PSICHARI, ERNEST. - French writer, b. 20 Sept. 1883 in Paris, d. in war on 22 Aug. 1914 at Rossignol (Belgium), nephew of Ernest Renan. A personality essentially modern and profoundly mystical. Driven by the pain of a severe disappointment to a dissolute life, and by disgust at this to an attempted suicide, he sought in a school of discipline the aid to create within himself that inner order whose first principle he still did not know, and he entered the army (1903).
From 1909 to 1912, in the solitude of a long military mission in the desert regions of Mauritania, he completed that spiritual journey from agnosticism to God recounted in his works: *Les voix qui crient dans le désert* (published in 1920) and *Le voyage du centurion* (published in 1916). Before these he had composed: *Terre de soleil et de sommeil* (1908), and *L'appel des armes* (1913).