XXVIII. GOOD-NIGHT AND GOOD-BY…

XXVIII. GOOD-NIGHT AND GOOD-BY

It is well for us that faith is able to decipher what De Quincey calls “the hieroglyphic meanings of human suffering”; and that, though the interpretation should not at once be made plain to us, we may, at least, be sure that it is merciful. As St. Peter stands supreme, holding in his hand the shining keys of heaven, which none but he can set in the wards, and none but he can turn, so to each Christian on earth is given the golden key to a personal heaven, and none but he can open the door, and none but he can close it. Within that door sits the interpreter, and when the soul is still it hears his voice reading, with praise and amen, both day and night: and some riddles he makes clear, and on some he sets the seal with the Holy Name; and that is God’s secret, and one day he will speak to the soul concerning it. He who seeks to tear away that seal finds only darkness and confusion; but he who folds his hands above it will at last be illuminated.

Never once during his trial had Dick Rowan rebelled against God, or questioned him. Nature might writhe in pain, and forget for a time the words of praise, but it submitted; and, according to the tumult and darkness that had prevailed, so were the light and peace that followed. It was thorough work, as all the work in this soul had been from the first, and his convalescence was like a new birth.

On the morning after Edith’s parting with Carl Yorke, Dick remained in his room unvisited, keeping all his strength for that first drive. At length the carriage came to the door, and Mr. Williams, who had insisted on remaining at home to superintend what he called the “launching” of his step-son, came down-stairs with Dick. Mrs. Williams, all smiles, followed after, rustling in silks donned in honor of this great occasion. Edith and Ellen Williams stood in the entry, awaiting the little procession. Miss Ellen, blushing and bedizened, was to accompany the two on their drive. Edith had preferred to stay at home and prepare for her evening exodus to Hester’s.

“Why, Dick, you look like an Esquimaux!” she exclaimed. “I cannot even see your nose. How are you to get any fresh air?”

He laughed. “I told mother that I could not breathe anything but fur; but she is a tyrant.”

“It isn’t often I get the chance to play the tyrant over you,” Mrs. Williams remarked, and began giving orders to have sundry hot soap-stones, and gay afghans put into the carriage.

“Mother,” her son exclaimed, “I am ashamed of having such a fuss made over me! I will run away. I will leave the country. I will go back to bed.”

He really blushed, and seemed annoyed.

They went out, and there was the parade of getting settled in their places, Mrs. Williams pleasantly conscious, and her son distressfully so, that several of the neighbors were looking on with interest. The inquiries for Dick had, indeed, been constant from all the neighborhood, even from persons with whom they had no acquaintance. Not a woman, young or old, but had looked kindly on the young sailor, and known when he sailed away, and when he came back; not a child but smiled and nodded to him through the window when he passed. Of course they had all surmised that the lovely young girl whom they had seen there before, and who had now been taking care of him, was one day to be his wife. She divided their attention with him as she stood on the step, and watched him drive away.

It was the hour of the steamer’s departure; and when Edith was alone, she shut herself into her chamber, and, kneeling there, prayed fervently that God would keep the traveller wherever he might wander, and that, though far from her, he might be ever near to heaven.

She did not leave her room when she heard the others come home; and after a while Mrs. Williams came to say that Dick would like to see her.

“We had a delightful drive, and he is not a bit the worse for it,” the mother said. “He will be well enough to go to Mrs. Cleaveland’s to see you, now; but I think he wants to have a good talk with you before you go away. He told me not to let any one interrupt.”

Edith knew well what the summons meant, and with one upward aspiration, “O Spirit of light and truth!” she went immediately.

Dick was sitting in his arm-chair by the window when she entered, and he looked around with a bright smile and greeting, “Well, little sister!” and motioned her to a chair near him.

On hearing that title, she stopped, and clasped her hands on her bosom.

“It was a brother who sent for you,” he said. “Come!”

She seated herself, speechless, almost breathless.

“Edith, where is Carl Yorke?” he asked gently.

She gave the answer with a quiet that looked like coldness. “He left in the steamer to-day for England. From there he continues his travels to the East, I do not know where else. No person is to know this but you and me, as his mother cannot be told.”

The color and the smile left Dick Rowan’s face. Surprise and pain for a moment deprived him of the power of speech.

“I am astonished and distressed!” he said, at length. “I wished to see him, to talk with him. But that he is not a Catholic, I should have wished to see you married soon.”

A deep blush of wounded delicacy rushed to Edith’s cheeks. “Dick Rowan,” she said, “you have yet much to learn about women, or, at least, about me. Whatever feelings of sympathy and affection I may have had for Carl Yorke, my conduct and conversation with him have been irreproachable, and so have my thoughts even. The thought of marriage has not crossed my mind. I do not wish to hear you speak of it.”

Her dignified answer disconcerted him for a moment. He had made the mistake nearly always made by men, often made by women, of misinterpreting the nature, or, at least, the degree of development, of an affection as yet angelically pure, if ardent.

“You were quite right in supposing that I would marry no one but a Catholic,” she remarked.

“I have done you a great wrong, Edith,” he said hastily, “and I wish to repair it as far as I can. But, first, will you tell me why you promised to marry me?”

“Because you told me that your life hung in the balance, and that I was your only hope and aim,” she answered. Her voice trembled slightly, and her eyes softened as she remembered how nearly he had spoken the truth. “You had been my first and most faithful friend. I considered my obligations stronger to you than any one else. I could not tolerate the thought of your suffering through me, when I was the only person you cared for.”

While she spoke, his eyes were downcast, and a deep color burned in his face. “Did my dependence on you attract your affection?” he asked, still looking down.

“It attracted my pity and anxiety,” she replied, without hesitation. “I should respect more a man who would be able to live without me. I do not believe that these violent feelings are either healthy or lasting; and I would not choose to act the Eastern myth of the tortoise supporting a world.”

“Oh! how mean I was!” he exclaimed. “How contemptibly selfish! Let me tell you all. I had a strong affection for you, that is true; but I can see now that there were unworthy motives mingled with it. There were pride, ambition, and self-will. I was determined to take you away from Carl Yorke. I knew that he thought of you, and I believed that he would win you, unless I prevented it. Your antecedents of birth, your tastes and social position, your kind of education, all were the same, and made you suited to each other. I said to myself that my being a Catholic gave me the precedence; but in my heart I knew that there was no reason why he, as well as I, should not receive the gift of faith. I knew, indeed, that his friendship for Alice Mills had predisposed him toward it, and that he read Catholic books. But I was determined to have you. I did not dare to ask if you would be quite content. I would not contemplate any other possibility. When I asked you if you were willing, it was only after you had promised. I confess this with shame and contrition!”

“Dick,” Edith asked breathlessly, “have you quite got over caring very much about me? Are you not disappointed?”

He raised his face, and all the shame and distress passed away from it. “The only disappointment I am now capable of feeling,” he said, with the emphasis of truth, “would be in case any earthly object should come between me and God. In the last few weeks I have learned to shrink with fear and aversion from all earthly affection. There is nothing but harm in those attachments which are so strong that the loss of their object brings destruction. They are mistaken in their aim. Why, Edith, what I worshipped in you was not simply what you are, a good and amiable girl, but a goddess. You were magnified in my eyes, I put you in a niche. That niche is now empty. Or, no!” he added, raising his brightening eyes, “it is not empty, but the right one stands there. You could never have satisfied the enthusiasm of my expectation. The great and wonderful good which I vaguely looked for with you, I should never have won. I mistook my object.”

He looked out thoughtfully, and she sat looking at him. At length he said, with a faint smile, “I wrote you last year of a visit I paid to the island and cave of Capri. That scene is like my past life. That cave was an enchanted place, so fair, so blue, so unreal! All ordinary critical sense deserted me as I gazed. I could easily have believed that the walls and ceiling were of jewels, and the watery floor some magical blue wine. As I sat in the boat and looked back, I saw a white star in the distance. Everything but that, and a long white ray from it, was blue. I rowed toward that star, I looked at it as my goal, just as I made you my goal. But when I came near, I found that it was no star. It was only the low entrance to the cave. Or, rather, it was for me the passage to sunshine and the heavens. And that you have been to me, Edith,” he said, turning toward her. “Thank God that your influence with me has always been for good, and that, in leaving you, I progress rather than change! You inspired me, and kept me from what was low, when I had no religion to help me. I can see it all now. The very excess and enthusiasm of my affection for you was necessary in order to govern me and keep me from harm. Besides, it is my nature to do with my might what my hands find to do. I was not then capable of resolving to do right for the sake of right; but when I was strong enough, then you drew aside, and left me face to face with God!”

His breath came quickly, and his wide-opened eyes were fixed on the western sky, and caught its golden light.

“Of course there was a struggle,” he resumed, “for I was sincere. But that is over. My unreasonable affection for you is as thoroughly eradicated as if it had never been a part of my life. I am ashamed of having so given myself up to it.”

Edith hesitated, then put the test. “Dick, I must be satisfied that I am really free. If you were sure now that no other, deeper sympathy stood between me and you, and that I were ready and willing to fulfil my engagement with you, would you still say that God alone held your heart?”

His expression was one of terror and shrinking. “It is not so, Edith!” he exclaimed. “God forbid that it should be so! I could no more go back to those hopes and wishes of the past than I could be a little boy again!”

After the momentary fear and suspense that had accompanied her question, Edith’s first feeling was one of joyful relief and freedom, her second an indignant sense of the wrong that had been done her. She rose from her chair, walked to the other window, and stood there looking out with eyes that saw no object before her. Her mind glanced swiftly back over the last year and a half. She remembered the bright peacefulness of her life, yet half-enshrouded in the mists of childhood, the vision of her womanhood shining large and vague just above the line of her eyelids; for she cared not yet to look at or question that future. She recollected the hopes and aims that had begun to form themselves, of doing good, of making herself such a Catholic as would be a credit to the faith, of helping and instructing her poor, of trying to bring her uncle’s family into the church; and she remembered a faint rose-tinge of personal happiness, soft and rare, and too delicate to be seen, but felt by some finer intuition. Then came the sudden call that had put her life in confusion, the future wrenched rudely open, the many clustering interests trampled by one that demanded to be made paramount. And there was no more cause than this!

Indignation swelled to the point of speech. She turned about, and faced Dick Rowan, and her eyes flashed.

“You may well be ashamed,” she said, “for you have been unmanly! I do not speak of what I have suffered in my own mind; but you have exposed my reputation, which, next to my character, I hold sacred. You have deprived me of your mother’s friendship; for she will never cease to blame me. You have had me proclaimed as your promised wife, every one supposing that the promise was freely given. Yet, when I went down-stairs that day, I was like a victim going to be immolated. Nothing but prayer had strengthened my resolution. I thought that a refusal would be your destruction. You had said as much. You have exposed me to the condemnation of shallow judges, who will be only too glad to find fault. Those people who pronounce without knowing, and think that they can include the motives of another’s whole life in three words, will all condemn me. I, who have tried with constant watchfulness to walk to a hair’s-breadth in the path of womanly propriety, shall be pointed at as the girl who jilted you and broke your heart. And all this, not from the blindness of real affection, which would have excused you in my eyes, but from will, and pride, and a mere fascination. Don’t tell me of eradicating a real affection. It may be conquered, and made subject to duty; but sympathy is not to be eradicated. That feeling which has died in your heart was, indeed, a false blossom.”

She turned and stretched her hands out toward the East, where, far away, the steamer that bore Carl Yorke ploughed the twilight wave. “O Carl! you would not have done it,” she cried, and burst into tears; the usual womanly peroration to such a discourse.

“O God, accept my humiliation!”

She heard that tremulous prayer through her sobs, and, starting, looked at Dick. His face was bowed forward in his hands, as though he could never again raise it. She recollected herself. It was God who had cured and enlightened him. He was not a man who had turned from one fickle fancy to another. He was in the hands of God.

She wiped her eyes, and, after a little while, went and knelt beside his chair. “Forgive me, Dick, for reproaching you so,” she said. “It is over now. We all make mistakes, and those only do well who acknowledge them, and forgive others. My childhood’s dear friend, let us forget all that is painful in the past. God will direct. There is much in life besides marrying and giving in marriage, and I do not wish to think of that again, not for a long, long time, if at all. Set the seal on the events of the last two years. They never happened. I am happy now. You know that, though I was born at the North, I have a Southern temper. See! the little cyclone is past, and I am clear from every cloud. We are two sober friends, who wish each other no end of good. Tell me what you mean to do.”

He raised his head, and the one absorbing interest of his new life came back and obliterated the passing trouble. “I do not know, Edith, and I lay no plans. I have no reason to trust my own will or wish. I give myself up entirely to direction, and am certain on but one point: God will not let me go, and I will not let him go. When I lay bruised and helpless before him, he took me in his arms and healed me, and I will never know another love. He has kindled a fire in my heart which my life shall guard. I rejected him once, but will never again. That night I spent in the church, before my baptism, a voice from the altar asked me, I thought, to give up all for God; and it would have been easy then for me to promise. As I meditated on heaven, the Mother of Christ drew to herself all that is lovely in woman; all that was strong, and true, and protecting in a guide clustered around the church; all that was adorable, that passed beyond speech, was there before me in the tabernacle. I thought then that to be a brother in any religious order, or a servant in the church, to sleep under the same roof that sheltered the head of Christ, to light the candles, to care for his altar, to serve Mass, all that would be the highest honor and happiness. I think so now, but I ask nothing. I thought then with self-contempt how I had toiled to earn money, when the ‘inexhaustible riches of God’ had lain untouched at my hand; how I had travelled to see the wonders of the earth, when the wonders of God had appealed to me in vain. But when daylight came, I treated the whole as a dream, a mere exaltation of the fancy, and impracticable. I know now that what I took for a dream is the only reality, and what I thought reality is but a dream. I resisted the inspiration, and have been lacerated on the briers of my own obstinacy.”

He paused, looking out toward the west, and in the fine golden light that was left from sunset, with the new moon and the evening star half-drowned there, his face looked beautiful. Calmness, humility, solemnity, and sweetness mingled in its expression.

Edith whispered a low “Well, Dick?” to make him speak again; for he had, apparently, forgotten her.

“Father John has promised me that I may make a retreat as soon as he thinks me well enough,” he said, rousing himself at the sound of her voice. “I do not look beyond that. I do not know anything. I wait.” And again there was silence.

After a while, Edith said timidly, for he seemed buried in a reverie, “Do you remember last year, Dick, when we went about the city, like two strange sight-seers? You said then that the poor and the suffering looked at you in an asking way different from the look they gave others. Don’t you think it might have been the Lord who asked through their eyes?”

“I have not a doubt of it,” he answered.

“Nothing else is of worth!” he said after a minute, as if speaking to himself--“nothing else is of worth!” And again, “O miserable waste!”

Presently she spoke again, very softly: “Sometimes, when one has meditated a long while, everything seems unspeakably good and beautiful, as if all were in God. A warmth and sweetness flow around the soul. If your enemy should come to injure you, you would embrace him. If your friend were taken away from you, you would smile, and let him go. For, turning to the Lord, you find all there. Nothing is lost. When you go away, you feel still, and speak lowly. You want to do something for some one; and, wherever you look, you see the Lord, and whatever you do is done for him. He accepts it all, and nothing is small, and nothing is great. If you see any one suffer, you pity, and try to help, and, perhaps, you weep; but the agony of pain you feel at other times at the sight of suffering, you do not feel now. You get a glimpse of the reason why angels can witness so much pain, yet still be happy.”

Dick, looking out at the sky, smiled. “Yes!” he said, “yes!”

A carriage drove up to the door, Hester’s carriage, come for Edith. Twilight had fallen softly round them, and their faces were dim to each other in that curtained chamber.

“My dear friend,” Edith said earnestly, “is there peace between us?”

“All is peace, Edith,” he answered.

“Then, before I go,” she said, “I want you to put your hand on my head, and say, ‘God bless you!’”

He did as she bade him, laid his hand on her head, and said, “God bless you for ever! Good-night!”

Both of them knew that good-night meant good-by, yet they parted with a smile.

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XXIX. EVERYBODY’S CHAPTER

The family had come to Boston, and were settled in their old home. The change had not been effected without emotion, and, to the surprise of all, the one most moved was Mr. Yorke. Whether, with that noble self-control in which men so much excel women, he had carefully concealed the real misery of his life in Seaton, or whether the return to their former home reminded him that it had been lost by his act, we will not attempt to say, for he did not. He was silent and very pale, and, as he entered the house, stood on the threshold a moment, with an expression in his face which touched the hearts of all. One might read in his look the consciousness that a great change had passed over him since last he stood there, and that the return did not bring him the happiness he had anticipated.

Perhaps nothing in life is more sad than to have a boon long sought for at length accorded to us, and to find that we have lost the power to take delight in its possession.

The furniture and baggage had been sent in advance, and Hester and Edith had superintended the arrangement of everything, so that all was ready for them. Their last week in Seaton had been spent with Major Cleaveland, at his house there. He had kept it open for that purpose, and remained to assist and accompany them, while his wife and children had preceded him to the city.

Hester went to meet her family at the depot, and Edith stood in the door when they drove up, and ran joyfully out to embrace them. The house was bright, and dinner was ready. To Mrs. Yorke, there was but one blot on the occasion, and that was her son’s absence. But he had written her with such affection and cheerfulness that she did not grieve too much. Besides, she expected him soon to return.

Dinner over, Hester and her husband went to their own home, and the family sat once more together in their old, familiar sitting-room. The situation was one to provoke emotion or thoughtfulness. Clara set herself to cheer the company, and put sentiment into the background.

“The first trouble in changing one’s residence,” she said, “is to make people remember one’s address. Fortunately, our number, 96, is peculiar. It is the only created thing I know, except the planets, which is not changed nor disconcerted by being turned upside down. Turn it as you will, stand on your head and look at it, tear the house down, still the number 96 smiles on you unchanged, and as changeless as a star. It is a very proper number to have on a house.”

They all sat and looked at her, smiling slightly, glad to be amused.

“The next thing is,” she pursued, “to prevent our friends going to extremes in making their new estimate of us. They must be made to comprehend that, though we have positively renounced the German, we are not Puritans nor ascetics; and that, though we have written, do write, and mean to write in future, and to put ourselves in print whenever we feel so disposed, we do not set up as geniuses. Papa,” she said, suddenly interrupting herself, “why is not the plural of genius genii? I always want to say genii.”

“They mean about the same thing,” Mr. Yorke remarked; and there was silence again for a while.

The night was calm, the street quiet, but there was that unmistakable feeling that a great press of human life is near. It was not the presence which one feels in the woods, where nature is obedient to its Maker, and the soul is lifted by the constantly ascending homage that surrounds it, but a lateral influence, electrical and exciting, of contending human wills.

Clara was again the one to break silence. “Trees, and toads, and mosses, and no market, are all very charming for a change,” she said. “But if one does not live in the city, the city should be near. A man or a woman without society is no better than a vegetable. You remember, papa, how Bolingbroke took root among his trees. And what delights one has in the city! There is music. O the violins!--the soprano witch among instruments! If Pan invented the pipe, the original of the organ, then Æolus invented this instrument of airy octaves. Those old painters were right who put violins into the hands of their musical angels. Give a violin time enough, and the music of it will gradually eat up the whole body, or etherealize it, till some day the musician, touching carefully his precious film of a Cremona, will find it melt in his hands, and disappear in a harmonious sigh. Ladies and gentlemen, I should like to hear this moment a whirlwind of violins, ten thousand, say, blowing through a vast hall with clustered pillars, and dusky nooks and reaches, and arches everywhere, and a sultry, fragrant dimness through it all, and an immense crowd holding their breaths to listen, and, away up in the roof, little birds perched, as they are in Notre Dame, at Paris, and trembling with fear and wonder through all their downy feathers. And when it was over, people would look at each other, and some would smile, and some laugh out with delight; and the birds would venture two or three little silvery peeps, then flutter about as though nothing had happened. Yes, the city is the place to live in.”

“And then,” said Edith, “one can always go to church.”

Clara immediately gave her cousin an enthusiastic embrace. “Oh! you darling little bigoted Papist!” she exclaimed.

Melicent, sitting in the chimney-corner, was engrossed in her own thoughts. She was, perhaps, meditating on that romance of which Clara had written to Edith. A villainously ugly, but tenderly-beloved Scotch terrier lay on the hearth-rug, his eyes fixed on the fire, and seemed to muse. Mrs. Yorke bent toward him, touched him lightly, and quoted Champfleuri, apropos of cats: “‘A quoi pense l’animal qui pense?’” and added a definition she had heard somewhere: “‘The brute creation is a syllogism, of which the conclusion is in the mind of God.’”

This brought them to the point to which their thoughts naturally tended that evening. God, and the meanings of God, claimed their attention.

“We are all tired,” Melicent said. “Shall we have prayers now, papa?”

The Bible was brought, Betsey sent for, and they waited in silence for Mr. Yorke to begin the reading. He sat with his hand on the open page, and looked into the fire a moment, then looked at his wife.

“Amy, I would like, for to-night, to have all my family worship together,” he said. “After to-night, we can go our different ways. Let Patrick and Mary and Anne be called in, and, since they cannot unite with us, let us unite with them. Are you willing?”

Mrs. Yorke blushed with surprise, but made no objection. Melicent drew herself up, but no one observed her. Mr. Yorke turned smilingly to his niece. “Well, Edith, if you Catholics will listen to a chapter from me, I will listen to your prayers, and join in them as far as I can.”

She did not say anything as she rose to call the servants, but, in passing her uncle, she laid a loving hand on his shoulder, and looked her gratitude and delight.

Patrick and the girls had too much confidence in Edith to hesitate, though they wondered much at her summons. Seated in the midst of the circle, they listened while Mr. Yorke read a psalm, then they knelt down. There was a moment’s pause. The Yorkes were accustomed to sit while their prayers were read. Then Mr. Yorke knelt, and wife and daughters followed his example, Melicent involuntarily, and making a motion to get up again as soon as she was down, but concluding to stay. Episcopalians kneel, she reflected, and she could mentally kneel with them. Edith led the prayers, and her tremulous voice conciliated the good-will of the listeners.

It was the first time any of this family had ever assisted at a private Catholic devotion, and they were astonished to perceive how every circumstance and need of man was met by this perfect spiritual science. The devotion was not something apart from life, but an aspiration and petition from every thought and act of life. The invocation to the Holy Spirit, the recommendation to place themselves in the presence of God, the pause for the examination of conscience, the act of contrition following it, the preparation for death--a Catholic knows them all, but to a Protestant their effect is startling.

Never again would their own devotions seem to this family other than dry and unsatisfying; never would one of them again be in trouble or danger, but the impulse would be to utter the voice of Catholic prayer.

In taking up their old life again, the Yorkes were surprised to find that they had grown more earnest and simple during the years they had spent in retirement. Mrs. Yorke had lost much of her love for fashion and luxury, the daughters were astonished at the frivolity of some of their former pleasures, and Mr. Yorke cared less for heathen literature, and felt more interest in the poor and ignorant.

Edith was happy in her religion; but, though she went to Mass every day when she could, had a mind too enlightened and well balanced to find her religion only in going to church. She was not in the least a gushing young lady: hers was a deep and silent enthusiasm which moved to action rather than speech. The persecution of Catholics was going on in Massachusetts also, and Governor Gardner and his motley legislature were making juries the judges of the law as well as of the facts, and disbanding Irish regiments (which were allowed to reorganize for 1862), and making a law which would enable them to send a troop of men to search the dormitories and closets and cellars of convent schools. But all this troubled Edith very little. She could laugh at the Transcript’s parody:

“Half a league, half a league out of the city, All to the boarding-school rode the committee:”

and could see how the enemies of the church were covering themselves with ridicule and disgrace, and securing their own ultimate defeat.

“They’re hanging themselves! They’re hanging themselves!” Mr. Yorke would say with glee, at each new extravagance.

When the Yorkes first returned to the city, Melicent’s affairs chiefly occupied their minds. There was no engagement, and there had been no private intercourse between her and Mr. Griffeth; but she had not broken with him entirely, and had requested permission to receive friendly letters from him. After Mr. Griffeth had been bound over to commit no act and write no word aggressively sentimental, this permission was unwillingly given. One of these friendly missives had come the week after her arrival; and, though the writer had kept the letter of his promise, he had so broken the spirit of it that Mrs. Yorke, to whom the letter was dutifully shown, frowned on reading it, and had a mind to answer it herself. Melicent, indeed, seemed desirous to alarm her family as much as possible regarding this affair, and carried herself with such a conscious, heroine-of-a-novel air as both amused and annoyed her family.

Among their earliest visitors was the Rev. Doctor Stewart, Mrs. Yorke’s former pastor and good friend. The mother confided to him her distress, and besought him to speak to Melicent on the subject.

“She always had a high respect for you and Mrs. Stewart, and would be influenced by what you say,” she concluded.

The minister made inquiries concerning this suitor’s orthodoxy as a Universalist.

“He is orthodox in nothing, doctor!” Mrs. Yorke exclaimed. “He wears his creed as he wears his clothes, changing, when convenient, the one with as little scruple as the other. He is a moral Sybarite, who adjusts his conscience comfortably to his wishes, and looks about with an air of calm rectitude, and an assumption of pitying superiority over people who are so bigoted as to believe the same yesterday and to-day.”

“I know the kind of man,” the minister said, with an expression of severity and mortification. “They are one of the pests of the time, and a disgrace to the ministry. I will do all I can to separate Melicent from him.”

Doctor Stewart was a stately gentleman, something over fifty years of age, gray-haired, rather heavy, and slightly old-fashioned. He was amiable in disposition, believed that great respect should be paid to the clergy, wore a white neck-cloth, and was fairly educated in everything but theology. Since the Yorkes left Boston, he had lost his wife, an excellent lady several years older than himself. He was left with three children, a son of nineteen, who was a student in Harvard College; another son, ten years older, who was making his fortune in the West; and a daughter, the eldest of the family, married to a foreign missionary, and industriously distributing Bibles to the Chinese. Once a month, in the missionary-meeting, the reverend doctor read a letter from this daughter, in which she described the great work she was doing, and asked for more Bibles and money.

This was the gentleman to whose management Mrs. Yorke entrusted her eldest daughter’s love-affair.

Nothing of their first interview transpired, except that the minister seemed to be hopeful. Melicent became more inscrutable and consequential than ever.

About this time, Miss Clara Yorke began to grow exceedingly merry in her disposition. She would smile in season and out of season, and burst into laughter without apparent cause. At the mention of Doctor Stewart’s name, her eyes always began to dance, and at the sight of him approaching their house her gravity deserted her immediately. Mrs. Yorke was both astonished and puzzled by her daughter’s levity.

“I esteem Doctor Stewart very highly,” the lady said. “He is a dignified and agreeable person. I am glad he feels like running in here often. He must be lonely at home, for Charles is away during the day, and studies all the evening. Poor man! The loss of his wife was a terrible blow to him, but he bears it beautifully.”

The laughter with which Miss Clara was tremblingly full had to be restrained; for at that moment the door opened to give admittance to a smiling elderly gentleman in a white neckcloth. But, glancing at Melicent’s demure countenance a minute after, the young woman’s mirth became audible.

“Clara, you should, at least, give us the opportunity of sharing your amusement,” her mother said, rather chidingly.

Clara stammered out that there was a very witty article in the last Atlantic.

“By the way,” the minister said to her pleasantly, “I must compliment you on a very touching story of yours I have read lately. It is ‘Silent Rooms.’ I confess to you, Miss Clara, that I wept over it.”

How exquisite must be the sensibility of that person who weeps over one’s pathetic stories! Clara looked at the reverend doctor with a new interest. He certainly had a most beautiful nose, she observed, and his expression was benign. Moreover, he was a gentleman of good mind.

“I am delighted by what you tell me, doctor,” she said. “For, while such emotion is the highest compliment I could receive, it does not hurt you. Indeed, I thought that sketch would be affecting. I shed tears myself when I was writing it, and I think that a pretty good cry-tear-ion to judge by. Beg pardon, papa! I didn’t mean to. It punned itself.”

The minister then asked her to write a play and a hymn for the Christmas festival of his Sunday-school.

“I should be delighted to, doctor,” she said, but clouded over a little. “I am not much in the way of that sort of composition, but I will try.”

“Then you will succeed.” A bow and a smile accompanied the assertion.

“Do not be too sure of that,” Clara exclaimed with vivacity. “I can write easily enough what is in my own mind, but not what is in other minds; and I haven’t an idea on this subject. I am not a facile writer when I have nothing to say. When I have no thoughts, I find it hard to express them.”

“Oh! dash off some little thing,” said the doctor, with a sweep of the hand, as though he were sowing plays and poems broadcast.

“Dash off some little thing!” repeated the young lady scornfully, when their visitor had left them. “‘Dash off!’ That is all he knows. I don’t believe he cried over my story!”

“My daughter!” expostulated Mrs. Yorke; but her husband laughed. Melicent cast an indignant glance on her sister, and went out of the room. At that, Clara’s hilarity returned.

Carl wrote to his mother often, giving her an account of his movements. He stayed nowhere long, and every letter concluded with an announcement of his intention to make a flying visit to some other place. The descriptions he gave and the adventures he related were not those of an ordinary sight-seer. “I should think that the boy were gathering material for a history of the nineteenth century,” his mother said, and was evidently very proud of him.

But after a while she recollected he had not said that any one of these flying visits would be his last, and had never answered plainly her questions as to the time of his return. One day she suspected the truth. She had just received a letter from Carl, dated at Nice, in which he hinted at a projected trip to Asia Minor. After reading the letter through, she dropped it into her lap, and sat looking out through the window and off into distance.

No one else but Edith was in the room, and she had been attentively watching her aunt’s face. Seeing that strange look settle on it, she crossed the room, and seated herself close to Mrs. Yorke’s side.

“Edith,” her aunt said, her eyes still gazing far away, “I think Carl means to be gone a long while.”

Edith called up her powers of self-control; for the time of explanation had come.

“He has already been away a long while,” she said. “It is six months since he went. That is six months taken from the whole.”

Mrs. Yorke’s eyes turned on her niece with a quick searching. “You know all about it!” she exclaimed, and began to breathe quickly.

“Yes, I know all about it,” was the calm reply; “and I was to tell you as soon as it should seem best. Carl is making a long journey, but six months of it are over.”

Mrs. Yorke flung Edith’s hand away. “You knew it, and his own mother did not!” she exclaimed. “You need not tell me. If Carl deceived his mother, I wish to hear no more about it.”

She pressed her hands to her heart, which beat with thick, suffocating throbs.

Nothing but firmness would do. It was necessary to recall her to a sense of the injustice she was doing, and shame her into controlling herself, if no better could be done.

“Aunt Amy,” Edith said, “it seems to me that you should question yourself, rather than reproach others. Never was a woman more tenderly loved and cared for by her family than you are. Your husband, your children, your niece, your servants even, are constantly on the watch lest something should startle or agitate you. A door must not be slammed, the horses must not be driven too fast, ill news must be gently broken, you must not be fatigued nor worried. If we shed tears, we conceal them from you; if one of us is ill, we make light of it to you. We wish to do this, and do it with all our hearts, for your life is most precious to us. But I think that our devotion entails one duty on you, and that is to look on everything as calmly and reasonably as you can, and not agitate yourself without cause.”

Mrs. Yorke looked at her niece in astonishment. This tone of firm reproof was new to her, and, from its strangeness, effective.

“Carl did not deceive you,” Edith went on. “He has told you nothing but the truth.”

“A half-truth is a lie!” Mrs. Yorke interrupted. “I see plainly in this the influence of that pernicious Mr. Griffeth. I well remember one of his sayings: ‘As the doctors give poisons to a sick body,’ he said, ‘so we must sometimes give lies to a sick mind.’ I have a sick mind, it seems.”

“It is for you to prove whether you have or not,” Edith replied quietly.

The reproof was severe, and Mrs. Yorke’s heightened color told that she felt it. She leaned back in her chair, and was silent.

“Carl told me,” Edith said, “because I am healthy, and cannot be endangered by sorrow; and he knew, too, that I would not require any man to sacrifice his duty and prospect of a high career merely that I might have the pleasure of being always with him. When a man is twenty-nine years old, if he is not going to throw himself away, and be a miserable failure, it is time for him to go out into the world, and live his own life. Carl would gladly have told you all his plans, and it was cruel that he should be obliged to go away without your blessing, and to carry with him, as he must, this constant anxiety about you. He was doubtful and unhappy, but did what he thought was best. He told no one but me. Now, be fair, Aunt Amy, and ask yourself what you would have done if Carl had come to you and said that he was going away on a two-years’ journey?”

Mrs. Yorke put her hands over her face, and sat breathing heavily, and without uttering a word. Edith trembled. Would she see the pale hands fall nerveless, and her aunt drop dead in her arms? She sent up a silent prayer to her ever dear Mother of Perpetual Succor, then gently loosened a golden locket from Mrs. Yorke’s belt, and opened it.

“Dear Carl!” she said tenderly, kissing the miniature, “how could your mother misunderstand you so, when your true and loving face was so close to her heart? Is it only Edith who never mistakes you?”

The frail hands slipped down to hers, as she leaned on her aunt’s lap, and she looked up to meet a faint and tearful smile.

“You are all so tender, my dear, that I am afraid it makes me selfish,” Mrs. Yorke said. “Now tell me the whole story. See! I am reasonable.”

“You are an angel to let me talk so, and not be angry!” Edith answered joyfully. “Wait till I get you a granule of digitaline; then I will tell you all about Carl. You will be proud of your son, my lady.”

A few days after, Doctor Stewart proposed for Melicent, greatly to her mother’s astonishment. “Why, doctor, I am proud to consent, if Melicent does,” she said. “But I never dreamed of such a thing!”

“Melicent assures me that, with her parents’ consent, she is willing to entrust her happiness in my hands,” the minister said. “She does not find my age any obstacle. You must be aware, indeed, that your eldest daughter’s disposition is grave and dignified. My impression is, that the only attraction Mr. Griffeth had for her was through his clerical office. She has confided to me that she wrote him a decided dismissal the very day after my first conversation with her.”

Of course, if Melicent was satisfied, no one else could object; and Melicent radiated satisfaction.

“I am sure you have chosen wisely, my daughter,” her mother said.

“I never really thought I should marry Mr. Griffeth, mamma,” the daughter answered, blushing. “And I never said any more to him than that I would consider his offer.”

That very evening the engagement was tacitly announced to the public, by Mrs. Yorke and Melicent appearing at a lecture at Music Hall, escorted by Doctor Stewart. Mr. Yorke, Clara, and Edith went early, and took seats in the side balcony, overlooking the platform, where the rest of their party had places reserved.

“It will just suit Mel,” Clara said gleefully. “I saw it from the first minute, and have been laughing over it all winter, while you stupid folks never had a suspicion. Mel was cut out for just such a fate. She likes to be lofty and sphynx-like, and to sit on platforms with everybody staring at her, and to come sweeping in at the last minute, and take the highest place. The doctor, too, is just to her mind. He is tall, and large, and slow. His voice is sonorous, he has a nice nose and finger-nails, and his neckcloth compels respect. Oh! there is no fear but Mel will be happy. The only danger is on our side. For I tell you, papa, those two will walk over us in their smooth, grand way, if we are not careful. I must study how to take them down a peg.”

There was a smile in the corners of Mr. Yorke’s mouth, but he spoke reprovingly. “It doesn’t sound well for you to talk in that way of your sister, Clara,” he said.

Clara gave a little impatient sigh. “I sometimes wish that I could not see so plainly the difference between solid people and inflated people,” she said. “It is a misfortune; but I cannot help it.”

Mr. Yorke said nothing. He had already learned that there was one point on which he would have to resist encroachment. More than once he had seen Doctor Stewart turn a severe glance on the shelf where stood the numbers of Brownson’s Review left by Carl; and only that day Melicent had proposed that the books should be carried up-stairs.

“Up-stairs!” Mr. Yorke had repeated. “What for?”

“Why, on account of the doctor,” Melicent had answered, disconcerted by the sharpness of her father’s astonishment. “He does not like them, and their being here might lead to unpleasant controversy.”

The reply had been decisive:

“If Doctor Stewart does not like what he finds in my house, he is at liberty to remain out of it. And if he should forget himself so far as to begin any unpleasant controversy, I shall recommend him to increase his stock of theological knowledge by a careful study of the same Review.”

Mr. Yorke said nothing of this conversation, and Melicent had not mentioned it; but it was a warning to both.

“Papa,” Clara said, after looking down on the audience awhile, “did you ever observe how bald heads light up an assembly like this? They reflect the gas, and have a very cheerful effect. Oh! there is Mel. Attention! See, the conquering hero comes. My poor little mother is nearly invisible. Such a small duenna! How frightfully conspicuous! See the doctor smile, and show them to the very front chairs, and see the filial manner in which he behaves to Mrs. Yorke. Suppose he should take to coloring his hair! There! they are seated at last, after that display, and I must own that Mel’s stage-manners are very good. If only they would not look so conscious! Edith, why is Doctor Stewart like a verd-antique? It’s a conundrum.”

That night, after Melicent had gone to her room, the others sat talking over the wedding. Doctor Stewart had desired that it might be soon. Edith proposed to give the trousseau.

“We cannot allow you, my dear,” her aunt said. “Your uncle and I have something, and Melicent must take what we can give her. You are too bountiful already!”

Edith drew writing materials toward her, and began to make out a bill.

MISS EDITH YORKE, To Charles Yorke and family, Dr. To seven years’ board and tuition, $7,000 “ “ “ clothing, 1,400 “ Instruction in her religion, 20,000,000 “ Kindness to Father Rasle, 10,000,000 “ Never being anything but kind to her, 10,000,000 “ Sundries, 10,000,000 “ Joining her once in Catholic prayer, 100,000,000,000,000,000 ------------------------- $100,000,000,050,008,400

“I think that is correct,” she said, showing the bill to her uncle. “I am mathematical in my tastes, you know. I do not like the dollars, though, the association is so vulgar. We will put it in some classical gold coin. It shall be rose-nobles.”

Looking in Mr. Yorke’s face as he smiled on her, she exclaimed, “Uncle, you have a look of my father, now!”

“And you have a look of my brother,” he returned. “Your eyes are changeful, like his, and your hair has a sunny hue. When you coax, too, your ways are like his. Robert was very winning.”

She put her arm in his, and looked reproachfully across the table to her aunt. “And yet,” she said, “you are not willing that I should give Melicent a few pocket-handkerchiefs to be married with!”

Mrs. Yorke laughed. “You shall give her as many handkerchiefs as you please,” she said.

* * * * *

But what, meantime, of Dick Rowan?

Mrs. Yorke had called at once to see him on her arrival, but he had already gone to make a retreat, and they did not see him afterward.

The first part of that retreat was to him heavenly; but, when it came to making definite plans for the future, then he found himself in cruel doubt.

“Oh! if I could have had a Catholic training in early life!” he said to Father John. “It seems to me now that heaven has been within my reach, and has slipped away, without my knowing it. I do not wish to be presuming. I do not try to think of it; the thought haunts me.”

“Tell me freely all that is in your mind,” the priest said. “I am here to help you.”

Dick Rowan’s head drooped, and he spoke rapidly, as if afraid to speak: “It seems to me, father, that if I had been brought up a strict Catholic--any sort of Catholic--I should have been--” He lifted his face, looked at Father John with eyes that could not bear suspense, and added, “I should have been a priest!”

Then, since he found neither astonishment nor displeasure in that face, his distress broke forth. “And now, O God! it is too late!” he said, and wrung his hands.

“You think that you had a vocation, my son?” the priest asked calmly.

“I believe it!” he answered. “What has my whole life been but a searching and striving after some great and glorious happiness, something different from the common happiness of earth, some one delight which was to be mine here, and still more mine in the world to come? It was always my way to have but one wish, and to expect from its fulfilment what nothing on earth can give. I believe, sir, that when a man has that way of concentrating all his hopes and desires on one object, that object should be God. Otherwise, there is nothing but ruin for him. Such an end was once possible to me, and now it is lost!”

Father John laid his hand on the young man’s. “My son,” he said, “it is not lost!”

Dick uttered not a word, but gazed steadily into the priest’s face.

“I believe that you have a divine vocation.”

“You believe that I had!” Dick cried out sharply.

“I believe that you have!” the priest replied.

Dick drew a deep breath, and his pale face blushed all over with a sudden delight; but said nothing.

“When a man first thinks of choosing God,” the priest said, “he may mistake. But when God chooses a man, and tears away from him every other tie, and sets him in a place where he can see nothing surrounding him but a great solitude filled with God, then there is no mistake. I believe that God chooses you.”

“God chooses me!” repeated Dick Rowan, blenching a little, like one dazzled by a great light. “God chooses me!” he said again, and stood up, as if his swelling heart had lifted him. “Then I choose him!” He put his hands over his lifted face, and tears of joy dropped down. Father John, deeply affected, spoke to him, but he did not hear. He was repeating the words of the marriage-service: “‘For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, till death do us’--unite!”

The priest spoke afterward to Edith on the subject. Dick had requested him to tell her and his mother whatever they wished to know.

“Never was there a soul more ardent and single,” Father John said. “His only difficulty arose from a tender regard for the honor of God, and a great reverence for the sacred office. He fancied that it would be an insult to both for a man to seek to enter the priesthood of whom people could say that he did so because he was disappointed in love, and that he gave to God the remnant of a heart which a woman had rejected.”

“Dick rejected me,” Edith interposed hastily.

“I told him,” the priest resumed, “that if God had called him, he had no right to think of any coarse and uncharitable remarks which might be made. I reminded him that his life-long devotion to you had been a life without faith, and that, after one year in the church, he had given you up willingly. His idea of the true priest was this: one for whose sacred vocation his pious parents had prayed and hoped from the hour of his birth, who had lived from his childhood cloistered in retirement and sanctity, who had never cherished worldly hopes or desires, but, walking apart, had thus approached the altar that had never ceased to shine before him from the hour of his baptism. I owned to him that such a vocation is beautiful, and is often seen by men and angels; but told him that there are others whom the Almighty leads differently. He hides from such souls that he has sealed them also from the beginning, he allows them to drag in the mire of earth, to feel its temptations, to share in its weaknesses. We cannot penetrate the designs of God, but we may well believe that his motive is to humble that soul, and to teach it through its own failings a greater pity and tenderness for the weak and the erring. I warned him that this fear of his might be a temptation of the devil, who saw that his pride was not broken, and who pursuaded him that he was jealous for the honor of God, when in reality he thought but of his own. He was happy at that. ‘If it is nothing but my own pride,’ he said, ‘I have no more trouble.’

“And he has no more trouble, my child,” the priest concluded. “He is the happiest man I ever saw!”

SUPER OMNES SPECIOSA.

Is any face that I have seen-- Some perfect type of girlhood’s face: Some nun’s, soul-radiant, full of grace-- Like thine, my beautiful, my Queen?

Of all the eyes have paused on mine-- And these have met some wondrous eyes; So large and deep, so chaste and wise-- Have any faintly imaged thine?

The chisel with the brush has vied, Till each seems victor in its turn: And love is ever quick to learn, Nor throws the proffered page aside:

Yet few the glimpses it has caught, For thou transcendest all that art Can show thee--even to the heart Most skilled to read the poet’s thought.

That thought can pierce its native sky Beyond the artist’s starry guess: But all that it may dare express, Is through the worship of a sigh.

And this thou art, a sigh of love-- Love that created as it sighed; And shaped thee forth a peerless bride Dowered for the spousals of the Dove.

To set the music of thy face To earthly measure, were to give Th’ informing soul, and make it live As there--God’s uttermost of grace.

THE MOTHER OF LAMARTINE.[54]

M. de Lamartine tells us in his Confidences that, as the sages pause for reflection between life and death, so his mother was in the habit of devoting an interval at the close of the day in looking back on its vanished hours, and seizing its impressions before night should have dispersed them for ever.

When all the household had retired to rest, and no sound was to be heard but the breathing of her children in their little beds around her, or the howling of the wind against the casement and the bark of the dog in the court, she would softly open the door of a little closet of books, and seat herself before an inlaid cabinet of rose-wood to record the events of the day, pour out her anxieties and sorrows, her joy and gratitude, or utter a prayer all warm from her heart. Her son says: “She never wrote for the sake of writing, still less to be admired, though she wrote much for her own satisfaction, that she might have, in this register of her conscience and the domestic occurrences of her life, a moral mirror in which she could often look and compare herself with what she had been in other days, and thus constantly amend her life. This custom of recording what was passing in her soul--a habit she retained to the end--produced fifteen or twenty little volumes of intimate communings with herself and God, which I have the happiness to preserve, and where I find her once more, living and full of affection, when I feel the need of taking refuge in her bosom.”

Of course, such a journal was not intended for the public eye, and her son is so conscious of this that, even while editing this volume of extracts from his mother’s manuscripts, he says it has no interest but for those who are allied to her by blood or sympathy of soul, and prays all others to abstain from reading it. M. de Lamartine’s financial difficulties obliging him to make capital, not only out of the private emotions and experiences of his own heart, but even of his family archives, the publication of this volume was announced previous to his death, but was deferred at his earnest request.

The interest in everything connected with so eminent a poet, the charming pictures he has drawn of his mother in his Confidences, and the influence she had in moulding his character, made us look forward with interest to this work, that we might have a clearer insight into the soul to which he owed his poetical and imaginative nature. It is always refreshing and useful whenever one ventures to lift the veil of a pure soul and allows us to read its passing emotions. But such a soul should not be exposed to the eye of curiosity, but only to that of sympathy. To scan such a book--the outpourings of a mother’s heart, written solely for her own satisfaction and her children’s--with the cool eye of a critic, would be as profane as to jeer over the grave of one whose remains have just been exhumed.

But let every tender, religious heart--especially every maternal heart--that loves the sweet odor of flowers that still give out their fragrance when drawn forth from some old drawer in which they have long lain, reverently open this volume, sacred to all the outpourings of a mother’s tenderness. In her transparent nature they can read the unusual strength of the domestic affections, but a heart large enough to take in the poor and the sufferer of every grade, a charity that constantly found excuses for the asperities of others, and a piety that breathed all through her sweet life and crowned her death.

This book is a new proof of the tender piety and sincere faith among the old noblesse of France. Madame de Lamartine is worthy of being classed with the family of the Duke d’Ayen, the La Ferronnays, and the De Guérins. The simple grace of her style, the religious element so strongly infused into her daily life, the development of her emotional nature, and the intensity of her love for her family, all remind us of Eugénie de Guérin. And like her, she had one of those sweet, pensive natures that need the retirement of country life or the shade of the cloister for full development. They were similarly demonstrative in their affections and in their piety. And where one loves and follows with anxious prayer a gifted brother, the other, with the devotedness of St. Monica, weeps and prays for her son.

M. de Lamartine, after passing one gloomy All Souls’ day in recollection near his mother’s grave at St. Point, ended it by taking out the eighteen livrets in which all her thoughts and feelings had been buried for so many years, and, while the church-bell was mournfully tolling above her grave as if to reproach the living for their silence and admonish them to pray for their dead, he opened these books one after the other, and read, sadly smiling, but oftener weeping the while. It is with some such a feeling the reader will follow him. The drama of the heart is always touching, the genuine tear, even in the eye veiled in domestic obscurity, always appealing, and in this page of life’s drama there is many a one dropped. But the eyes from which they fell are always turned heavenward, and such tears have always a gleam of heaven in them, without which the sorrows of life would be unendurable.

* * * * *

Madame de Lamartine was the daughter of M. des Roys, intendant-general of finances to the Duke of Orleans. Madame des Roys was the under-governess of the children of that prince, and so great a favorite of the duchess that she was employed as the confidential agent of the latter during her exile, as we learn from this volume. After the execution of Philippe Egalité and the dispersion of his family, the duchess took refuge in Spain. Her daughter, afterwards known as Madame Adelaide, who displayed so much character and exerted so great a political influence during the reign of her brother Louis Philippe, was in a German or Swiss convent. The duchess, suspicious of Madame de Genlis’ influence over her daughter, and perhaps fearful she might be made a tool of the Orleans faction, with whose aims she did not sympathize, commissioned her devoted follower, Madame des Roys, to bring her daughter to Spain. Madame des Roys succeeded in her mission. She embarked at Leghorn about the beginning of January, 1802, and arrived safely at Barcelona with her charge. Madame de Lamartine, who had all this from her mother’s lips, says the meeting of the duchess and Mademoiselle d’Orleans was extremely affecting. Madame des Roys subsequently returned to France, and died on her estates in June, 1804, worn out with fatigue, and troubles resulting from the revolution. She gave her daughter a portrait of Mademoiselle d’Orleans--a present from the duchess, and Madame de Lamartine always showed herself loyal to that family. When the poet wrote his Chant du Sacre without mentioning the Duke of Orleans among the other members of the royal family, she entreated him with tears to be mindful of what she owed the family. Lamartine yielded, but with so ill a grace that his allusion displeased the duke. Madame de Lamartine, fearful of being thought ungrateful to the family, wrote Mademoiselle d’Orleans a full explanation of the affair.

But to go back to the time when Madame des Roys was still governess in the Duke of Orleans’ family. She and her husband had apartments at that time in the Palais Royal in winter, and at St. Cloud in summer. It appears Madame des Roys and Madame de Genlis had some pitched battles in those days, or, as Madame de Lamartine afterward expresses it, deux camps opposés. Madame de Genlis kept up the grudge after the death of her former rival, and, years after, severely attacked M. de Lamartine’s poems by way of satisfaction.

Madame de Lamartine was born at the palace of St. Cloud, and passed her childhood there with Louis Philippe, sharing the lessons and sports of the Orleans children. All her earliest recollections were connected with St. Cloud, its fountains, and broad alleys, and velvet lawns, and lovely park. Many years after (in 1813), she tells in her journal that, being at Paris, her son drove her to St. Cloud in a cabriolet, and she thus writes of her visit: “This is the place where I passed so much of my childhood when my mother was bringing up the Duke of Orleans’ children. I was very happy there. I left when fifteen years old, and had not seen the place since, though I longed to, for I retained a delightful remembrance of it. I walked all over the park with Alphonse and Eugénie, pointing out tree after tree where I played when a child. I wished to see our apartments once more, but it was impossible, as they are occupied by the Empress Maria Louisa.”

When fifteen years of age, Alix des Roys was nominated by the Duke of Orleans to a vacancy in the noble Chapter of Salles, where she was placed under the protection of the Countess Lamartine de Villars, a canoness of that chapter. The Chevalier de Lamartine, visiting his sister, fell in love with the beautiful Alix, who is said to have resembled Madame Récamier, and, instead of embracing that semi-monastic life, she ultimately married him, March 6, 1790.

We can imagine the contrast between her life in the maisons de plaisance of one of the wealthiest princes in Europe, and that she afterward led in a plain country residence a hundred miles from Paris, and in limited circumstances. She afterward alludes in her journal to this change: “In my childhood I imagined it impossible to exist unless at court, in a palace like the Palais Royal, or the park at St. Cloud, where I lived with my mother. Now, O my God, I wish to be content in every place where thy will places me!”

But her new home was not without its attractions for a nature like hers. Leaving the banks of the Saône where it winds among the fertile hills of Mâcon, and going toward the old Abbey of Cluny, where Abélard breathed his last, the traveller, turning aside into a winding mountain-path, comes after an hour or two to a sharp spire of gray stone towering above a group of peasants’ houses. Beyond these, nestling in a hollow at the foot of a mountain, is Milly, familiar to every reader of Lamartine. Five broad steps lead to the door, which opens into a corridor full of presses of carved walnut containing the household linen. From it doors open into the various apartments, and access is had to the one story above. The mountain almost insensibly begins its ascent directly back of the house. Its slope is luxuriant with vines, on which depended mainly the subsistence of the family. A small garden is in the rear of the house, with its vegetables and flower-beds and clumps of trees, and its secluded “Alley of Meditation” where Madame de Lamartine walked at sunset, saying her rosary and giving herself up to holy recollections.

She seems to have taken Milly at once to her heart. She affectionately calls it her Jerusalem--her abode of peace. She often said to her son: “It is very small, but large enough if our wishes and habits are in proportion. Happiness is from within. We should not be more so by extending the limits of our meadows and vineyards. Happiness is not measured by the acre, like land, but by the resignation of the heart; for God wishes the poor to have as much as the rich, that neither may dream of seeking it elsewhere than from him!”

And again she says: “If people were convinced that, by submissively receiving all the difficulties of the position in which they are placed, they would be at peace everywhere; they would allow themselves to be sweetly guided without anxiety by circumstances and the persons to whom they owe deference. Since I decided on this, I have been infinitely more happy. There was a time when I wished everything to yield to me, and absolutely subordinate to my will. I was then incessantly tormented about the present and the future. I often saw afterward it would have been a misfortune to have had my own way. Now I abandon myself to the Infinite Sovereign Wisdom, I feel at peace exteriorly and interiorly! God be praised for ever! He alone is wise, and should overrule all!”

Poor woman, she had enough to try her flexible will. Her husband’s elder brother, who, according to the ancient régime, was regarded as the head and guide of the family, was not disposed to give up his rights. He was unmarried, and particularly fond of interfering in the domestic regulations of the family whose future prospects somewhat depended on him, particularly those of Alphonse, who was to perpetuate the name. Another brother, the Abbé de Lamartine, lived further off, and was, of course, less tempted to interfere, but seems to have given his voice on extraordinary occasions. And then there were two unmarried aunts whom Madame de Lamartine seems to have been attached to, and whom in her charity she calls saints, but very trying saints they were with their strictures on her dainty ways, her careful dress, and her indulgence to her children. To do them justice, however, they all seem to have been sincerely anxious for the prosperity of the family.

Madame de Lamartine brought up one son and five daughters, concerning whom she gives many interesting details in her journal. The daughters appear to have been lovely in person and character. Their brother has given a delightful description of them in his Nouvelles Confidences, which is confirmed by his mother’s journal.

But M. de Lamartine makes a very strange mistake in saying his mother derived her notions of educating her children from the works of Rousseau (particularly from Emile) and St. Pierre, whom he calls “the favorite philosophers of women because the philosophers of feeling,” and “whose works,” he says, “she had read and admired.”

Some of Madame de Lamartine’s earliest recollections were certainly of Gibbon, D’Alembert, Rousseau, and others of the same stamp who frequented the society of Madame des Roys. She even remembered seeing Voltaire when but seven years of age, and “his attitude, his costume, his cane, his gestures, and his words remained imprinted on my memory as the foot of some antediluvian monster on the rocks of our mountains.” But she certainly did not esteem these men or imbibe any of their opinions, and so far from having “conservé une tendre admiration pour ce grand homme,” Jean Jacques Rousseau, as her son declares, she regarded him with a certain horror, and his genius as allied to lunacy.

In the first place, Madame de Lamartine seems to have been very scrupulous about reading dangerous books. In her journal of the year 1801, she makes a resolution to deny herself all useless reading for her children’s sake, and declares frivolous books “one of the most dangerous pleasures in the world.”

Some years after, she visits her son’s chamber, during his absence, to examine his books. Among others she finds Rousseau’s Emile. She regrets it is “empoisoned with so many inconsistencies and extravagances calculated to mislead the good sense and faith of young men. I shall burn this book,” she adds, “and particularly the Nouvelle Héloïse, still more dangerous because it inflames the passions as much as it warps the mind. What a misfortune that so much talent should be allied to madness! I have no fears for myself, for my faith is beyond temptation and not to be shaken; but my son ----”

And when toward the close of her life she saw by her son’s poem Childe Harold that he had imbibed the pernicious ideas of French philosophy, she says: “I knew these famous philosophers in my youth. Grant, O my God! he may not resemble them. I firmly represent to him the danger of such ideas, but, in the language of Scripture, the wind bloweth where it listeth. When a mother has brought a son into the world, and instilled her own faith into him, what can she do? Only put her feeble hand continually between the light of this faith and the breath of the world that would extinguish it! Ah! I am sometimes proud of my son, but I am well punished afterward by my apprehensions as to his independence of mind!

“As for me, to submit and believe seems the only true wisdom in life. They say it is less poetic, but I find as much poetry in submission as in rebellion. Are the faithful angels less poetical than those who rose up against God? I would rather my son had none of these vain talents of the world than to turn them against the dogmas that are my strength, my light, and my consolation!”

Madame de Lamartine records a fact concerning Rousseau which is by no means a proof of her esteem for him. Madame des Roys, from whom she had it, was very intimate with the Maréchale de Luxembourg. Previous to the birth of one of Rousseau’s children, the maréchale, a great friend of his, fearing he would send the child to a foundling asylum as he had done three others, begged, through a third person, to have it as soon as it was born, promising to take care of it. Rousseau gave his consent. The mother was beside herself with joy, and as soon as the child was born sent word to the person who was to take it away. He came, found it was a fine, vigorous boy, and appointed an hour to come for it. But at midnight Rousseau appeared in the sick-room wrapped in a dark cloak, and, in spite of the mother’s screams, carried off his son to drop it at the asylum without a mark by which it could be recognized. “This is the man whose sensibility so many extol,” said Madame des Roys, and Madame de Lamartine adds: “And I, I say, here is the unfeeling man whose head has corrupted his heart! Alas! genius is often only a prelude to insanity when not founded on good sense. Let us welcome genius for our children if God bestows it, but pray they may have sound sense!”

Alphonse was sent at an early age to a secular school at Lyons, the religious orders not being restored. His mother thus writes:

“November 9, 1801.--To-day I am at Lyons to bring Alphonse back to school. My heart bleeds. I went to Mass this morning. I was continually looking for his beautiful fair hair in the midst of all those little heads. My God! how frightful to thus root up this young plant from the heart where it germinated, and cast it into these mercenary institutions. I was sick at heart as I came away.”

In October, 1803, she says: “I have with difficulty obtained permission from my husband and his brothers to take Alphonse away from the school at Lyons, and place him at the Jesuits’ College at Belley, on the borders of Savoy. I came with him myself. I was too much distressed to write yesterday after confiding him to these ecclesiastics. I passed half the night weeping.

“October 27.--I went this morning to look through the guichet of the court of the Jesuits’ College at my poor child. I afterward saw him at Mass in the midst of the students. He says he is satisfied with his reception from the professors and his comrades. I went to-day to see the Abbé de Montuzet, the former prior of my Chapter of Canonesses at Salles. In the evening I left for Mâcon. In passing before the college I could see the boys from the carriage playing in the yard, and heard their joyous shouts. Happily, Alphonse did not approach the guichet and see my carriage. He would have felt too badly, and I also. It is better not to soften these poor children destined to become men. Leaning back in the carriage, I wept all alone under my veil a part of the day.”

She loved to read the Confessions of St. Augustine, and, like St. Monica, she followed her son with her prayers and tears all through the vagaries of his early life, trembling for his rich gifts and susceptible nature. And with how much reason is evident from his own account. How much more she continually desired his spiritual welfare than his success in the world is evident throughout this work. In the first flush of his fame as a poet, she writes:

“January 6, 1820.--Nothing new at Paris, except I am told Alphonse is received with distinction in the best society, where his appearance and talents have excited, according to my sister, Madame de Vaux, a kind of enthusiasm. She mentions the names of many whose mothers I knew in my youth who overwhelm him with cordiality--the Princess de Talmont, the Princess de la Trémouille, Madame de Raigecourt (the friend of Madame Elizabeth), Madame de St. Aulaire, the Duchess de Broglie (Madame de Staël’s daughter), Madame de Montcalm (the Duke de Richelieu’s sister), Madame de Dolomieu, whom I knew so well at the Duchess of Orleans’; then there are many eminent men who eagerly proffer their friendship to him who was so obscure but yesterday--the young Duke de Rohan, the virtuous Mathieu de Montmorency, M. Molé, M. Lainé, said to be such a great orator, M. Villemain, the pupil of M. de Fontanes, whom he sees at M. Decazes’, the king’s favorite, and a thousand others. Thou knowest, O my God! how proud I am of this unexpected cordiality toward my son, but thou knowest also that I ask not for him what the world calls glory and honor, but to be an upright man, and one of thy servants like his father: the rest is vanity, and often worse than vanity!”

And when, still later, she goes to Paris, and meets the distinguished circle in which he moved, is received by Madame Récamier with her incomparable grace, and hears Châteaubriand, one of her favorite authors, read, and sees the prestige which her son had acquired, she confesses to a feeling of gratification at his fame, but adds: “I pray God for something higher than all this for him.”

But to return to her life at Milly. The tenderness of her nature was not confined to her own family, but was always responsive to every appeal.

To quote from her journal: “I was told after dinner that a friendless old man, whom I saw after, that lived in a hut on the mountain, with only a goat for a companion, had just been found dead. The news greatly distressed me, for I had reproached myself for not having gone to see him lately--it was so far. It is true I thought he had recovered, but I should not have trusted to that at his age. I ought to have been more attentive to him. My heart is full of remorse. In the good I do, and in everything, I am not persevering enough. I grow weary too soon and too frequently. I am too easy led away by distractions or weariness, which are not sins, but weaknesses, and hinder from a holy use of time. Was not time given us that every day and hour something might be done for God, both in ourselves and for others? I went to walk this evening with my husband and two eldest daughters. We went through the vineyard, now in bloom. The air was perfumed with their pleasant odor. Our vines are our only source of income for ourselves, our domestics, and the poor. If there are as many bunches of grapes as of blossoms, we shall be quite well off this year. May Providence preserve them from hail!

“We approached the hut above the vineyard where the poor old man died in the morning. I wished to enter it once more in order to pray beside him. My husband was not willing, fearing the sight of him would make too great an impression on me and the children. I wished to ask pardon of his soul for not having been there to utter some words of consolation and hope during his agony, and to receive his last sigh. The door was open: his goat kept going out and in, bleating as if to call assistance in its distress. The poor creature made us weep. My husband consented for me to send for it to-morrow after the burial, and give it a place with our cow and the children’s two sheep.”

Another day she writes: “I went to see an old demoiselle of eighty years, who lives on an annuity in one of the upper chambers of the château. Her only companion is a hen, who is as attached to her as a tame bird. She is called Mademoiselle Félicité. In spite of her wrinkles and hair as white as the wool on her distaff, it is evident she must have been very handsome once. My husband has consented to my wish not to disturb her in spite of the inconvenience it causes us. Old plants must not be transplanted. The places where we live become truly a part of ourselves. She is taken care of by Jeanette, the sexton’s wife, once a servant at the château, and who knows all its past history: we love to hear about those who lived before us in the same dwelling. All this excites to reflection. Some day I shall be spoken of as having been, and perhaps the day is not far off! My God, where shall I then be? Grant it may be in thy paternal arms!”

The means of the family seem to have been quite limited during the first years of her married life. This made them anxious as to the vintage on which their income chiefly depended. She thus writes: “The day has been unfortunate. There have been several showers, and the hail has crushed our vines. This is more distressing, for they were loaded with grapes. My heart is very heavy to-night on our own account and that of our poor vinedressers. This shows how much I still involuntarily cling to the things of earth. It is as if I thought happiness due me, for the least affliction immediately casts me down. My God! make me realize at last the nothingness of the things of this world, that I may set my heart only on those that are eternal!”

And later: “The will of God be done! These were the last words I wrote in my journal at the last date. They are the first on to-day’s page. The great storm yesterday was a terrible misfortune to us. The hail completely destroyed our harvest. We should have had a fine crop, and now there remains scarcely enough for our poor laborers to exist on. I am ill with sorrow and anxiety. This misfortune will oblige us to make retrenchments and privations. All our plans to go to Mâcon for the education of our children are frustrated. We shall probably have to sell our horse and char-à-bancs. But it is the will of God: this ought to be sufficient to console me for everything. The fewer pleasures I have in the world, the less I shall cling to it, and the more I shall look forward to that world which alone is important and imperishable--our eternal home. Nothing hardens the heart and so fills it with illusions as prosperity, and what seems hard to human nature is perhaps a very great grace from God, who wishes us to cling to the only real treasures by depriving us of what is only dust. I can say this with more sincerity to-day: yesterday the blow seemed too hard. My husband showed great courage--more than I--though he was greatly distressed for the moment. He said: ‘Provided neither your nor our children are taken away from me, I can resign myself to anything. My riches are in your hearts.’ Then he prayed with me. Meanwhile we could hear the noise of the hail which was breaking the branches and the glass, and the peasants in the court sobbing in despair.”

As in all the old patriarchal Catholic families, Madame de Lamartine was not unmindful of the spiritual interests of her servants: “After dinner, which is at one, I read, then sewed awhile, after which I read a meditation on the Gospel to my domestics. I am going presently to end the day at the church, whose dim light inspires devotion and recollection. It is there I fill the void during my husband’s absence.”

“September 5, 1802.--We have just established family prayers. It is a very impressive and salutary practice, if, as the Scripture says, we wish like brethren to dwell together in unity. Nothing elevates the hearts of servants so much as this daily communion with their masters in prayer and humiliation before God, who knows neither great nor small. It is also good for masters, who are thus reminded of their Christian equality with their inferiors according to the world.

“My poor aunt, who took care of me in my infancy, is dead. I am extremely uneasy about the fate of poor old Jacqueline, her femme-de-chambre, who was a second mother to me, and is now left alone, and perhaps poor. I wish at whatever cost to receive her here. The family are opposed. My husband fears, and with reason, to contradict his brothers and sisters, on whom we rely a good deal for our children. He proposes to pay secretly Jacqueline’s board in a house at Lyons, where she will no longer lack food and care, but I would like to fulfil my obligations of gratitude toward this poor woman to their utmost extent. If I were in her place, and she in mine, nothing would prevent her from receiving me, even in her bed.”

The domestics of the old families in France seemed to have been regarded as a part of the family. Service was almost hereditary, and a bond on both sides. In the French Revolution, nine out of ten of those proscribed by law who escaped were saved by the devotedness of their domestics. Madame de Lamartine shows how fully she regarded the tie that bound her to every member of her household as a sort of spiritual relationship.

“Palm-Sunday, 1805.--There is a great commotion in town and country. The emperor arrives to-day with all his court. We are très gênés, because we are to lodge Mgr. de Pradt, Bishop of Poitiers (the emperor’s chaplain; since Archbishop of Malines, so celebrated for playing the courtier at that time, and for his subsequent ingratitude towards Napoleon after his fall). I prefer this guest to any other of the retinue.”

Of course the parenthetical clause is by M. de Lamartine. It seems Mgr. de Pradt was not wholly ungrateful to the emperor, for the declaration issued by the allied sovereigns at the Congress of Laybach in 1821, so insulting to the memory of Napoleon, called forth from the Archbishop of Malines the following noble protestation:

“It is too late to insult Napoleon now: he is defenceless, after having so many years crouched at his feet while he had the power to punish. Those who are armed should respect a disarmed enemy. The glory of a conqueror depends, in a great measure, on the just consideration shown toward the captive, particularly when he yields to superior force, not to superior genius. It is too late to call Napoleon a revolutionist after having, for such a length of time, pronounced him to be the restorer of order in France, and consequently in Europe. It is odious to see the shaft of insult aimed at him by those who once stretched forth their hands to him as a friend, pledged their faith to him as an ally, sought to prop a tottering throne by mingling their blood with his.

“This representative of a revolution which is condemned as a principle of anarchy, like another Justinian, drew up, amid the din of war and the snares of foreign policy, those codes which are the least defective portion of human legislation, and constructed the most vigorous machine of government in the whole world. This representative of a revolution, vulgarly accused of having subverted all institutions, restored universities and public schools, filled his empire with the masterpieces of art, and accomplished those stupendous and amazing works which reflect honor on human genius. And yet, in the face of the Alps which bowed down at his command; of the ocean subdued at Cherbourg, at Flushing, at the Helder, and at Antwerp; of rivers smoothly flowing beneath the bridges of Jena, Serres, Bordeaux, and Turin; of canals uniting seas together in a course beyond the control of Neptune; finally, in the face of Paris, metamorphosed, as it was, by Napoleon, he is pronounced to be the agent of general annihilation! He, who restored all, is said to be the representative of that which destroyed all! To what undiscerning men is this language supposed to be addressed?”

Napoleon himself at St. Helena, though he censured Mgr. de Pradt’s course as ambassador at Warsaw, regarded the tribute he subsequently paid him as an amende honorable.

Las Cases, alluding to his notes from the emperor’s statements and those about him, says: “I, however, strike them out in consideration of the satisfaction I am told the emperor subsequently experienced in perusing M. de Pradt’s concordats. For my own part, I am perfectly satisfied with numerous other testimonies of the same nature, and derived from the same source.”[55]

It was during this visit of Napoleon at Mâcon he held some conversation with M. de Lamartine [the poet’s uncle] in Mgr. de Pradt’s presence. “What do you wish to be?” said the emperor at the close. “Nothing, sire,” was the reply. The emperor turned away with a look of anger.

“Lyons, April 26, 1805.--I came here with my sister to see the Pope. I saw him pass from the terrace of a garden near the archevêché where he stops. Yesterday I went to the Pope’s Mass at St. Jean’s Church. I had a good view of all the ceremonies, but found it difficult to reach the throne in order to kiss his slipper. However, I had this happiness. This aged man has the aspect of a saint, as well as some of the Roman prelates who were with him, especially his confessor.”

“May 12, 1805.--Our fortunes are improving. My husband has just bought M. d’Osenay’s hôtel at Mâcon. The garden is small, but the house is immense. We are furnishing it, and shall take possession of it this summer. My husband allows me six hundred francs a month, and all the provisions from our two estates, for the household expenses, and to pay for Alphonse’s board [at school]. This is more than sufficient. I cannot cease to admire the providence of God toward us, and am ever ready to give up all he bestows on me when he wishes and as he wishes.”

There is an interesting description of this new home in the Nouvelles Confidences, and of the circle of friends whom they drew around them. Madame de Lamartine desired this change for the benefit of her daughters, but her own tastes inclined her to the retirement of the country.

She thus writes September 7: “I am again at St. Point, which I prefer to any other residence in spite of the dilapidation of the château. I long for a still more profound retreat--a moral one. We must from time to time enter into the solitude and silence of our own hearts.”--“It seems to me if I were free I would consecrate myself entirely to God, apart from the world. But we are always wishing for something different from the will of God. Is it not better to desire only his will?”

She describes the life she leads with her daughters as almost conventual. They all go to Mass every morning. After breakfast they read the Bible or some religious book, and then resume their studies--history, grammar, etc. After dinner and an hour’s recreation, they sew and study. At nightfall they say the Rosary together, and in the evening she plays chess with her husband, and sometimes reads one of Molière’s comedies. “I see no harm in it,” she says with her characteristic delicacy of conscience. “I skip every dangerous word.” They finally have family prayers, at which she improvises a short meditation aloud. Her great object, she says, is to cultivate a genuine spirit of piety in her children, and to keep them constantly occupied.

“September, 1807.--I am enjoying the seclusion at Milly alone with my children. Madame de Sévigné is my society. I took a long walk to-night on Mount Craz, above the vineyard back of the house. I was all alone. I take pleasure in such long strolls at this hour in the evening. I love the autumn time, and these walks with no other company but my own thoughts. They are as boundless as the horizon and full of God. Nature elevates my heart, and fills it with a thousand thoughts and a certain melancholy which I enjoy. I know not what it is, unless a secret consonance of the infinite soul with the infinity of the divine creation. When I turn back and see from the heights of the mountain the little lights burning in my children’s chamber, I bless Divine Providence for having given me this peaceful, hidden nest in which to shelter them!

“I finish always with a prayer without many words, which is like an interior hymn, which no one hears but thee, O Lord! who hearest the humming of the insects in the tangle of furze which I tread under my feet.”

“Milly, April 11, 1810.--I passed the night here with Cécile and Eugénie. The weather is fine, and I longed to enjoy a pleasant spring morning which I find delicious. As soon as I rose I went into the garden, where I passed three hours reading, praying, meditating, thanking God for his benefits, and endeavoring to profit by them. The weather is lovely, the trees are full of buds and blossoms which perfume the air. The leaves are beginning to put forth, the birds to sing, the little insects to hum. Everything in nature is reviving and being born again. I am inexpressibly happy when I can be at peace in the country at this sweet time of early spring. Unfortunately I am obliged to return to town for I know not how long, but I wish only the good pleasure of God, and my only desire is to fulfil my duty wherever he calls me.

“Ah! how much I have to reproach myself for. I go to extremes in everything. In the world I am too worldly, in retirement too austere. Present surroundings have too sensible an effect. I am not well. I offer my sufferings to God. I pray a little. I read a good deal. I am extremely impressed by the shortness of life, and the necessity of preparing for eternity. I often endeavor to be fully penetrated with what I remember to have once written--that this life must be regarded as a purgatory, and whatever sufferings the good God sends I should look upon as sweet in comparison with what I merit.

“What makes me tremble is the establishment of my six children, and all the difficulties I foresee in this respect. But this anticipated trouble is wrong; for, after the assistance of God in so many circumstances, I ought to expect it still more in this the great object of my life.”

In fact, she succeeds wonderfully in disposing of her daughters à la Française, and, to our American eyes, they are wonderfully docile, but perhaps edifyingly so. Her lovely daughters all marry gentlemen who are so fortunate as to have the particle de to their names--a thing of vast moment with the French gentry.

One of them, Césarine, a dazzling beauty of the Italian style and said to have a lively resemblance to Raphael’s Fornarina, has her little romance, which her mother favors, but the fates frown adversely in the person of la famille, to wit, the formidable uncles and aunts. How poor Madame de Lamartine ever got such a jury to agree on the sentence of any suitor is no small proof of her talent for diplomacy. In this case the objection was for pecuniary reasons only, for the de was not wanting--“de misérables raisons de société,” says the mother, who adds: “They would not be very rich, but I could keep them at home. I am obliged to conceal from my husband’s family my inclination for this marriage; but, if I did not oppose them sometimes, I should never get my children married.”

In this instance she was at last forced to yield, and tell the aspirant, but not without tears, that Césarine could not marry him. “The family is obstinate in its refusal. I am in despair. The young man still hopes against all hope.” Luckily--at least luckily for the family peace--Césarine, though sad, is touchingly submissive--the lovers are separated for ever. The chivalric Alphonse tells his sister not to do violence to her feelings--that he will take her part against the whole set; but the gentle maiden declares--we persist in believing, in our fondness for a bit of sentiment, that she made a virtue of necessity in view of those Gorgons and chimeras dire--declares her attachment rather a feeling of gratitude for the love that had been given her, and that she is ready to marry without repugnance the estimable man destined to replace the one she has lost!

Nothing more could be said. She marries unexceptionably--M. de Vignet, the nephew of the celebrated Count de Maistre, author of Du Pape, and goes to Chambéry to become a member of a very distinguished family. She died a few years after.

Some years later, Madame de Lamartine records a visit from the discarded suitor of six years before. “We did not speak of Césarine, but his very presence and tender manner said enough. I cried heartily.”

In 1824, she records the affecting and edifying death of her daughter Suzanne, whose loss, as well as that of Césarine, her affectionate nature never recovers from. Her heart seems now to turn more fully toward heaven. The latest records in her journal evince a constantly increasing devotional frame of mind. The surviving daughters are all married, and her son’s prospects extremely flattering. She says: “I should be a happy mother had I not lost two flowers from my crown. Ah! what a void their loss makes when I walk here in the garden in the evening, and yearn to see them and hear their voices. I must detach myself more and more from the world in spite of myself.

“I have this year formed the habit of going to Mass before light. It is better to snatch the first moments of the day from the bustle and pleasures of the world, and first render to God the things that are God’s, and then to the world what belongs to the world. I sometimes find it hard to go out in all kinds of weather from my warm room to attend what is called the servants’ Mass, to which the poor go; but are we not all poor in divine grace, and all servants to our parents, our husbands, and our children? I am abundantly repaid by the recollection I feel in the dim church, the fervor of my prayers, and the calmness and strength I derive from the Divine Presence which accompanies me throughout the day after thus fulfilling a paramount obligation.”

Only a short time before the dreadful accident that caused her death, Madame de Lamartine thus reviews her past life, as if conscious of her approaching end:

“Milly, October 21, 1829.--To-day the birth-day of my first-born. I am here alone, and have consecrated the day to meditation to strengthen my soul and prepare it for death. How many times in my life I have paced up and down this alley of meditation, where no one can see me from the house, with my rosary in my clasped hands, meditating or praying! Alas! what would have become of me in all my interior and exterior trials had God not visited me in my meditations, and suggested holier and more consoling thoughts than my own! It is a great grace to have this facility for recollection in God, which has inclined me almost every day of my life to consecrate some hours, or at least some minutes, in thinking exclusively of him. He loves these heart-to-heart appeals to his divine compassion. He inclines his ear to listen to the pulsations of the pious heart that turns toward him! I felt this more than ever to-day, and came away all bathed in tears, without perceiving it while walking in the alley. It seemed as if my whole life passed before me, and before him who is my Creator and Judge!

“Oh! may his judgment, which is approaching, be merciful.

“I saw myself, as if but yesterday, a child playing in the broad alleys of St. Cloud; then, still young, a canoness, praying and chanting in the Chapel at Salles, undecided whether to make my vows like my companions, and consecrate my whole life to praising God in a place of retreat between the world and eternity; I saw my husband, young and handsome, come in his rich uniform to visit his sister, Madame de Villars, the canoness, under whose care I had been placed because she was older and more reasonable than I. I saw his attention was particularly directed to me above all the rest, and that he profited by every opportunity of visiting his sister at the chapter. As for me, I was struck with his noble features, his somewhat military air, his frankness of expression, and a haughtiness that seemed only to unbend toward me; I remember the emotion of joy shut up in my heart when he at length asked through his sister if I would consent to his demanding me in marriage; then, our first interview in his sister’s presence, our walks in the environs of the chapter with the elder canonesses, his openly expressed wish to marry me, and the continued opposition, and the many tears shed in the presence of God during three years of uncertainty to obtain the miracle of his family’s consent, which appeared impossible; finally, our years of happiness in this poor solitude of Milly, then much more humble than at present; my despair when, scarcely married, he desperately sacrificed all, even me, to fulfil his duty at Paris, defending as a simple volunteer the palace of the king on the 10th of August: the divine protection which enabled him to escape covered with blood from the garden of the Tuileries, his flight, his return here, his imprisonment, my apprehensions as to his life, my visits to the wicket of the prison, where I took my son to kiss him through the bars; my walking with my child in my arms, through the streets of Lyons and Dijon, to appeal to the rude representatives of the people, a word from whom was life or death to me; the fall of Robespierre; the return to Milly, the successive births of my seven children, their education, their marriages, the vanishing of those two angels from earth, for whose loss the remainder cannot console me!

“And now the repose after so much weariness! Repose, yes, but old age also, for I am growing old, whatever they say. These trees that I planted; the ivy I set out on the north side of the house that my son might not tell an untruth in his Harmonies where he describes Milly, and which now covers the whole wall from the cellar to the roof; these walls themselves covered with moss; these cedars which were no higher than my daughter Sophie when she was four years of age, but under which I can now walk--all this tells me I am growing old! The graves of the old peasants whom I knew when young, which I pass as I go to church, tell me plainly this world is not my abiding-place. My final resting-place will soon be prepared. I cannot refrain from tears when I think of leaving all, especially my poor husband, the faithful companion of my early years, who is not feeble, but suffers and needs me now to suffer, as he once needed me to be happy! My children, my dear children! Alphonse, his wife, by her affection and virtue, a sixth daughter; Cécile and her charming children, a third generation of hearts that love and must be loved! And then those who are wanting, but who follow me like my shadow in the Alley of Meditation! Alas! my Césarine, my pride on account of her marvellous beauty, buried far away behind that Alpine horizon which continually recalls her remembrance! Alas! my Suzanne, the saint who wore too soon the aureola on her brow, and whom God took from me that her memory might be for me an image of one of his angels of purity! Dead or absent ones, I am here alone, having borne my fruit--some fallen to the ground like that of yonder trees, and others removed far from me by the Husbandman of the Gospel! Ah! what thoughts attract me, pursue me in this garden, and then force me to leave it when they cause my heart and my eyes to overflow! Ah! this is truly my Garden of Olives!

“O my Saviour! has not every soul such a garden? Alas, yes! this was my garden of delights--and now it is laid waste and desolate. It is my Garden of Olives where I come to watch before my death! And yet it is dear to me, in spite of the vacancies time and death have made around me, even while seeking beneath yonder linden-trees for the white dresses of my children, and listening for their gay voices exclaiming over an insect or a flower in their border!

“What had I done that God should bestow on me this corner of the earth, and this small house, of whose size and barrenness I was sometimes ashamed, but which proved so sweet a nest for my numerous brood? Ah! his name be blessed! his name be blessed! and after me may it still shelter those who will always be a part of me.

“But I hear the bell at Bussières ringing the Angelus.

“Let us leave all this--it is better to pray than to write. I will dry my tears, and all alone in my alley I will say the rosary, to which my little daughters used to respond as they followed me, but which only the sparrows in their nests and the falling leaves now hear. No; no, no, it is not good to give way too much to tears. I must keep my strength for duties to be accomplished--for we have duties even on the death-bed.

“It is the will of God! Let us abandon ourselves to him entirely! The only true wisdom consists in this--to resign ourselves to his adorable will. I have been busying myself here in putting in order my old journals, which has led me to look them over with interest. This always fills me with fresh gratitude for all the grace I have received from God, and with regret for my little progress in piety, after all the good resolutions and reflections I have so often made, but with so little profit. But there is time, always time, while God gives us life, to profit by it to prepare for heaven. This is what I beg him with my whole heart as I finish this book, praying him to shed on me, and on all who belong to me, abundant spiritual blessings. As to temporal blessings, I only ask for them as far as they may be necessary for gaining heaven, but I abandon myself with all my heart to his paternal decrees. May he bless me in my children, in my friends, in all who have loved me, and whom I have so much loved on earth!”

These are the last words Madame de Lamartine wrote in her journal. Some days after, in entering a bath, she found the water too cool, and turned the faucet. The boiling water dashed up on her chest. She fainted. Her cry was heard, but it was too late. She was removed to her chamber. Consciousness returned, and she lived two days. During her last hours she constantly exclaimed: “How happy I am! How happy I am!” Being asked why, she replied: “For dying resigned and purified.”

Her son was at Paris, and did not arrive till after the funeral. Remembering her wish to be buried at St. Point, he had her removed. The grave was opened at midnight, one cold night in December, when the ground was covered with snow.

The peasants, whom she loved and who loved her, took turns in carrying the bier eight leagues, her son on foot behind. Not a word, not a whisper, was to be heard on the way. When they approached Milly, between two and three o’clock in the morning, all the peasants stood in their door-ways, with pale faces and tearful eyes, holding lamps in their trembling hands. They all came out to follow the procession to Milly, where her coffin was placed for a while at the entrance, on the very benches where every morning sat the needy to whom she used to distribute food or medicine.

All the sobbing crowd came up to sprinkle her body with holy water and utter a prayer.

M. de Lamartine afterward built a chapel over the grave of his mother at St. Point, which bears on its cornice the inscription:

“SPERAVIT ANIMA MEA.”

FOOTNOTES:

[54] Le Manuscrit de Ma Mère; or, Extracts from the Journal of Madame de Lamartine. Edited by her Son. Hachette & Co., Paris. 1871.

[55] See Abbott’s Napoleon.

A QUARTER OF AN HOUR IN THE OLD ROMAN FORUM DURING A SPEECH OF CICERO’S.

A PASSAGE FROM CICERO’S SPEECH IN SUPPORT OF L. LICINIUS MURENA’S CANDIDACY FOR THE CONSULATE, AGAINST THAT OF SERVIUS SULPICIUS--TWENTY YEARS BEFORE CICERO’S ASSASSINATION--CICERO AND C. ANTONY BEING CONSULS--SIXTY-TWO YEARS BEFORE CHRIST.

Introductory Note: Servius Sulpicius was perhaps the most eminent practitioner of his day in that branch of the law which belongs to the “special pleader” and the “conveyancer”; but so little of a speaker that he would not venture alone to recommend his own cause or to urge his claims before the Roman people. He employed Cneius Postumius, then very young, and Marcus Cato, a most weighty orator, whose character, however (and a reputation for unswerving principle and the austerest virtues), had a larger share than the mental power of his words in securing to them influence and authority. It was less important what Cato said than that it had been said by Cato. How very different was the case with Hortensius! A stranger, whose face, whose name, not one of the audience knew, fitly delivering any of Hortensius’ harangues, would have commanded attention from the first, retained it to the last, raised many an interrupting tempest of applause during its progress, and left, when he had finished, a powerful, a formidable impression.

Hortensius was that Bolingbroke of the Roman Forum to whom the huge and intelligent assemblies he addressed were what the organ is to a Smart or the violin to a Sivori. He had hewn a lane through many a group of brilliant opponents and rivals, with an Excalibar forged by genius and by study together (and few at last cared to face the weapon), to the very throne of contemporary eloquence. And there, for years, he sat at ease, a king. A suitor despaired of his cause beforehand upon learning that Hortensius had been retained on the other side. Of course, his wealth had become enormous, and his indirect influence (for, although he had had his year of the Consulate, he cared not very much about politics) was an element, a “quantity,” which had to be taken into account by statesmen and generals, by the senate, and by the consuls.

In the case of “Sulpicius against Murena” (Murena had defeated Sulpicius in the canvass for the ensuing year’s Consulate, and this was a prosecution of revenge to unseat the future and “designated” chief magistrate), Murena had retained Hortensius, M. Crassus, afterwards the Triumvir, and Marcus Tullius Cicero. Now, during about ten years past, Hortensius--although speaking with the same charm and the same glamour as ever--had ceased to sit upon the throne or to wear the crown of eloquence. A far mightier spirit, a far finer genius, a far deeper student--a master upon whom his competent and appreciative glance rested with an admiration at once boundless and hopeless--had, after a gallant struggle on his part, so utterly eclipsed him that there was now a greater distance between Tully and Hortensius than there ever had been between Hortensius himself and those accomplished but defeated competitors to whom Hortensius had long been a wonder and a despair.

Cicero, however, had passed a sleepless night before the day of this trial: his voice almost failed him; he looked haggard; his nerves had, for the moment, given way, and with them his presence of mind. In charm of manner, in vigor of delivery, in clearness and percussion of utterance, in external grace, and dignity, and ease, his ancient rival for once surpassed him; nay, till the respective speeches were reported, and could be compared on perusal, Hortensius created the illusion that he had at last, in all respects, overtaken his victor, and would yet again contend for the palm of pre-eminence.

This never was to be. The broken heart of the only orator known to human records, who might perhaps have performed such a task, had then been mouldering for three centuries in a small island of the Ægean Sea. We have bored the reader enough about the advocates, and have mentioned also what Servius Sulpicius, the prosecutor, was. The defendant, L. Licinius Murena, was, on the other hand, a distinguished soldier. He had served as a sort of adjutant-general to the famous Lucullus in that series of campaigns by which he had greatly reduced, without overthrowing (a task reserved for Pompey), the power of Mithridates. Except Hannibal, and perhaps Antiochus (we do not reckon Pyrrhus, for Rome was in the gristle then), no enemy had ever waged so formidable a warfare against the Romans as Mithridates. He was a winged beast. How his fame remains! What parties and excursions you Crimean gentlemen made to the spot where his ashes are supposed to have been inurned and intempled! Lord of every seaboard of Pontus and the Euxine, and lord of the “Evil Sea” itself; of ten thousand rich cities; of five hundred strong fortresses; of five hundred thousand armed men; of horses enough to mount the hordes of a Genghis Khan; of half-a-dozen numerous, adventurous, and well-found fleets; of treasures uncounted and uncountable; adroit, bold, proud, insatiably enterprising; no mean captain; an object of worship to his followers; magnificent and munificent; an implacable hater of the Roman name; the long-alight, far-flaming meteor of the East--he threatened to shake hands in Spain, across all Europe, with Sertorius; to make the shores of Italy quake at the white clouds of his sails, and to teach the waters of the Atlantic as well as those of the Levant to know either the sceptre or the sword of Mithridates. It was no child’s play to bring this potentate to the dust.

Against such a potentate, in the post next to that of the commander-in-chief (who happened, besides, to be a great general), Murena had served for years with the most brilliant efficiency and distinction.

Sulpicius, among other things (alleged bribery, etc.), had sneered at the presumption of Murena, a man “who had been principally with the army” and out of Rome, in entering into competition with, or daring to come forward as the rival of, a person of his, Sulpicius’, dignity, learning, and professional station, standing, rank.

We have said enough--perhaps too much--to frame the little picture which we want to present to our readers; to set it near the right window as you pass. That little picture is the argument in which Cicero (who was on terms of personal intimacy with the prosecutor, as well as with his gallant client) firmly questions--yet questions with the most exquisite urbanity--the rather exorbitant pretensions of Sulpicius, the “learned conveyancer and special pleader,” to a higher consideration than “ought to be, or could be,” allowed to the instruction, the knowledge of many sorts (geographical, historical, administrative, tactical, and technical--ay, strategical even--and of characters; of general statistics; of actual local supplies; of incidental resources, material and moral), and to the professional industry, to the labors, the wounds, the dangers, to say nothing of the valor and the genius of a patriotic and public-spirited soldier, who had led armies to victory, had stormed great strongholds, and had not only defended the frontier of the empire, but enlarged it, with every circumstance of legitimate splendor and honorable success.

* * * * *

TRANSLATION--EX “PRO MURENA”--SECOND PART OF THE “CONTENTION.”[56]

“I recognize in you, Servius Sulpicius, all the respectability and distinction that family, character, intellectual toil, and such other accomplishments can confer, as may entitle any one to aspire to the Consulate.

“In all these respects I know Murena to be your equal; and so nicely your equal, that we can neither admit any inferiority on his part, nor concede the slightest precedency on yours.

“You have taunted Murena with his genealogy, and extolled your own. If you mean, in all this, that no one can be deemed of honorable parentage who is not a patrician, you will bring the masses [plebs, not populus] to withdraw [secede] once more to Mount Aventine. But if there are considerable and distinguished plebeian families--why, both the great-grandfather and the grandfather of Murena were actually prætors; and his father, when laying down the prætorian office, having received, in the amplest and most honorable form, the solemnity of a capitolian triumph, left thereby the more accessible to my client the avenue to the Consulate, inasmuch as it was for a dignity already earned by the father, and due to him, that the son became a candidate.

“Your nobility, Servius Sulpicius, although of the highest class, is best known to men of letters and to antiquaries; to the people and the electors, not so obvious: your father, you see, was of knightly rank; your grandfather--famous for nothing very remarkable--so that no loud modern voices, but rather the remote whispers of antiquity, attest the glories of your race. For which reason, I have ever claimed you as one of us; a man who, although but the son of a knight, yet have achieved for yourself a fair pretension to the honors of the chief magistracy in the republic.” [He means that he was not presumptuous in offering himself to the electors for the Consulate: “summâ amplitudine dignus” are the words.]

“Nor, for my part, have I ever looked upon Quintus Pompey, a new man, and bravery itself, as having less worth and dignity than Marcus Æmilius (Scaurus), one of the leaders of our aristocracy; for there is the same merit in the mind and the genius which hand down to posterity the glory of a name not inherited (and this Pompey has achieved), as to revive, like Scaurus, by personal services, the half-dead honor of an ancient line. However, I was under the impression, judges, that my own exertions had succeeded in rendering the objection of lowly birth obsolete in the case of persons of merit--persons who, if we recall not merely the Curii, the Catos, the Pompeys, of a former age, architects of their own station, and men of the loftiest spirit, but the Mariuses, the Didii, the Cœliuses of almost yesterday, had been left lying in the shade. But when, after so long an interval, I myself had stormed those fastnesses of nobility, and had struck wide-open for the admission of merit not less than of nobility, in the time to come (as they used to be among our ancestors), the approaches to the Consulate, I certainly did not expect, while a ‘designated’ consul, sprung from an ancient and illustrious family, was defended by an actual consul, the son of a Roman knight” [Cicero was himself at that moment vested with the Consulate], “that the accusers would venture to taunt him with the newness of his origin! For, indeed, it was my own lot to be candidate for the chief magistracy in competition with two eminent patricians, one of them as conspicuous for the abandoned audacity of his wickedness, as the other for his modesty and virtue--and to vanquish both: Catiline, by the respect in which my character was held; and Galba, in the love and confidence of the people. And, surely, had it amounted to any reproach to be a new man, I lacked neither enemies nor enviers. Let us drop, then, this discussion about family, a point in which the present competitors are both alike distinguished; let us see what the other allegations are. ‘Murena sought the Quæstorship with me: and I was made Quæstor first.’ An answer is not expected to be given to every little nothing; nor does it escape any of you, when a number of persons obtain simultaneously the same grade of the magistracy, while only one of them can stand first on the list of announcements, that to be first declared in point of time is not the same thing as to be declared first in point of rank; for the obvious reason, that there must be earlier and later entries in every catalogue, although each name on it bears, for the most part, the very same honor. But the quæstorships of both pretty nearly coincide as to the ‘partition’” [of region]: “my client, under the Titian law, had a silent and quiet province; you, that Ostian province at the mention of which the people, when quæstors are drawing lots, usually utter shouts--not so much a favorite or distinguished, as a busy and troublesome department. The names of each of you continued dormant in quæstorships; for fortune gave to neither a field wherein your valor might respectively have been exercised and displayed. The ulterior periods of time which are brought into rivalry were by each of you very differently spent. Servius pursued here, along with us, this civic warfare of replications, pleas, caveats; replete with care and vexations; learnt the civic law; kept late watches; toiled hard; was the servant of every one; endured the stupidities, bore with the arrogance, was surfeited with the perplexities of hundreds; lived at the will of others, not according to his own. It is highly honorable, and wins men’s favor, that one man should labor in a pursuit which is useful to so many others. And all this while, how was Murena engaged? He was serving as adjutant-general to the bravest and wisest of men, a consummate captain, Lucius Lucullus, in which service he led the army, engaged the enemy, was repeatedly [often] at close quarters with him; routed large forces; took cities now by storm, now by siege; so traversed that opulent Asia, that Asia famed for its seductions, as to leave behind him not one trace either of care for its wealth or pursuit after its gaieties; in short, during a war of the first magnitude, played such a part, that, while he shared, and shared with distinction, in every achievement of the commander-in-chief, the commander-in-chief had no part in numerous and notable services of his. Although I speak in Lucullus’ own presence, yet, lest it should be supposed that he allows me, on account of Murena’s actual danger in this prosecution, to exaggerate his merits, let me remind you that everything I state rests upon official and public evidence--evidence in which Lucullus awards to his second in command an amount of credit which never could have proceeded except from the most candid and the least jealous of chiefs. Each of the present competitors possesses every title both to personal respect and to social position; and I would pronounce them equal, if only Servius allowed me. But he will not allow me. He persists in his quarrel with soldiering; he inveighs against the whole of Murena’s adjutant-generalship. He will have it that the supreme magistracy is the natural reward of this, his desk and chambers [assiduitatis, etymologically sitting-ness] work; these daily labors of his. ‘What!’ quoth he, ‘you will have been with the army all these years; you will never have been seen in the Forum; and then, after such a disappearance, you pretend to compete for the highest dignities with men who have spent their lives in the Forum?’ In the first place, Servius, you are not aware how irksome, how wearisome to people, this assiduity of ours is. To me, indeed, the ‘in sight, in mind’ brought with it its conveniences; but I surmounted the danger of tiring people by my immense laboriousness: you may have done the same; but a little less of our everlasting presence would have hurt neither of us.

“However, passing over this, let us come to the comparison of your several studies and acquirements. How can there be any doubt, but that warlike glory carries with it far more likelihood than that of the law to win the Consulate? You keep night-watches, that you may give an opinion to your consulting clients; he, that he may reach his destination in good time with his army. You awake in the morning to the crowing of the cocks; he is called by the battle-breathing trumpets. You array pleadings; he, armies. You are careful not to let your clients be captured; he, to keep from capture cities and camps. He studies how the enemies’ forces, and you how neighbors’ drains and roof-rains, may be held at bay. He knows how to extend our boundaries; and you, how to litigate about our ‘boundings and buttings’”--Cætera desunt, hic.

FOOTNOTE:

[56] N. B.--Be it observed that what follows is an attempt to translate the untranslatable. Not only the idiomatic proprieties are lost, but the strain of public sentiment and public thinking which the speaker took into account in every remark is changed: and the rhythm defies reproduction, etc.

A SALON IN PARIS BEFORE THE WAR.

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I. VANITY OF VANITIES

Mesdames Folibel occupied a double set of rooms au premier on the Boulevard des Italiens. On a door to the right a large brass plate announced that Madame Augustine Folibel presided over “lingerie et dentelles,” and invited the public to “tourner le bouton.” To the left a large steel plate proclaimed Madame Alexandrine Folibel “modiste,” and invited the public to ring the bell. But after a certain hour every day both these invitations were negatived by a page in buttons, who, stationed at either door, kept the way open for the ceaseless flow of visitors passing in and out of the two establishments. My friend Berthe de Bonton was just turning in to the lingerie department when I came up the stairs.

“How lucky!” she cried, running across the landing to me, then sotto voce: “Madame Clifford [pronounced Cliefore] is here, and wants me to choose a bonnet for her. Now, if there’s a thing I hate, it is choosing a bonnet for an Englishwoman. To begin with, they don’t possess the first rudiments of culture in dress, then they can never make up their minds, and they find everything too dear; but the crowning absurdity is that they bring their husbands with them, and consult them! Figurez-vous, ma chère!” And Berthe, with a Frenchwoman’s keen sense of the comic, laughed merrily at the ludicrous conceit. I laughed with her, though not quite from the same point of view.

“I made an excuse to get away for a few minutes, and left the ménage discussing a pink tulle with marabout and beetle-wings trimming--un petit poème, chérie--but,” she caught me by the arm, “fancy Madame Clifford’s complexion under it!”

“Ah, bonjour, mesdames! I am at the order of ces dames. Will they take the pains to seat themselves just for one second?” continued Madame Augustine, who greeted us in the first salon, where she was carrying on a warm debate on the relative merits of Alençon versus Valenciennes as a trimming for a bridal peignoir.

“I merely wanted to say a word with reference to my order of yesterday. Where is Mademoiselle Florine?” inquired Berthe, looking round the room, where there were several groups ordering pretty things.

“Florine! Florine!” called out Madame Augustine.

“Voici, madame!”

Mademoiselle Florine was a plump little boulette of a woman, who wore her nose retroussé and always looked at you as if she had reason to complain of you. Without being uncivil, she looked it; her nose had a supercilious expression that made you feel it was considering you de haut en bas. The fact is, Mademoiselle Florine was not happy. She was disappointed, not in love, but with life in general, and with lingerie in particular. She had adopted lingerie as a vocation, and now it was going down in the world; it was degenerating into pacotille; grandes dames began to grow cold about it, and to wear collars and cuffs that a petite bourgeoise would have turned up her nose at ten years ago. More grievous still was the change that had come over petticoats. The deterioration in this line she took terribly to heart, and the surest way to enlist her good graces and secure her interest in your order, be it ever so small, was to preface it with a sigh or a sneer at red Balmorals or other gaudy and economical inventions which had dethroned the snowy jupon blanc of her youth, with its tucks and frills and dainty edgings of lace or embroidery. Berthe, it so happened, very strongly shared this dislike to colored petticoats, and was guilty of considerable extravagance in the choice of white ones; Mademoiselle Florine’s sympathies consequently went out to her, and, no matter how busily she was engaged or with whom, she would fly to Berthe as to a kindred soul the moment she appeared.

“I have been thinking over those jupons à traine that I ordered yesterday,” said Berthe to the pugnacious-looking little lingère, “and I have an idea that the entre-deux anglais will be a failure. We ought to have decided on Valenciennes.”

“Ah! I thought Madame la Comtesse would come round to it!” observed Mademoiselle Florine with a smile of supreme satisfaction. “I told Madame la Comtesse it was a mistake.”

“Yes, I felt you didn’t approve; but really twelve hundred francs for six petticoats did seem a great deal,” observed Berthe deprecatingly. “Now, suppose we put alternately one row of deep entre-deux and a tuyauté de batiste edged with a narrow Valenciennes instead of all Valenciennes?”

“Voyons--réfléchissons!” said Mademoiselle Florine, putting her finger to her lips, and knitting her brow.

“It occurred to me in my bed last night,” continued Berthe, “and I fell asleep and actually dreamed of it, and you can’t think how pretty it looked, so light and at the same time très garni.”

“So much the better! Talk to me of a customer like that!” exclaimed Mademoiselle Florine, clasping her hands and turning to me with a look of admiration which was almost affecting from its earnestness. “There is some compensation in working for madame, at least. If those ladies knew what I have to endure from three-quarters of the world!” And she threw up her hands and shook her head in the direction of the premier salon. “But let me get out the models, and see how this dream of Madame la Comtesse’s looks in reality.” Boxes of lace and embroidery were ordered out by the excited lingère, and under her deft and nimble fingers the dream was illustrated in the course of a few minutes. Berthe was undecided. She sat down and surveyed the combination in silent perplexity.

“Really this question of jupons makes life too complicated!” she said presently; “and now I begin to ask myself if these will go with any of my new dresses? The crinoline éventail is going out, Monsieur Grandhomme told me, and they will never go with the queue de moineau that he is bringing in!”

Here was a predicament!

“Attendez,” said Florine, dropping a dozen rouleaux of lace on the floor as if such costly rags, the mere mortar and clay of her airy architecture, were not worth a thought. “Let us leave the question of jupons unsettled for a while; I will go myself this evening and discuss the toilettes of Madame la Comtesse with her femme de chambre; we will see the style and fall of the new skirts, and adapt the jupons to them.”

“How good you are!” exclaimed Berthe, looking and feeling grateful for this unlooked-for solution of her difficulty.

“It is a consolation to me, Madame la Comtesse,” replied Mademoiselle Florine with a sigh, “and I need a little now and then!”

We wished her good-morning. “Let us go back now to Alexandrine,” said Berthe; “I hope Mrs. Clifford has made up her mind by this time.” But the hope was vain. Mrs. Clifford was standing with her back to the long mirror, looking at herself as reflected in a hand-glass that she turned so as to view her head in every possible aspect, while Mr. Clifford looked on. “Do you think it does?” she inquired as we came up to her.

“I think a darker shade would suit you better,” I said; “that pale pink has no mercy on one’s complexion.”

“I’ve tried on nearly every bonnet on the table,” she said, looking very miserable, “and they don’t any of them seem to do.”

“Madame will not understand that the first condition of a bonnet’s suiting, after the complexion of course, is that the hair should be dressed with regard to it,” interposed Madame Alexandrine, who I could see by her flushed face and nervous manner was, as she would say herself, à bout de patience; “these bonnets are all made for the coiffure à la mode, whereas madame wears un peigne à galerie.”

“Dieu! but it is six months since the peigne à galerie has been heard of!”

I suggested, in aid of this undeniable argument, that the comb should be suppressed.

“Oh! dear, no, I wouldn’t give it up for the world!” said Mrs. Clifford, with the emphatic manner she might have used if I had proposed her giving up her spectacles.

“Then you must have one made to order.”

“Yes,” said Madame Alexandrine, “I will make one for madame after a modèle à part.”

“But then it will be dowdy and old-fashioned,” demurred the Englishwoman.

“Then let madame sacrifice le peigne à galerie! What sacrifice is it, after all? Nobody wears them now; they belong to a past age,” argued Madame Alexandrine, appealing to me.

“This one was a present from my husband,” replied Mrs. Clifford, in a tone that seemed to say: “You understand, there is nothing more to be said.”

I did not dare look at Berthe. Luckily she was beside me, so I could not see her face, but I saw the muff go up in a very expressive way, and she suddenly disappeared into a little salon to the left, set apart for caps and coiffures de bal. I heard a smothered “burst,” and a treacherous armoire à glace revealed her thrown back in an arm-chair, stuffing her handkerchief into her mouth, and convulsed with laughter.

Madame Folibel, whose risible faculties long and hard training had brought under perfect control, received the communication, however, with unruffled equanimity.

“That explains why madame holds to it,” she answered very seriously; “it is natural and affecting. Still, one must be reasonable; one must not sacrifice too much to a sentiment. Monsieur would not wish it,” turning to the gentleman, who stood with his back to the fireplace listening in solemn silence to the controversy. “Monsieur understands that the chief point in madame’s toilette is her bonnet. I grieve to say English ladies themselves do not sufficiently realize the supremacy of the bonnet; yet a moment’s reflection ought to show them how all-important it is, how necessary that every other feature in the dress should succumb to it. The complexion, the hair, the shape of the head, are all at the mercy of the chapeau. Of what avail is a handsome dress, and fashionable shawl or mantle, costly fur, lace--an irreproachable tout-ensemble, in fine--if the bonnet be unbecoming? All these are but the rez-de-chaussée and the entresol, so to speak, while the chapeau is the crown of the edifice. Le chapeau enfin c’est la femme! [The bonnet, in fact, is the woman!]” At this climax Madame Folibel paused. Mr. Clifford, who had listened as solemn as a judge, his hands in his pockets, and not a muscle of his face moving, while the modiste, looking straight at him, delivered herself of her credo, now turned to me.

“Unquestionably,” he said in a serious and impressive tone, “there must be a place in heaven for these people. They are thoroughly in earnest.” Mrs. Clifford took advantage of the aside between her husband and me to follow up Madame Folibel’s oration by a few private remarks.

Clearly she was staggered in her fidelity to the “sentiment” which interfered so alarmingly with the success of the “crown of the edifice,” but she had not the honesty to confess it outright. She was ashamed of giving in. Without being often one whit less devoted to the vanities of life, an Englishwoman is held back by this kind of mauvaise honte from proclaiming her allegiance to them. She is ashamed of being in earnest about folly. Now, this British idiosyncrasy is quite foreign to a Frenchwoman; even when she is personally, either from character or circumstances, indifferent to the great fact of dress, she is always alive to its importance in the abstract, and will discuss it without any assumption of contemning wisdom, but soberly and intelligently, as befits a grave subject of recognized importance to her sisterhood in the carrying on of life.

“What do you advise me to do, dear?” said Mrs. Clifford, appealing to her husband, the wife and the woman warring vexedly in her spirit.

“Give in,” said Mr. Clifford. “What in the name of mercy could you do else! A dozen men in your place would have capitulated after that broadside ending in the woman and the bonnet.”

“What does monsieur say?” inquired Madame Folibel.

Monsieur had answered his wife with his eyes fixed on the Frenchwoman, as if she were a wild variety of the species that he had never come upon before, and might not have an opportunity of studying again.

“I suppose I must sacrifice the comb,” observed Mrs. Clifford, affecting a sort of bored indifference and looking about for her old bonnet, “so we will leave the choice of the model open till I have had a conversation with Macravock, my maid, and see what she can do with my hair; she is very clever at hair-dressing.”

“Oh! de grâce, madame!” exclaimed La Folibel, terrified at the rough Scotch name that boded ill for the couronnement. “Your maid, instead of mending matters, will complicate them still more. You must put yourself in the hands of a coiffeur who understands physiognomy, and who will study yours before he decides upon the necessary change. If madame does not know such a man, I can recommend her mine, a coiffeur in whom I have unlimited trust. I send him numbers of my customers, he never fails to please them, and I can trust him not to compromise me. Madame understands the success of my bonnets depends in no small degree on the way in which the head is adjusted for them. Il y a des têtes impossibles that I could not commit my reputation to. I am sometimes obliged to make a bonnet for them, but I never sign it. I have my name removed from the lining, and so edit the thing anonymously. It would compromise me irremediably if my signature were seen on some of your country-women’s heads!”

Mrs. Clifford, awakened to the responsibility she was about to incur, promised to consult the artist instead of her Scotch maid; whereupon Madame Folibel handed her a large card which bore the name Monsieur de Bysterveld and his address. Under both was a note setting forth his capillary capabilities, and informing the public that--

“Monsieur de Bysterveld undertakes to prove that it is possible to become a hair-dresser and yet remain a gentleman.”

The modiste then assisted Mrs. Clifford to tie on her bonnet, observing, while she smoothed out the ribbon carefully as if trying to make the best of a bad case:

“I am glad for her own sake that madame has consented to give up that peigne à galerie. It really is an injustice to her head, and it is simply out of the question her having a chapeau convenable while that impediment exists. Madame will be quite another person,” she continued, addressing Mr. Clifford. “Monsieur will not recognize her with a new chignon and in a bonnet of mine.”

“Oh! then I protest,” said Mr. Clifford dryly; he understood French, but did not speak it--“I protest against both the chignon and the bonnet, madame.”

“Plaît-il, monsieur?” said Madame Folibel, looking from one to the other of us.

“Dear Walter! she means I shall be so much improved,” explained the wife, laughing.

“Improved!” repeated Mr. Clifford, not lifting his eye-brows, but writing incredulity on every line of his face.

His wife blushed, and her eyes rested on his for a moment. Then, turning quickly to Madame Folibel, she made some final arrangement about a meeting for the following day.

Just at this juncture Berthe came back. I was glad she was not there in time to catch the absurd little passage between the two. A husband paying a compliment to his wife, and she blushing under it after a ten years’ ménage, would have been a delicious morsel of the ridicule anglais that Berthe could not have withstood; it would have diverted her salon for a week.

“Well?” she said, five notes of interrogation plainly adding: “Are you ever going to have done?”

“C’est décidé,” answered Madame Folibel, coming forward with an air of triumph. “Madame sacrifices the comb!”

“Excellent!” exclaimed Berthe. “I congratulate you, chère madame. Even mentally, you will be the better of it. For my part, I know no little misery more demoralizing than an unbecoming bonnet.”

We all went down-stairs together, but at the street-door we parted from the Cliffords.

“Where are you going now?” asked Berthe.

“To the réunion at the Rue de Monceau,” I said. “I got the faire-part last night, and I want particularly to be there to try and get a child into the Succursale school. There is only one vacancy, and we are six trying for it, so I fear my little protégée has small chance of success. Come and give me your vote, Berthe.”

“Chérie, I would with pleasure, but I am so dreadfully busy this afternoon: I promised La Princesse M---- to look in during the rehearsal at her house; and then I’ve not been to Madame de B----’s for an age, and I almost swore I’d go to-day.”

“Well, what’s to prevent your going afterwards?” I cried. “It’s not yet four, and the réunion does not last more than an hour. Monsieur le Curé arrives at a quarter-past four, and leaves at five.”

“But one is bored to death waiting for him,” argued Berthe, “and the room is so hot chez les bonnes sœurs, and there won’t be a cat there to-day, I’m sure; everybody is at the skating.”

“Oh! the parish and the skating don’t interfere with each other,” I cried, laughing; “but I see you can’t come, so good-by. I must be off. Mademoiselle de Galliac will be waiting for me.”

“Comment! Is la petite to be there? I particularly want to see her. I want to know how her snow-storm costume went off at the Marine, for in the crowd I never caught sight of her. Chère amie, I’ll go with you to Monceau. After all,” she continued, drawing a long sigh as we stepped into her carriage, “this life won’t last for ever; one must think now and then of one’s poor soul.”

We were a little behind our time for the canvassing. Four of my rivals were before me in the field, and had robbed me of a few votes that I might have received by being there a quarter of an hour sooner.

“Now, Berthe,” I cried, “it’s your fault, so you must bestir yourself to help me. Attack those young girls in the window, and persuade them to vote for my child.”

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know--go and ask them.”

Berthe charged valiantly at the group in the window, introducing herself by embracing the young girls all round, and declaring her perfect confidence in their support. They gathered round her, fascinated at once by her beauty and her frank, attractive manner. I saw at a glance that the votes were safe, and that I had no need to bring up reinforcements in that quarter, so I set to work elsewhere.

Perhaps it would interest my readers to hear something of the good work itself. Its object is to take charge of orphans of the poorest class, clothe, feed, and educate them till the age of twenty-one. The members are exclusively ladies, married or single. To be a member, it is necessary to be a parishioner, to pay a small sum yearly for the maintenance of the confraternity, and to assist at the monthly meetings, where the wants, plans, and progress of the work are discussed in presence of the curé, who is always president, and another parish clergyman elected directeur, the rest of the board--treasurer, secretary, and vice-president--being chosen from amongst the members. When an orphan is proposed for admission, a written statement giving her birth, parentage, and circumstances, and setting forth the special claims of her case, is placed on the green table of the assembly-room, at which the dignitaries preside during the meeting. This preliminary fulfilled, the next step is to secure the votes of the confraternity. The demand being always much greater than the supply, when a vacancy occurs it is sure to be sharply contested. A zealous patroness takes care to canvass beforehand; but, from one circumstance or another, there are always a good many votes still to be disposed of on the day of the election, and the half-hour that elapses from the opening of the assembly to the arrival of the curé is spent in fighting for them, and presents a scene of interesting excitement. The patroness is looked upon as the mother of the little petitioner, who, once admitted into the orphanage, is called her “child.” Those who are long members and very zealous succeed in getting in many orphans, and thus become mothers of a numerous family. The most devoted of these mothers are generally the young girls. The way in which some of their hearts go out to their adopted children is touching and beautiful beyond description. They seem to anticipate their joys and cares, and to invest themselves with something of motherhood in their relations with the little outcasts, who look to them for help in a world where, but for them, they would apparently have no right to be--where no one cares for them, no one loves them, except the great Father who suffers the little ones to come to him, and will not have them sent away.

Every month the sœurs send in a special bulletin of the conduct and health of each child, addressed to the adopted mother, and read by Monsieur le Curé at the meeting. According to the contents of the bulletin, the mothers are congratulated or the reverse. Little presents are sent to the good children, and letters of reproval written to the naughty ones. In this way, the maternal character is kept up till the children leave the shelter of their convent home. Then the mothers assist in placing them as servants or apprentices, or, better still, in getting them respectably married.

While Berthe was getting up votes for me on her side, I was busy on my own, and when the bell rang, announcing, as we thought, Monsieur le Curé, I had a pretty good poll.

The buzz of talk subsided suddenly; the high functionaries broke away from the humbler participants, and took their places at the green table, near the fauteuils, waiting for the curé and the vicaire. Some of the very young mothers looked eager and flurried. One in particular, who was a rival candidate with me, seemed terribly nervous. She was about seventeen. Two young mothers on either side of her were speaking words of encouragement and trying to keep up her hopes. “You must pray hard for my success,” I heard her say to one of them; “the poor old grandfather will break his heart if Jeannette is refused. He can’t take her into Les Vieillards, even if it were not against the rules, because he hasn’t a crust of bread to give her. He has nothing but what the sœurs give him for himself. Oh! do pray hard that I may succeed!”

“Let us say another Pater and Ave before Monsieur le Curé comes in,” suggested her companions; and the three friends lowered their voices, and sent up their pure young hearts together in a last appeal to the Father of the fatherless in behalf of the little orphan.

The door opened. It was not Monsieur le Curé.

“Ah, bonjour, cher ange!” exclaimed Madame de Bérac, embracing Berthe with effusion, and talking as low as if she were “receiving” in her own salon. “What a charming surprise to meet you! I came to vote for Marguerite’s protégée, and see how my dévouement is crowned!”

I expressed my satisfaction at virtue’s proving in this case its own reward.

“But why have I not seen you before?” inquired Berthe. “I did not even know you were in town.”

“I hardly know it yet myself,” replied Madame de Bérac. “I only arrived last night. Marguerite wrote to me imploring me to be here if I could in time to vote for her. Chère aimée,” she continued, turning to me, “till you reminded me of it, I actually forgot I was a member at all!”

“Well, now that you are in town, you mean to stay?” said Berthe.

“Hélas, I only remain a week.”

“But you said you meant to spend the carnival here?”

“When I said so, I believed it.”

“And what has changed your plans?” I inquired.

Madame shrugged her shoulders. “My husband has been so impolite as to tell me that he has no money! One cannot stay in Paris without money.”

“Quel homme!” exclaimed Berthe, with a look of pity and disgust.

The door opened again. This time it was the curé. After the usual blessing and prayer, he declared the séance opened, and read the reports of the board and the bulletins. These matters disposed of, the business of the election began at once. A brisk cross-examination soon put four candidates hors de concours. Two had fathers who could support them, but wouldn’t. The confraternity found the children not qualified for its charge. Two others were not parishioners of St. Philippe du Roule. Of the six who had started, two therefore only remained in the field. One was mine, the other was the protégée of the young girl whose conversation I had just overheard. We were to divide the votes between us. Our respective orphans had the necessary qualifications. It only remained to see which of the two, as the more destitute, could establish the primary claim on the protection of the confraternity. Mine was ten years of age. She had two tiny brothers and a sister some five years older than herself who, since the death of their mother, six months ago, had supported the whole family by working as a blanchisseuse de fin by day, and as a lingère half the night. But the bread-winner gave way under the load of work, and now lay sick at the hospital, while the brothers and the sister, clinging to each other in a fireless garret, cried out for bread to the rich brothers who could not hear them. The Curé de Ste. Clothilde had promised to find shelter for the boys; but what was to be done with the girl? I had stated these plain facts in the petition, and now verbally recommended the case to the compassion of the members, and once again asked for their votes.

My rival’s child was twelve years of age. She had no brothers or sisters. She was utterly destitute, but in good health, and nearly of an age to support herself.

Monsieur le Curé listened to the two cases, and, when he had heard both, his judgment seemed strongly impressed in favor of mine.

In spite of the interest I felt in my poor little protégée, I could not help regretting the impending failure of my young competitor opposite. She had answered the curé’s questions in short, nervous monosyllables, and now sat drinking in every word he said, two fever-spots burning on her cheeks, while her eyes swam with tears that all her efforts failed to suppress. A face of seventeen is always interesting; but in this one there was something more than the mere attractiveness of early youth and innocence. There was an eager, awakened expression in the clear blue eyes, and a sensitive play about the grave, full lips that one seldom sees in so young a face. She was simply, almost quaintly dressed as contrasted with the costly elegance of most of the dresses around her. The black bonnet with the wreath of violets resting on the fair hair, and the neat but perfectly plain black reps costume, bespoke not poverty, but the very strictest economy.

“To the vote, mesdames,” said the curé. “I fear, Mademoiselle Hélène, you have a bad chance.”

“O Monsieur le Curé!” burst from Hélène, “her poor old grandfather will die of disappointment.”

“My poor child, I hope not,” said the curé, evidently touched by her distress, but unable to repress a smile at this extreme view. “Your protegée’s having a grandfather is indeed an advantage on the wrong side.”

“He’s blind, Monsieur le Curé! and paralyzed! and eighty-six years old!” urged Hélène, gaining courage from desperation, “and his one prayer is to see the petite safe somewhere before he dies. O Monsieur le Curé!--” She stopped, the big tears rolling down her cheeks.

“Voyons!” said the good old pastor, rubbing his nose, and fidgeting at his spectacles. “Let us take the vote, and then we shall see. You have a child already, have you not, mademoiselle?”

“Yes, Monsieur le Curé; I have two, but one is in the country, at the Succursale.”

The votes were taken, and, by a very small majority, I carried it. My voters congratulated me, while Hélène’s friends crowded round her, condoling. But the poor child would not be comforted; overcome by the previous emotion and the final disappointment, she sobbed as if her heart would break.

“Oh! really, it’s too cruel to let that dear child be disappointed,” said Berthe. “Can’t we do something, Monsieur le Curé? Can’t we by any possibility squeeze in another child?”

“Nothing easier, madame; you have only to create a new bourse, or get subscribers to the amount of three hundred francs a year for the term of the child’s education,” replied Monsieur le Curé.

“Then I subscribe for two years down,” said Berthe impulsively. “Who follows suit?”

“I do,” said another speaker; “I will subscribe for one year!”

“And I will give forty francs,” said a third.

“And I a hundred,” said the curé, who was always to the fore when a good work was to be helped on.

In a few minutes, the green table glistened with gold pieces and notes. It was all done so quickly that Hélène had not had time to ask what it was all about, when Berthe ran up to her with the good news that her child was taken in, and, embracing her tenderly, bade her dry her tears.

“How good you are, madame!” said the young girl, returning her caress with fervor; “but I knew you were good; you have the face of an angel!”

“It is better to have the heart of one,” said Berthe, laughing, and hastily rubbing a dew-drop from her own fair face.

“Now, I must make haste away, or I shall be late for my lesson,” said Hélène, after thanking the members who gathered about her, this time embracing and congratulating.

“What lesson are you going to take, ma petite?” inquired Berthe affectionately.

“I am going to give one, madame,” replied Hélène. “I live by giving music lessons.”

“Then you must come and give me some,” said Berthe. “Here is my address. Come to me to-morrow as early as you can.”

“You are not sorry I made you come, are you, Berthe?” I asked, as we went out together.

“Sorry! I would not have missed it for the world.”

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