As we age, we slip softly from one country to another, and what began in innocence led down a path littered with betrayals and smelly compromises. Charles Péguy understood how it happens. After defending Alfred Dreyfus, he found himself allied to unscrupulous and opportunistic politicians. “Everything begins in mystique and ends in politics,” he wrote. But the dreams of our youth never quite die, and without quite knowing it we continue to yearn for something we had lost along the way. And that is purity.