The great French Catholic poet, journalist and polemicist Charles Péguy died at the first battle of the Marne at the very outset of the First World War. Ever since then his fame and influence upon French literature, thought and politics has grown. Yet knowledge of him in Britain remains sporadic, even amongst Catholics. With a growing number of translations available, most recently of his long poem “The Portal of the Mystery of Hope”, and shortly of his crucial two final essays on Bergson, that situation could soon alter.