He was a bachelor, a very private man, a noted philosopher who held no academic position in France, but tutored university students voluntarily in his home. He lived through the Crisis of the German Occupation of his country. He was influenced by the modern philosophers who with background in Kant and Kierkegaard formed the direction and stimulus of Existentialism that took many forms. His was a very inward quietly spoken form, but involved communion with others, not with his own mind alone. He explained this approach many times in his apartment on Rue de Tournon with his large long haired cat in his lap. His bushy white mustache tickled his nose. It was he who went to Gallimard publishers in Paris and insisted they publish Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest. Crisis had made him anything but introspective and hermetic despite his personal suffering and appearance of a solitary life. Crisis became transformed spontaneously into outward generosity, oppression into release from fear. His was called Social Existentialism by recent historians of philosophy. It might be called transformative existentialism transcending the paralyzing dialectic between Essence and Existence, the ontological issue that both Nietzsche and Bergson in their different ways had helped contemporary minds escape. Marcel and others of his persuasion found kinship in St. Thomas Aquinas. Others found no kinship philosophically in others or in God and made their own existence as their essence. Marcel’s view was of God’s Existence as the contingency of all existences and all life being the result of God’s infinite liberality.He once said that we fight for our liberty even when we have it as the expression of God’s and our own particular creativity.Communion of existences centered for him on Christ included intercessions, spiritual transferences, and divine foreshadowings. He wasn’t a preacher, claimed no ecstatic moment or power to perform miracles. He was a friend of many academic philosophers and specialists in various fields. He rented his apartment. His landlord was threatening to sell and thus to throw him out. A lady friend and admirer, Mme Abeille, was quietly soliciting donations to enable him to purchase his apartment. He knew nothing of this effort. Nor did his cheshire cat.HWM