It first happened a few years ago as I sat in a plaza outside a Paris elementary school, reading the Wikipedia article for Au revoir les enfants, Louis Malle’s 1987 film about a priest’s attempt to protect his Jewish students from the Nazis. I, an American man who had waged a long preemptive and clandestine campaign against tears, such that it never became an actual fight, began to well up when encountering an object of French culture. It happened next after I witnessed Renée Falconetti’s wide-eyed holy terror in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc.
It happened again and again on a subsequent trip to France, specifically in the city of Rouen: at the site of Joan’s execution, again in the adjacent Church of Saint Joan, and once more in the chapel dedicated to her in the city’s sun-soaked cathedral, where her altar was affixed with a replica of her sword and engraved with “JESVS MARIA,” and where, behind the statue of her bound to the stake, a stained-glass window of the flames rose 30 feet. It happened most forcefully, as sobbing comme une madeleine, like Mary Magdalene, while I told a friend about all the times it happened in places connected to Joan.
My question is why it happened. Why did I cry so readily over French things, but little else?
*
Six months before the second visit to France, I started taking language classes at the Alliance Française of Dallas. I began regularly listening to Radio France Internationale’s news program, Le Journal en Français Facile. I subscribed to Le Monde. Something was drawing me to the country and its culture. Still, I did not cry when I read Albert Camus’ The Stranger in French, nor over perhaps the most beloved object of French literature, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. I don’t cry when I read Michel Houellebecq’s astringent novels in English, and I would worry about anyone who did.
Then last fall, the Dallas Opera put on Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites: French composer, French lyrics, French people being unjustly put to death. The night of the performance, I stuffed my pockets with tissues.
I felt an odd connection to Poulenc, not because I knew his music, but because both times my wife and I went to Paris, our first meal was on the terrace of an adorable café with mismatched cast-iron tables and chairs sprawling beneath Poulenc’s apartment windows. It felt as if he were hosting our visit to his city.
Poulenc’s second and last opera, which premiered in 1957, dramatizes the true story of 16 sisters from the Carmelite Abbey at Compiègne who were executed during the last days of the Reign of Terror in 1794. (The martyred sisters were all canonized as saints in 2024.)
The central character is Blanche, the directionless daughter of an aristocrat. At the convent, she takes the name Sister Blanche of the Agony of Christ. She becomes fast friends with a chatty young sister, Constance, who reports a dream: She and Blanche will soon die together.
As the revolution presses toward the community, the sisters debate what to do: flee, acquiesce, accept death? Just before intermission, they sing the “Ave Maria” a cappella in front of graffiti that reads “Égalité” in a revolutionary’s hand, with “devant Dieu” later added by the prioress — equality . . . before God. I got a lump in my throat and thought, this is the Church as I want it to be. I still don’t know exactly what that means, but I had never known it at all until I saw it onstage.
Soon after, the nuns are arrested. Blanche runs away. The others vow to become martyrs, if God so wills.
The final scene is when I lost it. Fifteen nuns, condemned to death, array themselves across the stage and softly begin “Salve Regina.” They get through a few measures, slowly, in unison, ascending the scale step by step, then shhhunk: the sound of the guillotine like a schoolroom paper-cutter. The Prioress’ hands jerk to her throat. Fourteen voices remain, but the singing grows only more intense, the sopranos reaching a full tone higher with each phrase. Shhhunk. Thirteen.
Higher, louder. Each silenced sister drifts offstage, arms outstretched. The lighting throws their white gowns into relief; they look like headless angels slowly vanishing. Shhhunk. Shhhunk. The blows come faster, shhhunk, the singing turns softer, shhhunk. I can pick out specific voices. Shhhunk. A brief, heartbreaking duet, shhhunk. Only Sister Constance remains to carry the song.
Sister Blanche returns just as Constance sings, “O dulcis Virgo Ma . . .” shhhunk.
Tears fell as I watched and listened in the opera house, and, for that matter, every time I watched other productions of the opera on YouTube. Blanche begins the final lines of “Veni, Creator Spiritus”: “in saeculorum saecula; in saeculorum” — forever and ever, forever and — shhhunk. Then silence.
*
I’m hardly unique in reacting to Poulenc’s finale with tears. I told a music librarian I wanted to understand why this scene tore through me. “Because it’s tragic?” she retorted. “Because it’s in A-minor?”
Perhaps I’m overthinking it. In a Reddit thread under r/opera, several users describe crying every time they hear the final scene. Some report starting to cry a few scenes earlier. “The final scene, of course, is such an overwhelming moment of grace and terror,” writes one, “but . . . I find myself wrecked long before that.” Others call the last scene “devastating,” “shattering.”
Crying in response to artworks may be a signal of personal transformation. In a 2015 paper, the psychologist Matthew Pelowski posits that this crying results from a two-step process: You encounter an “initial discrepancy” between what you expect of the work and how you perceive it, followed by a “change in schema/expectations that allows for resolution.” That is, if you don’t dismiss or run away from the discrepancy, you cry because you’re forced to give up your initial “cognitive mastery” of the work and somehow change.
Pelowski’s team surveyed and interviewed people who visited exhibitions of Mark Rothko’s paintings in England and Japan, as well as the Rothko Chapel in Houston, an installation of 14 dark, meditative canvases. Nearly four visitors in 10 reported crying or feeling like crying in response to these works. The ones who cried reported feeling a change or sense of peace.
Still, keeping dry eyes when faced with a moving artwork need not mean you were unaffected by it. A Japanese visitor who did not cry at the local Rothko exhibition responded gnomically to Pelowski’s question about the work’s meaning: “Face yourself . . . space . . . it’s difficult.”
That’s how I feel, still in the confused state of discrepancy about these representations of French martyrs. I haven’t changed, so far as I can tell, by having cried over Dialogues of the Carmelites. My anxieties and doubts are right where they’ve always been. Inside the Church of St. Joan, a sign next to the statue of her at the stake suggests offering her “your fears about illness and death.” How much time do you have, Joan? The sign continues, “This is a powerful place. It can be a complex step.” Those are the words that pierce me, even just in recalling them now. It is a powerful place. I had never before believed so surely that a holy person had trod the ground beneath my feet.
*
The feeling of being so shaken in Rouen makes me think my experience with the opera wasn’t strictly an aesthetic one. Or maybe religious and aesthetic experiences aren’t very different. The rock critic Greil Marcus writes in What Nails It that “the dimension of the sacred” in music appears when “the listener is struck with a sense of awe, a sense of impossibility, a sense that something is taking place beyond intention.” In other words, the sacred is when you hear more than the score contains. At these moments, you might feel “the presence of some force outside the ordinary thinking mind, the intervention of some external intelligence or even gnosis.” Or in Catholic terms, grace.
These discrepant moments are openings. Marcus, an avowed defender of the value of low art, recounts being overpowered by Titian’s Assumption altarpiece in Venice. “I was trapped by revelation,” he writes. “Yes, I said to myself, I finally understand. The only great art is high art. And the only high art is religious art. And the only truly religious art is Christian art. Three things to the bottom of my life I don’t believe — yet I was reduced to a puddle of acceptance.”
Openings close. “I got over it,” Marcus writes of his revelation in Venice. But minor openings appear often for those with eyes to see. For Marcus, they happen while writing, when you encounter “that out-of-nowhere sentence showing up on the page and asking you if you can take the next step, or fail it, fail the dare it’s throwing at you, abandon it as if it were never there at all.”
The figures who move me, whom I meet on film, on stage and in stone, encounter grace and accept its dare. In Dialogues, Blanche is the most reluctant of martyrs. Her family jokes that she’s afraid of her own shadow. “I was born in fear, I have lived in fear, and I still do,” she sings before fleeing the convent. But when the door opens, when she sees that only Sister Constance still has her head, she steps forward and walks through. She only needs an instant of courage. The priest in Au revoir les enfants is based on Père Jacques de Jésus, the Carmelite friar who led Malle’s middle school in Nazi-occupied Fontainebleau. He also took the next step.
Jean-Paul Sartre, in Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, writes, “during emotion, it is the body which, directed by consciousness, changes its relationship to the world so that the world should change its qualities. If emotion is playacting, the play is one that we believe in.” Perhaps I cry because I want to believe in a world in which martyrdom, sainthood and the defiance of tyranny and evil are possible. I want to believe that 600 years ago, Joan’s flaming body burned a hole between earth and heaven that has never closed. If Sartre is right, my tears make it true; they are my opening.
But onto what? What would it mean for me to accept the dare, to step through the door? I don’t know. I only know I want it to stay open.
Jonathan Malesic’s essays have appeared in America, Commonweal, The Atlantic and The New York Times. His next book, Dear Student: Letters on Life and Learning in College, will be published by Princeton University Press.