Mattéo Alfassa

(Sujata:) “Matteo, Mother's brother, was born in Alexandria on July 13, 1876. As a barely one-year-old infant, he was taken to France by his parents. Although the Alfassas became naturalized French citizens only in 1890 (August 28), still Matteo went to school in France, as did his little sister Mirra. He was eighteen when he entered the Ecole Polytechnique, the prestigious Parisian high-technology seat of learning which churns out the cream of French engineers, administrators, etc.
         Coming out, Matteo was posted to the Martinique, an overseas department of France. Martinique is an island off the Windward group, in the West Indies. A street there still bears his name.
         Then, in 1900, Matteo went to New Caledonia as the Navy's Supply Officer. Mathilde had accompanied her adored son. In 1905, soon after his return from New Caledonia, he married. His wife, Eva Brosse, was born in 1883. They had two daughters, Simone and Janine, and a son, Etienne. The son followed in his father's footsteps and became a Polytechnician, he too! Etienne specialized in railway engineering; he worked in the Congo as a director of Railways (of the Congo-Océanie line). He is now a retired engineer of the State Railways, the SNCF. Matteo's children were almost toddlers when Mother left France in 1914. But one of his granddaughters came to Pondicherry in the mid-fifties with her Japanese husband, to see her ‘great-aunt’.
         In 1919, Matteo was appointed Governor of the Congo in Central Africa. Then, in 1934, he became the Governor of French Equatorial Africa. While the parents were away in Africa the three children lived with their grandmother. Mathilde looked after them well. Even today, Etienne and his sisters have kept a vivid and deep impression of their grandmother as an exceptional woman.”

(Sujata:) “[Mother] would play games with her brother. “One of the favourite games my brother — who was only eighteen months older than I — and I played, was to take the Animal Dictionary and become a particular animal for ten minutes. Have you ever tried?” Mother asked us, half a dozen brothers and sisters in our teens. “Well, you know, it's not that easy to become a great anteater. What a long snout it has!” Her laughter pealed out and ours mingled with hers.”

(Mother:) “Did I tell you what happened to my brother? No?... My brother was a terribly serious boy, and frightfully studious — oh, it was awful! But he also had a very strong character, a strong will, and there was something interesting about him. When he was studying to enter the Polytechnique, I studied with him — it interested me. We were very intimate (there were only eighteen months between us). He was quite violent, but with an extraordinary strength of character. He almost killed me three times but when my mother told him, “Next time, you will kill her,” he resolved that it wouldn't happen again — and it never did. But what I wanted to tell you is that one day when he was eighteen, just before the Polytechnique exams, as he was crossing the Seine (I think it was the Pont des Arts), suddenly in the middle of the bridge ... he felt something descend into him with such force that he became immobilized, petrified; then, although he didn't exactly hear a voice, a very clear message came to him: “If you want, you can become a god” — it was translated like that in his consciousness. He told me that it took hold of him entirely, immobilized him — a formidable and extremely luminous power: “If you want, you can become a god.” Then, in the thick of the experience itself, he replied, “No, I want to serve humanity.” And it was gone. Of course, he took great care to say nothing to my mother, but we were intimate enough for him to tell me about it. I told him, “Well (laughing), what an idiot you are!”
         That's the story.
         At that moment he could have had a spiritual realization: he had the right stuff.”

(Sujata:) “Matteo was a gentleman, refined and cultured. Not only he did the Ecole Polytechnique but he also graduated in arts from the Ecole Normale Supérieure where only the most brilliant pupils in arts are admitted. All those who knew Matteo were struck by his sense of justice and impressed by his extraordinary personality. Mother wrote on 17.7.40 that “My brother, the Governor General Alfassa, was since the beginning of the war at the head of the Colonial Information Service in the French Government.” ”

(Sri Aurobindo:) “The Mother's brother, for instance, organised Congoland in Africa and did a lot of work. He was one of the best colonial governors and administrators – but all the credit went to the Minister who was only a figurehead at the top. Even when he was an officer in Equatorial Africa, sometimes as Governor and sometimes as Governor-General, the whole job was done by him. He hardly had a bed but used to lie down in an easy-chair. He is nearly seventy now but as soon as the war broke out he went to the office and asked for work. Now he is working eighteen hours a day.”

(Sujata:) “He passed away in Blois, France, on 12 August 1942, at the age of sixty-six.”

---

See also

• Mathilde Alfassa
• Maurice Alfassa
• Mother's Agenda: January 4, 1969