In his memoirs, he describes the extent to which the discovery of the atmosphere that reigned there was a shock for him: he perceived a significant moral and spiritual slackening among the young students.
[1] His career as a pastor, then as a professor of theology, was marked by the concern to offer his parishioners, his students and his colleagues a discipline of prayer and life.
Thus, in a talk in 1913: "Oh, I dream of a lay third order - so to speak - intended to promote and protect the evangelical social ideal in our churches!".
[5] In the summer of 1922, one of Wilfred Monod's sons - Theodore, the future famous naturalist and botanist - brought him a rule project.
Likewise, the figure of Francis of Assisi is given a certain amount of discretion and is preferred to that of Peter Waldo, more acceptable in the Protestant world.
[7] By cultivating inner silence, by uniting prayer and action, by being "in solidarity with the whole Church and the world itself", it is a matter of "living an ordinary life in an extraordinary way".
[15] The Rule specifies the nature of these three times of prayer: Meditation on the Passion and Resurrection of Christ is recommended every week on days that evoke these events.
It contains articles and testimonies from members of the Fraternity, information on the dates of regional and national meetings, and a list of Bible verses to accompany the Friday tribute.
The spirit of the Watchers, the centrality of the Beatitudes and its motto "joy, simplicity, mercy" have directly inspired several Protestant communities born after World War II.
At the age of twenty, he gave his father a document in which, he wrote, "I listed a certain number of decisions that I had taken personally to orient my life".
Very quickly called upon by the National Museum of Natural History to undertake numerous trips and missions throughout the world, he established a faithful correspondence with the Watchers, anxious to enlighten and support his companions.
In 1927, while meditating in front of Charles de Foucauld's hermitage in the Hoggar, he exclaimed: "I found in the archives of the Tamanrasset post a large typewritten notebook in which Charles de Foucauld had drawn up the statutes of a brotherhood which is a sort of third order, open to all, lay people, single or not, ecclesiastics: there are pages inspired by the purest spirit of St. Francis, on humility, poverty, the sanctity of work, which would deserve to be known one day and which would be especially useful to the Watchers".
[25] In 1925, in Cameroon, he wrote the Livre de prière des Veilleurs (Prayer Book of the Watchers), which was used for a long time in the Fraternity.
[26] In it, he proposed prayers for the three daily moments of recollection, which he called the offices of the light, the flame and the perfume, as well as liturgies for various other occasions.
His life ethic, his relationships and his commitments testify to a personal appropriation of the main elements of the Watchers' Rule that opens to the universal.