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The good side of Belloc was his freshly un-English point of view and the strength of character that went with his narrowness. His marriage is an extraordinary example of his tenacity. Kept dangling by Elodie Hogan, a Catholic girl from California whom he had met in London, Belloc followed her home. He traveled steerage to New York, then "gambled his way across the plains." When his luck and money gave out, he continued on foot "along the Denver and Rio Grande,'' on to San Francisco. Mother Hogan was far from pleased to see the "tattered and penniless Frenchman." Nor could Belloc overcome Elodie's resistance (she wanted to be a nun) until five years of relentless courtship—by mail —persuaded her at last into happy marriage. Eighteen years later, when he was 43, his wife died. For the rest of his life he wore black broadcloth, and used black-edged writing paper.
On the Spot. Out of his blended love for "the Guns," scholarship and French history came his brilliant biographies of Danton, Robespierre, Marie Antoinette and his vivid studies of warfare. During World War II, recalls Author Speaight, General Bedell Smith, Chief of Staff to General Eisenhower, asked for a copy of Belloc's Six British Battles. "That is the man I want to read," he said; "he has studied the thing on the spot."
This was true: Belloc studied his battlefields on foot, marching as the armies had marched, waking and sleeping as they had done. His great purple passages describing the storm or sunshine that had attended great events were not Bellocian inventions. Weather and walking were his passions, and it is no accident that they are at the heart of two of his most popular books, The Path to Rome and The Four Men.
Once his steps ranged beyond his favored places—Sussex, France, Rome—Belloc's zeal turned to disgust. He described Germany as "an odd filter through which civilization gets to the Slavs." He despised the Tyrol ("detestable"), the Kremlin ("quite insignificant"). Angry, this mind spewed along. Max Beerbohm said, "like a Roman river full of baskets and dead cats"; fixed, it set in hard grooves. "I suppose," said Beerbohm, on hearing that Belloc had witnessed cricket, "he would have said that the only good wicket-keeper in the history of the game was a Frenchman and a Roman Catholic."
The Reasons Why. Belloc was far from an unquestioning Catholic. Much as he respected the church's authority in theory, he tormented it mercilessly in practice. "Are we all Catholics here?" he asked, coming down to Friday breakfast in a Catholic country house. "Very well, I shall help myself to a large slice of ham." Proof of the Catholic Church's divine inspiration, he once said, "might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight."