 In 1901, Maritain met Raïssa Oumansoff, a fellow student at the Sorbonne and the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. Both were struck by the spiritual aridity of French intellectual life and made a vow to commit suicide within a year should they not find some answer to the apparent meaninglessness of life. Largely at the suggestion of his friend, the poet and religious thinker Charles Péguy, Maritain attended lectures by Henri Bergson at the Collège de France (1903–04). Bergson’s challenges to the then-dominant positivism sufficed to lead Jacques and Raïssa to give up their thoughts of suicide, and they married in 1904. Soon thereafter, through the influence of the writer Léon Bloy, both Maritains, as well as Raïssa’s sister, Vera, sought baptism in the Roman Catholic Church (1906). (Vera would live with Jacques and Raïssa for the rest of her life.)