to the Ecole Polytechnique and

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stayed there from December 1919 to August 1921 and started my industrial career immediately after.

In the meantime, my mother went back to Pondicherry and resumed Her real work with Sri Aurobindo. She kept me regularly aware of the development of the Ashram and of their Sadhana. I was thus more and more interested until the Second World War broke out and the collapse of France cut all relations between the Mother and me ... and this lasted until the liberation of Paris.

Then the opportunity arose for me, in 1949, to make a round trip to India which the Mother monitored through Bombay, Delhi, Agra, Calcutta and Madras, eventually greeting me at the room 3E1 at Golconde.

After this, my recollections are more or less one with the life of the Ashram.

Courtesy: Sri Aurobindo Circle Magazine, Issue No. 34, Dt. 14.11.1977

(Andre Morisset (1898 - 1982) was the Mother's only son. He visited the Ashram first in 1949 and was one of the members of the Comite Administratif d'Auroville (Committee for Administration of Auroville) approved by the Mother in 1970.)

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