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But that's not all.
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In this room, transformed into a kind of chapel,
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Maurice was represented like a saint who had saved France;
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and as his own grandmother wrote in a prayer, the whole universe,
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l'univers entier--not only France, l'univers entier.
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Maurice's personal belongings were described by Berthe Gallais,
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his mother, as some religious relics.
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And this is actually what many, many Catholic French people felt in the '20s and '30s.
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At this time, as my colleague, Annette Becker is explaining, in one of her books,
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the Christian soldier was likened in his sacrifice to Christ in a kind of imitatio christi,
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and his mother to a new Virgin Mary, a mater dolorosa.
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Until her death in 1927, Maurice Gallais's grandmother went every day to the room,