Mother's Chronicles (Book 1)

18

Atoms

Thus time passed.

Life brought its thousand and one riches to the growing child.

The child was now a girl.

The girl was now a woman.

Mirra was now in her late teens.

Matteo had entered the Polytechnique.

The nineteenth century was drawing to its close.

Mirra was finding the life she was leading more and more limitative and distateful. In all likelihood sparks flew often and often between Mathilde and Mirra.

"Born in a perfectly respectable bourgeois family, where art was considered as a pastime rather than a career, and artists as frivolous, easily inclined to

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debauchery and with a dangerous disregard for money, I felt —perhaps out of a spirit of contradiction — a compelling need to become a painter." Thus begins the speech of the Artist, written by Mother in 1954, in the play The Great Secret.

As soon as she attained the required age, Mirra joined the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. There she came into closer contact with Henri Morisset, son of Edouard Morisset whom Mira Ismalun had long known. The two families had continued to be on friendly terms.

On October 13, 1897, Mirra Alfassa and Henri Morisset were married. Mirra was nineteen, going on twenty.

This was as good a way as any to change her surroundings. At any rate, a good way to plunge into a new way of life.

Mirra was already in quest of a truer way of life.

For, some years back, a casually acquired knowledge had shaken her to the core. This was when she came to know that everything was nothing but 'atoms.' "I still remember my impression," Mother said to

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us in 1966, "when I was quite young and was told that everything is 'atoms' (that was the term used in those days). They said, 'You see this table? You think it's a table, that it is solid and it's wood —well, it is only atoms moving about.' I remember, the first time I was told that, it made a kind of revolution in my head, bringing such a feeling of the complete unreality of all appearances. All at once I said, 'But if it's like that then nothing is true!' I couldn't have been more than fourteen or fifteen."

Thus began Mirra's quest for the true Reality.

Which was to lead her ultimately, through life's byways and highways, to Sri Aurobindo.

Then Mirra would become the MOTHER.

Then Sri Aurobindo and Mother would set out together to "make r-e-a-l what is True."

End of Book One

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