Brussels…

Brussels

“There was a sound of revelry by night, And Belgium’s capital had gather’d then Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men. A thousand hearts beat happily; and when Music arose with its voluptuous swell, Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spoke again, And all went merry as a marriage bell; But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!”

Childe Harold.

The roar of cannon that ushered in the day of Waterloo—the deadly Waterloo, big with the fate of empires—the fatal Waterloo, that sealed the doom of the mighty conqueror, that hurled him on the prison‐island in the far‐distant ocean, where expiation could be the only consolation of the proud, haughty heart that knew no law but the iron will, which, irresistible to all else, was shivered on the Rock of Peter—was not the first, and may not be the last, sound of fearful strife there heard, as Belgium has ever been the chosen battlefield of Europe.

And so well is the fact recognized, that the sole condition on which she now exists as an independent state, is that of perfect neutrality. No matter what may be her sympathies, what may be her interests, she cannot take the sword: she can only defend her frontier, and prevent the entrance of either friend or foe. This it is that gives her importance; her central position, which makes her the key of the Continent, causes England to watch over her with tender interest, gives the mistress of the seas a pied‐à‐terre in case of a general war—a contingency which may arise at any moment.

The late King Leopold I., the Nestor of the European sovereigns, held an exceptional position; the head of one of the smallest states, he had perhaps the largest personal influence. His sagacity and experience made his advice sought and respected by all. When, in the revolution of 1848, thrones were tumbling down, and kings flying in every direction, of course Brussels had to follow the prevailing fashion, and, without knowing exactly what was wanted, the Bruxellois assembled around the palace; but before they could state their grievances, Leopold appeared upon the balcony, told them there was no necessity of any demonstration; he had come to Brussels at their invitation, and was ready to leave, if his departure would make them happier. Whereupon they reconsidered the question, and concluded to let well enough alone.

After the separation of Holland and Belgium, Brussels increased rapidly, and is now one of the pleasantest capitals in Europe. The new part of the city, the Quartier Leopold, is a beautiful faubourg, and the boulevards that encircle the city with a belt of green verdure, furnish a delightful promenade. The park, a portion of the forest of Soignes, is charming; the great trees meet in arches, and shade the crowds of ladies and children, who live in the open air on fine days. On Sundays, the military bands play from 2 to 3 P.M.; and every summer evening, from the 1st of June to the 1st of September, the orchestra of the Grand Opera gives concerts in the kiosk of the Quinconce, the flower‐garden of the park.

Life in Brussels is very pleasant, easy, and independent; all the appliances of modern civilization are within reach, botanical and zoological gardens, picture galleries, theatres; the opera is a permanent fact, at a reasonable rate; the orchestra led by Hanssens (recently departed for another world) was admirable; numbered among the violinists De Beriot, blind, but playing always with rare skill, and the other artists were of equal merit. Of late years Brussels has become a foyer for discontented spirits—

“Black spirits and white, Red spirits and gray. Mingle, mingle, mingle, You that mingle may.”

And mingle they do without fear of mouchards, and air their opinions, no matter how wild and dangerous. If they go a little too far, the government or persons attacked interchange a few diplomatic notes with the Belgian authorities, and then the police politely request them either to be silent or try another dwelling‐place. Prim was for a long time resident, but one fine morning was advised to take his departure, as his intrigues were becoming too open and dangerous, but had been kept secret long enough to lay the mine that exploded and blew the Queen of Spain into France; and Henri Rochefort, driven from France, issued his Lanterne, which threw light on many facts then thought to be false, but which events proved to have been only too true.

Brussels is a paradise for women of taste; for where else can be found such laces and fairy webs, such garnitures of point de Bruxelles, of Valenciennes, of Malines, of Duchesse? A morning stroll down the Montagne de la Cour and the Madeleine is a feast for the eye, for lace‐making is one of the fine arts; the large houses employ three or four first‐class artists to draw the designs, and, as the competition is great, the efforts to surpass are immense. In making up a bride’s trousseau, it is etiquette for the mother of the bride to give the white laces, the happy bridegroom the black; and the prices where the parties are wealthy run up to an enormous amount.

The gold embroideries are equally beautiful; in one fabrique we saw a set of vestments just finished for the Cathedral of Tournai; they were for Lent, and were violet, with the instruments of the Passion exquisitely done in raised embroidery. The effect was admirable; on the back of the chasuble was the cross with the spear and the sponge, and so perfect was the sponge it seemed as though it could be grasped. The column was on the front of the vestment. It was a complete set for priest, deacon, and sub‐ deacon, with five copes, so that the artist had full opportunity for the display of his talent. The same house had recently sent off the dresses for the Empress of Austria and the ladies of her court, to be worn when they walked in the procession on the Feast of Corpus Christi. Specimens of the embroidery, which was of silver on white satin, were shown us, and, judging by what we saw, the effect of the whole must have been charming.

The Musée Ancien is devoted to the artists of the past. Hubert and Jean Van Eyck, whose discovery of the use of oil in mixing colors revolutionized art, are represented by the “Adam and Eve” and the “Adoration of the Magi.” Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More is worthy of the subject and the artist. Crayer’s Saints and Martyrdoms abound; one, the “Apparition of Our Lord to S. Julien,” illustrates the beautiful legend of S. Julien and his wife, S. Basilisse, who founded a hospital, where they received and tended the sick poor. One winter night, hearing sighs and groans at the door, S. Julien went out, and found a man nearly frozen to death. He carried him in, warmed him before the fire, restored him to consciousness, and then laid him in his own bed. The next morning the holy couple went in to see their guest. The bed was empty, and, as they approached it, Jesus, for it was he who had taken the form of the poor sick man to try their charity, appeared to them, and said, “Julien, I am your Lord and Saviour, who announces to you that ere long you and your wife will repose in God.”

The “Martyrdom of S. Peter,” by Van Dyck, is terrible. The saint is fastened to the cross, and three men are placing it in the ground. One, kneeling, is endeavoring to push the end of the cross into the hole prepared to receive it, another supports the cross on his shoulders, the third steadies it. Meanwhile, all the blood in S. Peter’s body seems to have descended into his head and face, which is brick‐dust color, and looks as though it would burst. Altogether it is a fearful picture, so lifelike that one waits to hear the thump the cross will give when finally placed. Such pictures make us appreciate our feather‐bed Christianity, the comfortable way we try to gain heaven and at the same time keep up an agreeable acquaintance with the world, and perhaps its friend, the devil.

The finest Rubens in this Musée is “Christ ascending Calvary.” It is when he is met by S. Veronica and some other women, who are magnificently dressed, thus making the contrast greater between them and the exhausted, blood‐stained figure of Our Lord, who is sinking beneath the weight of the cross, and the agonized face of his blessed Mother, who, supported by S. John, is advancing with outstretched hands to the assistance of her beloved One.

The flower‐pieces by Seghers, the famous Jesuit painter, are exquisite; interiors by Cuyp and Teniers, displaying their delicate care and finish, are numerous; pictures by Rembrandt, with all his wonderful effects of light and shade; some charming faces by Velasquez—two lovely little girls hand‐in‐hand, who look as if they would step out of the frame and speak; two splendid half‐lengths of Albert and Isabella, by Rubens, whose portraits are always admirable; and some very good specimens of the Italian school, among which are a Madonna of Sassoferrato, and a portrait of a young woman, by Guercina, which is very beautiful.

The Musée Moderne is a collection of the modern Belgian school, which deservedly ranks among the first. “Hagar in the Desert,” by Navez, is as touchingly beautiful as any of the masterpieces of the great past; Leys, Wiertz, Gallait, Portaels, whose “Fuite en Egypte” is found everywhere, are men whose genius is recognized by all Europe; Van Schendel has produced effects of light as remarkable as Rembrandt; Willems and Stevens in finish rival Cuyp and Teniers; and Verboekhoven’s cattle‐pieces are unsurpassed. Art is encouraged and fostered by the government; every year there is a grand competition for the “Prix de Rome”; a committee is appointed by the crown to decide upon the merit of the pictures, and the successful one receives the Prix de Rome, which is four thousand francs, a sum sufficient to maintain a student in Rome, in artist style, three years, while he continues his studies.

Brussels is comparatively modern; it was a mere village when Malines, Louvain, and other towns had acquired importance. In 1005, it passed by marriage into the possession of the Comtes de Louvain, under whom it rapidly increased; in 1040, it was surrounded by massive walls, of which some portions still remain in the garden of the Curé of S. Gudule. In 1106, Comte Godfrey le Barbu acquired the title of Duc de Brabant, but Louvain continued the most important town in the duchy, and preserved the title of capital until the time of Albert and Isabella, who preferred Brussels on account of its healthful climate and the vicinity of the well‐ stocked forest of Soignies.

The Grande Place of Brussels is unique; any change is forbidden by law; as it has been for generations, so it must remain; and when one descends suddenly from the park and boulevards, brilliant and gay with all the sparkle of modern life, into the Grande Place, it is like another world. The Hôtel de Ville is on one side; opposite is the Maison du Roi, adorned with a statue of the Blessed Virgin, beneath which is the legend, A Feste, Fame et Bello, libera nos, Maria Pacis, placed there in 1625 by Isabella in gratitude to our Lady of Peace, for having delivered the city from plague, famine, and war. In the place immediately below, is the noble monument erected in reparation to the memory of the unfortunate Comtes d’Egmont and de Hornes, on the spot on which, as the inscription runs, “they were unjustly executed by the decree of the cruel Duc d’Albe.”

It was unjust and cruel, but still we cannot judge the past by the present. Then, principles were positive facts, not vagaries expected to give way at any moment to expediency, but realities plain and palpable, upon which depended not only this perishable present, but the never‐ending future, with its eternity of weal or woe. As men were expected to live up to their principles, so were they expected to die for them. It is a high standard by which to live, but it is the safest. We fancy nowadays that the cruelty then dealt out for thoughts and opinions was abominable, but we forget that those ideas, those thoughts, produced the frightful effects of the ravages of the Gueux, of the orgies of John of Leyden; that from religious they degenerated into social excesses of the lowest kind—excesses which, if prolonged, would have reduced Christian Europe to Vandal barbarism.

And so the brave, unfortunate Comte d’Egmont, the hero, whose valor contributed so signally to the brilliant victory of Philip II. at St. Quentin, lost his life for having tampered with the political sectaries, or rather by being led into the snare by the Prince of Orange; when too late, he saw his error, which was only political; his faith he ever kept pure and untarnished. The Prince of Orange, on the eve of leaving Brussels to join the enemy in Germany, urged him to go, but Egmont refused; the prince told him if he remained he would be lost; that he was a fool to run the risk. Friends until then, they parted in anger. Egmont spurned him, and said, “Adieu, prince sans terre”; the prince replied, “Adieu, comte sans tête”—words which were too fatally verified soon after. The Maison du Roi is now occupied by the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire, and it was in a small room in the second story that Comte d’Egmont passed the night preceding his death, and wrote those touching farewell letters to his wife and the King of Spain which reveal the nobleness of his character. The famous picture by Gallait, “La tête d’un supplicié,” is a portrait of Egmont. We have seen the original in the atelier of Gallait, and he assured us it was an accurate resemblance. Requiescat in pace.

The Hôtel de Ville on the Grande Place is the finest of the municipal palaces found in almost every city of Belgium. It is built round a quadrangle, and the oldest part is the wing to the east of the tower, commenced in 1402, at the angles of which are elegant turrets; the façade consists of a gallery of open arches, surmounted by the Grande Brétèque, a balcony from whence proclamations were made; above this are two rows of windows, and an enormous battlemented roof, pierced with thirty‐seven dormer windows.

The tower is 330 feet high; the lower half, from the basement to the summit of the roof, is square; the upper part, built in 1444, is octagonal, surmounted by a magnificent spire of open‐work, remarkable for its lightness and delicacy; on its apex is fixed a table of stone, twelve feet in circumference, and on this stone a globe of copper, supporting a colossal figure of S. Michael trampling on the devil, thirteen feet high, made of a number of thin plates of copper‐gilt, in 1454, which serves as a weathercock, and turns with the least breath of wind. There is a shocking tradition, currently reported, but not positively confirmed, that the architect of the beautiful tower hung himself on its completion, because he had not placed it exactly in the centre of the façade; which certainly did not remedy the evil, as putting himself out of the world did not put the tower in the right place.

The first story of the Hôtel de Ville contains a gallery in which are magnificent full‐length portraits of Philippe le Beau, Charles V., Philip II., Albert and Isabella, and other dignitaries; the council‐room, audience‐chamber, and all the other apartments are splendidly ornamented, the walls hung with Gobelin tapestry, representing scenes in the life of Clovis and Clotilda. The ceiling of the council‐chamber is a masterpiece of Janssens, in which the most extraordinary effects of light and shade are produced; it represents an assembly of the gods, and their majesties vary in their positions as they are seen from different points.

The remainder of the Grande Place is lined with venerable old houses, terminating in fantastic gables, most of which were originally the halls of various guilds and corporations; their façades pierced with numerous odd little windows and covered with quaint designs, bas‐reliefs, pilasters, balustrades, and inscriptions; some of the houses are gilded, which adds to the picturesque appearance of the place, and on the summit of the Brewers’ Guild is a fine equestrian statue of Prince Charles of Lorraine—the good prince, as he is still affectionately called. In mediæval times, the Grande Place was the ordinary scene of tournaments and executions; here the Knights of the Golden Fleece held their brilliant réunions, and Philip l’Asseuré and Charles V. gave splendid fêtes, which in the reign of Philip II. were succeeded by very different scenes, under the stern rule of the Duc d’Albe.

Just behind the Hôtel de Ville, at the corner of the Rue du Chêne and the Rue de l’Etuve, is the beloved little statue of the “Premier Bourgeois de Bruxelles.” The present bronze statue, after a model by Duquesnoy, was made in 1619, and this replaced an old stone statue which is said to have existed in the IXth century. Its origin is not known, but the favorite tradition is that it represents a youthful Duc de Brabant, whose father dying left him an infant of three years under the regency of his mother, the Duchesse Lutgarde. The neighboring Comte de Malines coveted the fair inheritance, declared war against the boy‐duc, and approached Brussels, determined to take it by force of arms. The Brabançons flew to defend the rightful heir, and, when the decisive day arrived, they besought the duchesse to let them carry the little fellow in his cradle, and suspend it from a great oak‐tree that overlooked the battle‐field. The duchesse in tears consented, accompanied them to the field of Ransbeek, and remained by the tree, from the highest branch of which the cradle was suspended.

The battle raged with fury; three times the Brabançons were driven back to the tree, but the sight of the brave little boy, who looked on with intense interest, never exhibiting fear or impatience, spurred them on to fresh efforts; at last the day was won, and the cradle carried back in triumph to Brussels, the duchesse radiant with joy. To commemorate the event, the oak‐tree was transplanted to Brussels, placed at the corner of a street, since then called Rue du Chêne, and the statue erected at its side; in the course of time, the tree has disappeared, but the statue remains, the object of undying love and interest. To steal it is considered an impossibility; in 1585, he was seized and carried off to Antwerp, but was speedily recaptured and brought home in triumph by a small party of Bruxellois; again he was taken away in a baggage‐wagon by the English troops after the battle of Fontenoy, and, on being recovered, was allowed for a short time to delight by his presence the inhabitants of Grammont, until he was reclaimed by the Bruxellois. In 1747, he was stolen by some soldiers of Louis XV., and again a few years later by two English soldiers, who, however, found him too heavy to carry away; the last time he was disturbed was in 1817, but the same good fortune attended him, and he was again recovered, to the great joy of the Bruxellois, who look upon him as the good genius of the city, and consider his loss a public calamity.

In the XVIth century, Louvain and Brussels gave him two splendid dresses for fête‐days; Charles V. presented him with a complete suit, and settled a pension on him. In 1698, the Elector of Bavaria not only gave him a uniform, but invested him with a military order, and appointed a valet‐de‐ chambre to wait on him. Peter the Great visited him, and added to his pension. In 1747, Louis XV. made him a knight, and solemnly decorated him with the Order of S. Louis, at the same time presenting him with a suit of gold‐laced uniform, a chapeau‐bros, and a sword; and in 1780 he was the first who wore the national cockade of Brabant, hence his present title, “Le Premier Bourgeois de Bruxelles.”

On national fêtes, and during the Kermesse in July, he is always dressed in the uniform of the Garde Civique, which he has worn since 1830, his numerous orders displayed on his infant breast. In addition to these gifts, several persons have made him presents, while some have actually remembered him in their wills. He thus possesses a positive revenue which is regularly paid, a treasurer who is responsible for his disbursements, a lawyer, and a valet‐de‐chambre; and let any stranger beware of ever speaking disrespectfully or slightingly to any Bruxellois of the “Premier Bourgeois de Bruxelles”!

Brussels abounds in charitable institutions and convents of every order; some are peculiar to the place. There is but one house in the world of the “Dames de Berlaimont”—an order of canonesses who follow the rule of S. Augustine—and it was founded by the Comtesse de Berlaimont, whose husband was one of the great officers of the court of Charles V. It is eminently aristocratic in its design. Any number of quarterings was required for the fair candidates in the palmy days of the old régime, but ideas have been modified by the wheel of the revolution, and now, if the head and heart are right, whether the blood is more or less blue is not strictly considered. The convent is splendid, the canonesses charming, and the education received by the young ladies under their charge leaves nothing to be desired.

Convents of Poor Clares are now few and far between; one is still found in Brussels. The rule is very strict—the strictest, we believe, for women in the world, not even excepting those of the Trappistines and Carmelites. It is forbidden to see strangers, but the superioress graciously relented in our favor, drew aside the heavy serge curtain behind double iron grilles armed with spikes, and told us we could look at her, but not speak. This announcement was made before the curtain was drawn. We kept profound silence, and for a few moments contemplated the figure, that stood motionless and speechless. What could have carried her there, from family, from home with all its charms? At the moment of solemn choice, the world enters but little into the thoughts: it is the strong ties that God and nature have implanted in the human heart that are the hardest to unloose.

She had left all for the rigid rule, for the self‐denying life, of a Poor Clare; the happy unbroken sleep of youth for the broken night of prayer and meditation; and, when sleeping, not even to lie down, but to sit half‐ upright; to go barefooted, never to touch meat, never to speak—only imagine it, a woman, and never to speak!—never to her fellow‐beings—ever to God. It was for him she had left home and friends, to find her eternal home and the never‐failing Friend; to be thirteen hours a day in prayer and adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, to expiate by her life the sins of the world around her. It is a wonderful life, a supernatural life; but, when truly desired, supernatural grace is given to lead it courageously to the grave.

The oldest church in Brussels is Notre Dame de la Chapelle, in the Rue Haute, which derives its name from having been at first a simple oratory in which the great S. Boniface, the apostle of Germany, had said Mass. The style is Gothic, and recently the choir, which is very fine, has been restored; it had been disfigured by an atrocious high altar in the style of the Renaissance; but in this reign of good taste it was decided to remove it, and in making the changes it was found there was a false wall, which, on being destroyed, disclosed the beautiful circle of the apse, which is remarkable for having the presbyterium and the credence‐table cut in the wall, something that has only been found in two other churches—one in France, another in Germany.

Notre Dame des Victoires—or Notre Dame du Sablon, as it is more generally called from its situation on the Place du Petit Sablon—is in the form of a Latin cross, with a polygonal apse to the choir. The Place du Petit Sablon during several centuries was the favorite residence of the aristocracy, and is yet surrounded by the Hôtel de Merode, and the palace of the Duc d’Aremberg, which was formerly occupied by Comte d’Egmont. Consequently in this church the monuments are very fine, especially the mortuary chapel of the Princes of Tour and Taxis, in which is an exquisite statue of S. Ursula, by Duquesnoy, and the tombs of the De Hornes, d’Egmonts, and De Chimay.

The beautiful collegiate church of SS. Michel and Gudule is built on a height formerly called Mont St. Michel, and its great towers dominate the city, and can be seen from every point. Its plan is cruciform. The choir is entirely surrounded by chapels, from which it is separated by double rows of columns; on one side is the Chapel du Saint‐Sacrement de Miracle, on the other the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin, behind that of S. Mary Magdalen. It is a magnificent church, one of the richest in Belgium, and the vestments and appointments are superb. The laces are a treasure in themselves—laces which now cannot be bought, are used in the sanctuary, and the vestments and antependiums are of corresponding magnificence. One antependium, which is the Lamb surrounded by the symbols of the four evangelists, is considered the finest piece of embroidery in Belgium.

But the glory of S. Gudule is not the gold, and silver, and lace, but the Très‐Saint‐Sacrement de Miracle, which is there preserved, and which is the object of the profoundest love and veneration. For it did Charles V. build the exquisite chapel whose four splendid windows were presents from his sisters, the Queens of Portugal and Hungary, his brother Ferdinand, King of the Romans, and Francis I. of France. Sovereigns, princes, nobles, and people for five hundred years have adored the sacred Body of our Lord, so cruelly profaned and outraged by the Jews, on Good Friday of 1370, who on that day, the day of Redemption, assembled in their synagogue, and stabbed the consecrated hosts stolen from S. Catherine’s, and, when they stabbed them, the blood which had flowed for them on Calvary, flowed again beneath their sacrilegious hands.

Day and night reparation is offered; the synagogue is now a chapelle expiatoire, attached to which is a community for perpetual adoration, and the Confrérie du Très‐Saint‐Sacrement de Miracle, established in S. Gudule, embraces thousands. The Duc d’Aremberg gave the monstrance, which is a cross of diamonds, surmounted by a triple crown of diamonds, from which hangs a little ship of the same precious stones, presented by the captain and crew of a vessel, in gratitude for delivery from shipwreck. Marie Antoinette sent her wedding necklace of diamonds to be suspended around it, and the lamps around the sanctuary are kept burning by the children of the family d’Aremberg.

The great ornament of the nave is the pulpit, elaborately and exquisitely carved in oak by Verbruggen in 1699, originally in the church of the Jesuits, in Louvain, and, on the suppression of the Order, given to S. Gudule by Maria Theresa, in 1776. The lower part represents the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise by the angel of the Lord, armed with a flaming sword. On the left is seen Death gliding around with his dart. The pulpit itself, in the hollow of the globe, is supported by the tree of knowledge, crawling up which is the serpent, while on the extreme summit stands the Blessed Virgin holding her divine Son, whom she is assisting to bruise the serpent’s head with a large cross. On either side the railing of the steps is formed by a hedge in which numerous birds are enjoying themselves; on the side of Adam are the eagle, the jay, and a monkey; while in the vicinity of Eve are the peacock, the ape, and the parrot.

And why these birds are there is the result of a little domestic disagreement between the artist Henri Verbruggen and his wife Martha Van Meeren, whom he married, hoping to find a tenth muse, but who only proved a prosaic everyday somebody, who fretted herself to death because Henri loved pleasure even more than art, and, while amusing himself with his friends, forgot there was no money in the house, nothing in the larder, nothing wherewith to dress Mme. and Mlle. Verbruggen. Poor Martha, who loved order, and would have been the treasure of some honest burgher, only provoked and irritated Henri by her occasional plain statement of facts. Affairs were in this sad condition when the Jesuits of Louvain, knowing the splendid talent of Verbruggen, ordered a pulpit for their church. The artist was enchanted. Here was a field for his genius; he immediately conceived an admirable work, which should contain, as in a book, the whole history of the Christian religion.

Said he, “I will make a globe, which will represent the earth, under which I will place Adam and Eve, the moment after their fatal disobedience, which entailed on us such misery. This globe will be the pulpit, the canopy of heaven will cover it, the tree of knowledge will overshadow it, around which will creep the serpent, and above, Mary, crowned with stars, the moon at her feet, her infant Son before her, will bruise the serpent’s head with the cross. By the side of the man I will place the cherubim with the flaming sword; near the woman, young and beautiful, hideous death—that will be a contrast!”

The artist commenced his work with ardor. The wood grew animated beneath his fingers. But pleasure for ever distracted him; the more people admired, the more he amused himself. Martha was miserable; she could see no hope of order and plenty. Irritated by the complaints of his wife, Verbruggen determined to revenge himself in his chef‐d’œuvre, and so perpetuate his vengeance. He was making the stairs of the pulpit. In his angry malice, Verbruggen thought he would punish Martha by placing satirical emblems to characterize women. On the staircase, by the side of Eve, who has just sinned, and who still holds the apple, he placed, as symbols, a peacock for pride, a squirrel for destructiveness, a cock for noise, an ape for malice—four defects of which poor Martha was totally innocent.

Man he made with pleasure. On his side he placed, first, an eagle, to typify genius—but just then Martha bade adieu to the world and her troubles, and Verbruggen was a happy widower. Too late, the sculptor understood his loss; the gentle, patient wife was gone, and now he only remembered her good qualities; his courage and energy forsook him; he could not work. Months rolled on; his friends pitied him, and tried to rouse him from his deep despondency.

“You weep for Martha,” said they; “there are others as good; you are only thirty‐six—marry Cecile Byns. She is joyous and lively like you. She will be a mother to your daughter, a charming companion for you.”

Verbruggen listened to the good advice; he asked the hand of Cecile Byns, who was one of those women that rule while laughing, that carry the point while appearing to submit. Cecile knew her power over Verbruggen, and made him obey.

“I love you,” said she, “but I will not marry you until the work which will make me proud of the name of Verbruggen is finished.”

“Only say the word,” replied Henri, “and I will complete it.”

Accompanied by her mother, she visited his atelier. She asked the explanation of the emblems he had placed on the side of Eve. The sculptor blushed.

“When I made what astonishes you,” he stammered, “I did not know Cecile Byns.”

“Very well,” replied the young lady; “but after the symbols of our defects, which perhaps we have not, how do you intend to designate your own noble sex?”

“I had just commenced,” he answered, blushing redder than before. “You already see the eagle, perhaps it typifies vanity.”

“Not at all,” interrupted Cecile. “The eagle is a bird of prey, an emblem of brutal tyranny. What do you intend adding?”

Verbruggen was silent. Cecile continued: “To be just to men, as you fancied you were towards us, you will place near the eagle a fox, a symbol of vain gossip; a monkey eating grapes, for drunkenness; a jay, for foolish pride. You must avow, my dear Verbruggen, these defects belong to men as much as the faults you have given to us, and which adorn the other staircase. And now, when this great work is completed, I will accompany you to the altar.”

The sculptor did not reply. He obeyed, fulfilled faithfully the orders given, and received for reward the hand of Cecile Byns; since which happy event he was never known to offer any further insult to the devout female sex.

And so the pulpit was finished and placed in the church of the Jesuits in Louvain, where it was the object of universal admiration, as it still continues to be in beautiful S. Gudule the pride and joy of Brussels.

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Sayings Of S. John Climacus

It is better to displease our relatives than displease God.

Obedience is simply going about anything without any judgment of our own.

Let your conscience be the mirror in which you behold the nature of your obedience.

A new wound is easily closed and healed; but the old wounds of the soul are cured, if ever, with great difficulty.

He is truly virtuous who expects his death every day; but he is a saint who desires it every hour.

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Marriage In The Nineteenth Century

“Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass.”—Matt. xxiv. 35.

It is only truth that is immutable in this world, and only truth’s representative that dare speak to‐day the same language it spoke eighteen, twelve, or three centuries ago.

Truth cannot progress, for it partakes of the nature of God’s perfection; it is not an ideal of our own evolving, susceptible of improvement as our knowledge grows wider, but a type towards which we are, on the contrary, making slow stages of assimilation. Of all individual parts of truth, hardly one of which remains in our day unassailed, none is so fiercely attacked as the truth about marriage. And yet, as we have shown in a previous paper,(232) almost every argument against it has repeatedly been put forward by barbarians and Romans, Byzantine emperors and feudal chiefs, and borne out by all the imposing display of military force, legal servility, and even ecclesiastical truculence. One might almost say of the agitation against marriage in our day, “What has been will be, and what will be has been.” If it is no longer in the individual passions of kings and nobles that the conflict centres, it is still a “sovereign” who plays the part of Philip Augustus or Henry VIII.—the “sovereign people.” Instead of one mighty colossus, it is a legion of personally obscure individuals which the church finds opposed to her; but the principle is the same, the issue is identical. What councils and embassies did formerly is now done oftener and in privacy; new agencies have widened the possibilities of communication, of discussion, and of adjustment, and causes are more rapidly multiplied, as well as more speedily settled. The press has lent its power to the altar, and redeemed, in part, its too well‐earned reputation as a pander and a tempter; and besides these new helps, we have, as of old, all those oft‐tried resources of personal eloquence, canonical censures, and grievous penances.

Still the question is exactly the same in the nineteenth as it was in all preceding centuries: Shall passion or reason rule mankind? Shall the most sacred of all rights of property be protected and maintained, or shall communism be allowed gradually to extirpate the human race?

The historian Rohrbacher, whom we have often quoted in the paper referred to above, specially insists upon the confusion which the legalized disruption or total disregard of the marriage vow would introduce into society, and supports his opinion by that of De Maistre. He also adduces the argument that, since the creation of man in the earthly Paradise was a perfect and complete act, and only one woman was there joined to one man, therefore the union of one man and one woman was distinctly God’s type of what he meant all future unions to be. We might speak of many Scripture proofs of the original institution of marriage being a state of perpetual monogamy until death, but such proofs would involve too lengthy a sketch of one portion of the subject, and this aspect has been so often discussed that we turn with a feeling of relief to any less hackneyed view of the question.

Speaking broadly, we may say that the Hebrews were the first, as they were for a long time the only, people whose laws protected both the honor and the property of women. Because they did so, they were also most stringent as regards the tie of marriage. Again, with them ancestry and descent were of paramount importance, and every family jealously guarded its record and registers; this also implied a strict protection of marriage, and, in fact, would have been impossible without it. Even when dispensations were allowed the Jews “because of the hardness of their hearts,” the son of the first wife was not to be put aside for the son of the second, if the latter were more pleasing to her husband than the former, and this because the sacred rights acquired at her betrothal were absolutely inalienable.(233) In the marriages mentioned in the Old Testament, the consent of the woman is always formally asked,(234) and she is considered competent to inherit property and transfer it to her husband.(235)

Among other nations of antiquity, the more truth was obscured in their religious forms, the more degraded became their ideal of marriage. This is patent even among such civilized nations as the Greeks and Romans; the whole of mythology is a deification of the passion of lust, and a caricature on marriage. Still, where greater genius abounds, there also we find glimpses of a higher morality. For instance, in Homer’s magnificent poems, conjugal love and fidelity stand out nobly as the themes of his especial admiration. It would require a thorough examination of many of the passages of the Iliad, and greater space than we have now before us (since this idea can only be used here as a collateral one), to bring out the full force of this striking fact, and some day perhaps it may be our good fortune to return to this topic; suffice it to say at present, that any one who reads Homer attentively will be struck by the majestic attitude of Juno, the constant protectress of the Greeks, and by the hearty sympathy shown by the poet in a struggle undertaken purely to vindicate the dignity of marriage and the rights of hospitality. This is perhaps even more obvious from the fact that even the good personages of the poem, the self‐sacrificing and devoted Andromache, the noble Hector, the infirm and guiltless Priam, are all included in the sweeping misfortune which is the swift and just retribution of the cowardly rape of Helen. The vindication of the principle of marriage is evident, while in the Odyssey its glorification is even more obvious. This illustration, for which we have to thank a very zealous and learned religious whose kindness put the suggestion entirely at our own disposal, is one which it is worth while for thoughtful persons to consider, as it gives a far greater moral importance, and consequently a more perfect artistic interest, to one of the few colossi of the intellectual world.

The law of Jesus Christ succeeded the preparatory dispensation of Moses, and perfected all its enactments, marriage among the rest. It gave the marriage contract an added dignity by making it the image of the union—single and indivisible—of Christ and the church, and by elevating it into a sacrament; in other words, a means of sanctifying and special grace. In this is certainly the secret of the church’s inflexibility with regard to marriage. Since by it a distinct and sacramental grace was vouchsafed, it followed that this grace in itself was sufficient to enable the contracting parties, provided they faithfully corresponded to it, to remain holily in the state of matrimony until death; so that, whenever any serious breach took place between them, the church could reasonably argue that the fault lay with their dispositions, not with the contract itself. In the old law, marriage, though holy, was not a sacrament, and was susceptible of greater relaxations; but in the new law, with a higher dignity added to it, and more abundant grace attached to it, it is too strong to need concessions and too noble to wish for them.

The Hebrews also, in propagating their own race, used the only means then in their power of propagating the knowledge of the true God; but in the new dispensation we have substituted a generation according to the spirit for the previous generation according to the flesh. Polygamous marriages among the Jews were a mysterious channel provisionally used for the increase and maintenance of God’s worship upon earth; but, since the coming of Christ, men have been won by the Word of God, the preaching of his servants, the sufferings of his martyrs, and the learning of his disciples. Those who are now constantly born into his fold are born “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”(236) Having said so much upon the historical and Scriptural aspect of marriage, we leave it to others to dispute the particular meaning of such and such texts, and the particular inferences to be drawn from the context, and go back to the church’s firm stand upon this matter.

Not only has she been the foremost champion of the integrity of marriage in past ages, but she is now almost its only one. No body of such force or numbers exists in the world, which alone gives her the priority among the upholders of Christian marriage; and when the tenets of the few other bodies to whom marriage is sacred are examined, they will be found to be inspired and created by her principles, so far as they refer to this matter.

Of the Anglican communion, especially in its more advanced branches, it is sufficient to say that, having better than any other body preserved the forms, it has as its reward attained to more of the spirit, of a “church,” and consequently inculcates a higher morality. But the following testimony, which, from the name of the sheet furnishing it (the Reformed Missionary), we suppose represents some other Protestant body, is more interesting because more unexpected. A Catholic paper of Nov. 16, 1872, the Standard, has preserved this testimony for us. Under the title of “The Divorce Question Again,” it discusses church authority and its relation to the civil law, and uses the following strong language: “Spiritual interests and spiritual discipline belong to that supernatural order of grace which has its home in the bosom of the Christian church.... There are many things besides loose divorce legislation which the state either tolerates or legalizes, but which the church cannot sanction or countenance for a single instant without committing spiritual suicide. And if the state should expressly dictate to the church a line of action at variance with the plain teaching of Christ, then it would be our solemn duty to obey God rather than men.... The church must interpret God’s Word, and exercise spiritual discipline in accordance therewith, no matter what course the state may take in disposing of kindred questions. As Dr. Woolsey has expressed it: ‘Whatever be the attitude of the state, the church must stand upon the principles of the New Testament as she expounds them, and apply them to all within her reach!’ ”

What is here said of the “state” may be applied to the people, the press, popular license, and all the modern agencies which the evil one has added to his former royal and learned tools. But if among earnest though mistaken Christians we find such auxiliaries as the Reformed Missionary and the eloquent sermons of Anglican divines,(237) we have also to encounter such authorities as the following on the side of passion and licentiousness: “Dr. Colenso, embarrassed by the obstinate adherence to polygamy which he observed among the Kaffirs, came to the resolution, after conference, it is said, with other Anglican authorities of the highest rank, to remove the difficulty by a process which, though adopted in a well‐known case by Luther and Melancthon, had not previously received the official sanction of Anglican bishops. As polygamy would not yield to Protestantism, Dr. Colenso agreed to consider polygamy ‘a Scriptural mode of existence.’ Here are his own words: ‘I must confess that I feel very strongly that the usual practice of enforcing the separation of wives from their husbands, upon their conversion to Christianity, is quite unwarrantable, and opposed to the plain teaching of our Lord.’ And then he proves, of course from the Bible, that polygamy is not inconsistent with the all‐holy religion of the Gospel. Here is the proof: ‘What is the use,’ he asks, ‘of our reading to them (the heathen) the Bible stories of Abraham, Israel, and David, with their many wives?’ But Dr. Colenso was not without support in his view on polygamy. ‘The whole body of American missionaries in Burmah,’ he observes, ‘after some difference of opinion, came to the unanimous decision to admit in future polygamists of old standing to communion, but not to offices in the church (as if the last were a greater privilege than the first!)’ ‘I must say,’ he continues, ‘that this appears to me the only right and reasonable course!’ ”

At the beginning of this extract, we read that Dr. Colenso was embarrassed by the obstinate adherence to polygamy among the Kaffirs. This means, we infer, that he had originally withstood this heathen practice. Why had he done so? If he believed it sufficiently immoral to attack it, he was guilty of violating his conscience in ceasing his attack; if he had always believed it “Scriptural” or allowable, he was guilty of hypocrisy in attacking it at all. Then, when he asks, “What is the use of our reading to them the Bible stories of Abraham, Israel, and David, with their many wives?” he gives us unconsciously another advantage by tacitly confessing the necessity of a divinely inspired interpreter of the Bible. If Dr. Colenso had been a Catholic, the difficulty would not have existed. Does he suppose that Catholic converts among savage nations do not hear the same stories? But in their case, a teaching and speaking church comes to their rescue, and explains what otherwise would seem dark. It is strange to hear a Protestant Christian, bred up on the rule of “the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible,” hesitate as to the effect of certain stories in the Bible. If the poor Kaffirs were to be evangelized upon the principle that a Bible precedent was practically a permission for all time, they would soon have Judiths and Jaels among them, as well as Abrahams, Israels, and Davids.

In the Times (London) of Dec. 20, 1872, on the occasion of a public “Day of Intercession” for more missionaries, we read the following stringent criticism upon the body which of all others most nearly approaches the ideal of a church: “The Church of England,” says the Times, “utterly abandons large regions on the ground that in tropical climes there will be polygamy or an equivalent disregard of the marriage ties, and that no preaching can prevail against it”—a confession of powerlessness which quite coincides with what we have said of Dr. Colenso. Still it is not fair to class the Anglican communion, despite this weak shrinking from a difficult task, with the more systematic deserters from the championship of duty; but, if we are grieved and astonished at her defection under certain circumstances, what shall we say of the following breach of ecclesiastical discipline on the part of those whose very names argue in this case a departure from the path of known duty? In the New York World of the 5th of January, 1873, we read among the announcements of business transacted in the mayor’s office the previous day this startling disclosure: “During the day the mayor was waited upon by a wedding‐party, the principals of which were Michael M’Clannahan and Mary Donovan, who wished to be united in matrimony without going to the trouble of getting up a public church celebration. Mr. H—— performed the duty according to the statute, and the bride and bridegroom went on their way rejoicing.”

It is not for us to judge these persons, nor speculate upon the motives that led them to take such a step; but the occurrence is nevertheless a sign of the demoralization which is every day on the increase among our people.

Polygamy, under the name of Mormonism, is still tolerated and protected in the United States, and the annals of divorce in the states where Mormonism is illegal quite make up the deficiency. In Connecticut, according to the deposition of the Rev. Dr. Woolsey, President of Yale College, made before the Western Social Science Congress in Chicago, the ratio of divorce is one in every eight marriages. We were told by a distinguished New England convert that the Vermont marriage law was practically so lax that the following “cause” for a divorce was considered legal: A couple, not very long married, mutually wished for a separation, simply on the score that they were dissatisfied with their bargain. They went to a lawyer to ascertain the technicalities of the case, and were told—appearances having to be saved!—that some specific cause must be alleged. The easiest was cruelty. But the parties had never been violent; so the lawyer suggested that the husband should, in his presence, give his wife a “blow.” This was soon accomplished by a light slap on the cheek of the willing “victim”; cruelty was pleaded, and the divorce obtained.

In Rhode Island, the proportion of divorces to marriages in 1869 was one to fourteen, and the law of that state leaves it practically to the discretion of the courts to annul any ill‐assorted marriage on the ground of uncongenial temper, desertion, drunkenness, or any sort of bad conduct. In that year, out of 166 divorces, only 66 were granted on the plea of adultery, while it must also be borne in mind that this grave charge is often unjustly and maliciously made to cover some shameful behavior on the part of the plaintiff, or to gratify his or her revenge. Speaking of a clergyman who was reported to have married one man successively to five wives, all of whom were living at the same time, a Protestant paper comments thus on the story: “It may be true or false. It is not altogether improbable. It suggests very serious reflections, as indicating what is possible under our laws, and the course things are taking in American society.” The paper goes on to speak of the clergyman’s responsibility in such a case, and although advocating the desirability, “for many reasons,” of the office of solemnizing marriage being “confined almost entirely to ministers of the Gospel,” does not see that it stultifies itself directly after by explaining that “the trust is reposed in them, not by any right to it on their part, as holding an ecclesiastical office, but on account of their position and general character(!). They are able to guard marriage, and give it a religious character and sanction. But they act, so far as the law goes, simply as civil magistrates.”

And let us add that here is precisely the evil, and that as long as clergymen are lowered to the level of magistrates, loose morals will never be uprooted.

The Nation of March 2, 1871, has the following:

“We cut from the marriage notices of the Philadelphia Press the following illustration, omitting names, of the way in which attempts to reduce human marriages to the level of those of the lower animals are dressed up in fine language:

“ ‘In Philadelphia, February 23, S—— and S——, the parties protesting against all marriage laws, whether legal or conventional, which subject either the wife or the husband to any control or influence on the part of the other which is not in accordance with the dictates of pure and mutual love.’

“This is, of course, simple ‘pairing.’ Marriage means the assumption by a moral agent of an obligation to perform certain duties, even after they become disagreeable. The arrangement by which the parties live together as long as they find it thoroughly pleasant is that common among birds, beasts, and fishes, and has nothing human about it.”

The Independent, a Protestant religious paper, sneers at all barriers to divorce, Catholic, Protestant, or civil, as “shallow,” and declares that “no matter with what solemn ceremony the twain may have been made one, yet when love departs, then marriage ceases and divorce begins.”

A certain unhappy section of those waifs of womanhood, the advocates of woman’s rights, is known as the champion of “free‐love,” that is, in plain words, adultery. Mrs. Stanton, one of the leaders, has said somewhere that “marriage is but a partnership contract terminable at the will of the parties,” and has advocated marriages for three years.

To this last proposition we have only one objection. Why three years? If a marriage is based on mere passion, three months or six at the furthest would be enough to exhaust the cohesive element, for if the adage be true that “no man is a hero to his valet,” it is equally certain that no man and woman could by any human possibility live together for that time in the familiar intercourse implied by marriage, without discovering to each other certain asperities of temper, inequalities of disposition, in short, all the little meannesses of our poor human nature. This disenchantment, following the close and daily companionship that is almost inevitable in married life, is enough to kill passion, though it cannot even daunt principle. Again, in a marriage based on passion, the satiety that follows in the train of unlawful love would be reproduced, and would break up the connection in far less than three years. In fact, when we come to sift the question, we find that, putting aside the religious spirit presiding over marriage, that state of life has no appreciable sign to distinguish it from the score of illicit connections punished by law or branded by society. We find here almost a parallel to the question lately agitated in England among Episcopalians, as to the reason why the Church of England should be called a “church,” and not, like all other independent Protestant bodies, a “sect.” We ask, What is to distinguish such a “marriage” as our modern reformers advocate from the “liaisons” at which society pretends to be so virtuously shocked? Where is the intrinsic difference between a woman who sells her honor to many men at once and one who surrenders it to a single man at a time for just that period during which pleasure shall keep her constant to him?

Another form of attack upon the sanctity of marriage is the trade of the great journals in daily advertisements such as these, which meet our eyes every morning:

“Absolute divorces legally obtained in different states. Desertion, etc., sufficient cause. No publicity. No charge until divorce is obtained. Advice free.

——, Attorney, —— Broadway.”

Or, with slight variations, thus:

“Also Commissioner for every State.

——, Counsellor‐at‐Law, —— Broadway.”

Here we see the press and the law conspiring to lend aid—and, more than that, encouragement—to the loosest and most devastating of passions. Then, again, the tone of the newspapers with regard to moral irregularities is a painful sign of the times. Thus we read in a great “daily”:

“Out West they call divorces ‘escapes.’ A speedy and safe ‘escape’ is guaranteed for a very low figure, and, as usual, a great many parties figure for it.”

There is a levity about such remarks that is saddening, when taken in connection with the future of a great people.

The morbid curiosity of the public is thus excited under the convenient plea of satisfying it, while, with regard to the institution of marriage itself, the saying is exemplified, “Give a dog a bad name, and then shoot him.” Marriage is ridiculed, conjugal affection put down as antiquated, home‐lovingness pitied as old‐fashioned, family reunions voted dull, and, as a natural consequence, youth is more or less alienated from the unfashionable circle. It is easy, then, to turn on marriage as a principle, remove the stumbling‐block altogether, paint in seductive colors a substitute for home, and familiarize the public with so‐called legal but transient unions. Once this principle is established in the abstract, it will be merely a question of time as to its practical extension. Granted that a man or woman may change companions as often as they choose, who is to regulate how often? Like the husband of Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights, every day? Why not? Again, if one man may have many “wives,” why should not a woman have many “husbands”? And so on ad infinitum the license might spread unchecked, till there would be as many conflicting interpretations of marriage as there are already of the Bible. Absolute communism would be quite a logical sequence, and, in a society so utterly confused as to parentage, there could be little question as to inheritance!

Christian marriage, on the contrary, has both a social and a sanitary, as well as a religious aspect. It creates a strong and healthy race, and at the very outset of each man’s career gives him a position by investing him with a responsibility. He feels that the pride which his old father and mother have in him must not be shamed; that the honor of his family is bound up in his actions; and that his behavior may influence for good or for evil both the moral and temporal prospects of his near kindred. A man so weighted feels a just pride, which, in default of higher motives, may even yet guide him into greatness; and though such a man may yield to temptation, fall into vice, and disgrace himself, so much at least of his early training will survive as to make him feel keenly the shame of his position. This alone has saved hundreds. It has been the serpent in the wilderness to many, but it would no longer be an imaginable motive were the ideal of Christian marriage, with its attendant responsibilities, to be swept away. There is another aspect under which the frequency of divorce and the condoned irregularities of intercourse between the sexes are a constant threat to public security—we mean in provoking murder. Three parts of the fearful murders committed in New York, and also in many other parts of the Union, are traceable more or less to ill‐assorted marriages and a spirit of unchristian rebellion against lawful restraints. Lately there has been a glaring case in point, the details of which are fresh in the memory of every one. A man is deliberately shot dead on the very threshold of what is practically a “Divorce Court”; the murderer is a brutal husband incensed at the victim’s testimony against himself. In 1872, three of the most famous New York “characters” figured in a terrible drama ending in death, imprisonment, and disgrace. What was the reason that set two of the most unscrupulous speculators in the world at deadly enmity? The disputed favor of a woman who, according to the new code, only asserts her rights, and claims to change “husbands” as often as she pleases. God help the age and nation in which such things are daily done, and where animal passion laughs in the teeth of law! Who does not see how every right and security hangs by the sanctity of marriage? Marriage, in the proper sense of the word, implies exclusive and permanent possession, and represents the first and greatest right of property. If that property is to be made movable, salable, takable, in a word, why not other less sacred and less valuable property also? “Property is theft,” say the socialists, and certainly it is, if we can previously agree to consider marriage so. If all kinds of possessions (life itself included) are to be thus transferable, every individual will be reduced to protect them single‐handed against the world, and from this state of things will grow a monster system of organized murder and legalized rapine. The early Californian society would be nothing to this imaginary community.

In France, Italy, and Spain, the infamous laws not only encouraging but actually enforcing civil marriage are sapping the foundations of society; and in England, a country hitherto held as a model for its conjugal and homely tendencies, the tenets of “free‐love” are making giant inroads into social life, and leavening the mass of everyday literature. Bigamy and divorce are almost worn‐out sensations; they have supplied the ablest pens with thrilling subjects, and have furnished the best theatres with the only dramas that really “take.” Something new and more monstrous yet is needed, and the prurient imagination that shall first succeed in originating a new version of social sin will become the power of the moment.

Such is the present situation. We do not know if there ever has been a worse stage of immorality, except, perhaps, that before the Flood; for at all times of unparalleled license there have been some extenuating circumstances, of which we are afraid we must own ourselves bereft. In the beginning of the Christian era, license was confined to pagans; for in the tottering Roman Empire the Christians were all soldiers of the cross, and their watch for the Bridegroom was too eager to allow them time for temptation; in the transition state that followed, the church’s power already made itself felt, and though barbarian kings still defied their pastors, the latter had at hand ecclesiastical terrors that seldom failed in the end to subdue the half‐converted Goth or Lombard. In the days of the ill‐starred Renaissance, when a spirit of neo‐classicism threatened once more to deify sin under the garb of art, the Council of Trent sat in solemn judgment, and condemned abuses which had unhappily paved an easy way for heresy: while later on, even in the days of the wicked and brilliant court of Versailles, there was found a Bourdaloue to rebuke the public sinners who sat in the high places, and to eulogize Christian marriage in the midst of a gathering which seemed to have utterly forgotten its meaning.

Faith still lingered—the faith that made the middle ages what they were—that faith that condemned public sin to as public a penance, and out of great excesses drew great examples. Louise de la Vallière was almost the last representative of this mediæval spirit of generous atonement; and her heroic words, when told in her cloister of the death of her son, “I should weep rather for his birth than for his death,” were the genuine outcome of a faith that could restore a prostitute to innocence, and place upon a once guilty brow almost a virgin’s crown.

With Voltaire, the work that Luther had begun was perfected, and henceforth it was not Europe that believed, but only a few scattered exiles who here and there kept the lamp of the faith dimly alight in the stifling atmosphere of universal and fashionable doubt. Even among believers the spirit of ready sympathy, with the slightest indication of the church’s unspoken meaning was gone, and there remained only the too self‐conscious effort of unquestioning loyalty. Still, thank God! it did and does remain, and, though shorn of all poetry, it is none the less vigorous in self‐defence. But we may now say that indeed the flood has broken loose, the Philistines are upon us, the whole array of the world’s newest forces is brought to bear against us, and behind her dismantled outposts the church retreats to her citadel, the naked Rock of Peter. Men say that the Council of the Vatican was inopportune, presumptuous, and imprudent; let the world’s gracefully lapsing course be a living refutation to such words. Every outward stay is gone; every difficulty in the way of the reunion of pastors is trebled; every see is hedged about with physical bars that are insurmountable; nothing remains free but what cannot be fettered—the tongue. Who can wonder if the church, in this dire emergency, delegates to one man the power she can no longer collectively exercise in peace? As in old Flemish cities there sits up in the lonely belfry of the cathedral a watcher whose duty it is to guard the city against fire, and to warn the people through a brazen trumpet at which spot he descries the first appearance of danger, so in the heart of the City of God there sits now the watchman whose eye and voice are bound to raise the alarm and direct the remedies through the length and breadth of listening Christendom.

The Council of the Vatican has made the word of the Pope the brazen tocsin of the Christian world.

And now, having said so much of the possibilities opened up by the present lax spirit in morals and equally lax interpretation of what remains in the shape of legal restraints upon vice, let us speak of what Christian marriage ought to be. We will be brief, for the position almost defines itself. Of the indissolubility of marriage under all circumstances, even in the case of one of the parties breaking the marriage vow, we will not speak, nor even of the fidelity which marriage requires in every thought and slightest intention. But we would insist upon that which ensures a happy and holy union, namely, the preliminary motive. We have seen how bad marriages and an unworthy idea of this state of life lead to shame, to socialism, to violence, sometimes to a criminal ending in a common jail; let us see now what leads to bad marriages themselves. Two motives there are—one mercenary, and one sensual. We heard a very impressive Jesuit preacher say a few years ago, in the pulpit of one of the most beautiful and frequented churches in London, that to make a good marriage both prayer and seemly preparation are necessary. Some parents, he said, in their pious anxiety to leave all things to Providence, and to avoid that solicitude for worldly things which the Gospel condemns, neglect to avail themselves for their children of the allowable means and legitimate opportunities of social life; but to these he would say, Remember the words of Christ: “Not every one that saith to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.”(238) On the other hand, many parents sinned far more grievously and—he was loth to say it—more frequently by altogether leaving the Creator out of the question in the serious matter of their children’s settlement in life. Which of these two extremes is the prominent one in this country? We need not answer the question. We know too well how nine‐tenths of those marriages are made which within a few months or years are broken in the divorce courts, or otherwise dissolved by a shameful esclandre. We know how wealth especially, position, associations, beauty, and accomplishments all rank before moral worth in what is called lightly but too truly the “marriage‐market.” We know how marriage is looked forward to through girlhood, not as the assumption of a sacred responsibility, but as the preliminary step to emancipation; we know how it is heartlessly canvassed by men as an expensive but advantageous luxury, its cost being in proportion to the social figure it will enable them to make, but its essence of no deeper moral account to them than the purchase of one trotter or the undertaking of one speculation more or less. We do not say that there are no exceptions to this rule—far from it; but that is just the point: however honorable these cases are, the fact still remains that they are exceptions. Again, where the motive is not directly mercenary, it is often selfish; old men will marry for mere comfort, physical luxury, and the regularity of a well‐ appointed home—things which the presence of a handsome, thoughtful, and tolerably intellectual woman alone can ensure; women no longer young, but still hungering for the whirl of fashion, will marry unsuitably for the sake of an assured position and means to continue the frivolous course of their former lives; in fact, all shallow disguises of selfishness have their representatives in the “marriage‐market,” from that of the millionaire who wants a wife to sit at the head of his table and wear his diamonds, to that of the day‐laborer who wants one to cook his dinner, mend his clothes, and eke out his week’s earnings by her own hard work. Marriages made in this spirit are unblest and always end badly: the millionaire will divorce his wife, and the laborer murder his in a fit of intoxication; the end is the same, the means differ only according as natural temperament and habits of education diverge.

How far otherwise with marriage in the true Scriptural, Christian sense of the word! In poverty or in riches, alike sacred and full of dignity; always conscious of its sacramental crown; ever mindful of its holy ministry, the salvation of two souls, the ladder to heaven of two lives that without it might have made shipwreck of their eternal interests! A thing apart from the common unions of earth, different from a commercial partnership, stronger than a political coalition, holier than even a spontaneous friendship. A thing which, like the riddle of Samson, is “sweetness out of strength,” and whose grace is so sublime that in heaven it can only find one transformation worthy of itself. “You err, not knowing the power of God; for in the resurrection they shall neither marry nor be married; but shall be as the angels of God in heaven.”(239) We are not told that the tie will be like brotherhood or like friendship; we are left to infer that between husband and wife some more peculiar link will exist hereafter than will be common to us all as children of the same Father, and it is plainly foretold that this relation will be as that of the angels towards each other.

We have only to look into the gospels and the teachings of the Apostle of the Gentiles to see by what means we may in the married state so sanctify our lives as to deserve this heavenly transformation; we have only to read the marriage‐service to learn the plain, straightforward, but most solemn duties, the performance of which will secure us spiritual peace and joy in this life or the next. To use the sacrament worthily, we must come to it with worthy preparation and steadfast intention, first as Christians resolved never to perjure themselves before God, then as rational beings willing to abide by whatever unforeseen consequences their deliberate vow may entail in the future. For it is an idle pretext to allege that, if one party breaks the engagement, the other is de facto absolved from it. Where in the formula, Catholic or Protestant, is this proviso? The only qualifying sentence is this, “Until death do us part.” How, then, can any reasonable person interpret “death” to mean sin, incompatibility, or any other incidental unpleasantness? We think that those who are so ready to foist unwarrantable meanings on the plain and naked oath they have sworn in full possession of their senses at the altar, would hardly be the persons we should like to trust as men or women of unimpeachable honor in the ordinary transactions of life.

If mercenary motives are uppermost in the majority of marriages in this age and in this nation, sensuality is none the less responsible for a share of the misery attendant upon modern unions. We have already spoken of the evil of marriages founded on passion, and of the shameful way in which the colloquial adage, “Marry in haste, and repent at leisure,” is thus frequently illustrated. To this also the remedy lies in a serious Christian spirit of preparation for marriage. The root of all evil developments in the relations between the sexes lies in the early education of the contracting parties, and it is here that the only radical cure can be tried. The church bids her children be especially circumspect at the juncture of marriage, but she also teaches them to reverence the sacrament from childhood upward as a type of the union between herself and her divine Spouse. If, as children, marriage appears to us in the shape of the angel of home, watching over the existence it has created, and dignifying the parental authority it has built up; if in youth the goal of marriage is looked forward to as the toga virilis of life, the reward of a dutiful childhood, the ennobling badge of our enrolment among the soldiers of the cross, then and only then will our country find in us efficient citizens, earnest patriots, and reliable defenders. If among men there is revived the chivalrous spirit of deference and forbearance towards women which sealed the middle ages as a charmed cycle among all divisions of time, and among women there is cultivated that generous and true womanliness which made SS. Monica and Paula, and Blanche of Castille, the typical heroines of the wedded state, then may we expect to see “a new heaven and a new earth.” Marriage means reverence for each other on the part of the persons married, as representing in themselves the sacrament typical of Christ’s union with the church; it means reverence for the children who are entrusted to their care by God and their country, and whom they are bound by the solemn adjuration of Christ not to scandalize; it means reverence for themselves, as the tabernacles of a special grace and the progenitors of new worshippers at God’s feet, new subjects of the kingdom of heaven. It is the woman especially who is bound to feel and express this reverence, for woman is, as the French poetically say, the priestess of the ideal. Besides, the highest perfection ever reached in the married state was reached by a woman, the Blessed Virgin, Mother of God. Among married saints there have always been more women canonized than men. The women of a nation form the men; and, if marriage is to be reformed, it must be done first through the women. We hope and pray that it may soon be so, but we fear that outside the church, where the reform is, in the abstract, not needed, there is not sufficient impetus to ensure its being made. We say in the abstract, because practically there are many marriages made among Catholics, celebrated in Catholic churches, and decorously observed through the course of a blameless life, which yet call loudly for reform, and sadly lack the noble Christian spirit that made perfect the unions of Delphina and Eleazar, and of S. Louis of France and Margaret of Provence. But however deficient in some cases our practice may unhappily be, our doctrine remains ever unchanged, and our laws ever inflexible. Thanks to the church, marriage is still recognized as an act not purely animal nor yet purely civil; and, thanks to the infallibility of the church and her calm expectancy of eternal duration, it will remain to the end of time an honored institution. If threatened, it will still live; if derided, it will nevertheless conquer. Christian marriage is the mould in which God has chosen to throw the lava of natural passion, and without whose wholesome restraints we should have a shapeless torrent of licentiousness, scathing mankind with its poisonous breath, carrying away all landmarks of ancestry, property, and personal safety, and finally exterminating the human race long before the appointed time for the dread judgment in the Valley of Josaphat.

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A Pearl Ashore

By The Author Of “The House Of Yorke.”

If one should wish to enjoy perfectly a fugue of Bach’s, this is perhaps as good a way as any: listen to it on a warm afternoon, in a Gothic Protestant church, in a quiet city street, with no one present but the organist and one’s self. If any other enter, let him be velvet‐footed, incurious, and sympathetic. It would be better if each listener could suppose himself to be the only listener there.

The wood‐work of the church is dark, glossy, and richly carved. Rose, purple, and gold‐colored panes strain the light that enters, full and glowing up in the roof, but dim below. On the walls, tinted with such colors as come to us from Eastern looms, and on the canvas of the old painters, are texts in letters of dull gold—those beautiful letters that break into bud and blossom at every turn, as though alive and rejoicing over the divine thought they bear. A sunbeam here and there, too slender to illumine widely, points its finger at a word, touches a dark cushion and brings out its shadowed crimson, or glimmers across the organ pipes, binding their silver with gold, as though Light would say to Song, “With this ring I thee wed!”

Those clustered, silvery pipes are surrounded by a border of dark, lace‐ like carving, and a screen of the same hides the keyboards. Through this screen shines the lamp on the music‐desk. Some one is stirring there. You lean back on the cushions, so that the body can take care of itself. Mentally, you are quiescent with a delightful sense of anticipation. If the situation should represent itself to you fancifully, you might say that your soul is somewhat dusty and weary, and has come down to this beach of silence for a refreshing bath. Knowing what you are to hear, watery images suggest themselves; for in the world of music it is the ocean that Bach gives us, as Beethoven gives us the winds, and Handel the stately‐flowing streams.

We have made a Protestant church our music‐hall, because, though not the dwelling‐place of God on earth, it is often the temple of religious art, and, having nothing within it to which we can prostrate ourselves in adoration, it can yet, by signs and images, excite noble and religious feeling. Indeed, we would gladly banish to such concert‐rooms all that music, however beautiful in itself, which intrudes on the exclusive recollection proper to the house of God.

This, we repeat, is as good a way as any to hear a fugue of John Sebastian Bach’s. So also thought Miss Rothsay; and she was one who ought to know, for she was a professional singer, and as sensitive musically as well could be.

It was an afternoon in early September, and she had only the day before reached her native city, after a prolonged residence abroad. Hers had been that happy lot which seems to be the privilege of the artist: her work, her duty, and her delight were the same. That which she must and ought to do she would have chosen above all things as her recreation. Now, with a perfected voice, and a will to use truly and nobly that gracious power, she had returned to her native land.

Her first contact with the New World had given her a slight jar. Utility seemed to mean here something rough and harsh, and the utility of beauty to be almost unrecognized. She had as yet met with only two kinds of people: those who regarded her talent as beautiful indeed and useful, in so far as it brought her money, but otherwise superfluous; and that yet more depressing class who were enthusiastic in hailing a new amusement, a new sensation, and who valued the singer as a necessity to elegant dissipation. As yet, she had met with no serious disciple of music.

Yet, when she stepped from her door to walk about, to renew her knowledge of familiar scenes, and make acquaintance with changed ones, she was pleased to perceive some of that tranquillity which, in her foreign life, had been so conducive to a steady growth in art. The fine streets she traversed were quiet, distant from the business world, and out of its track. The September air was golden, and the sun so warm as to make the shade welcome. Here and there, through openings between the houses, or at the ends of long avenues, were to be seen glimpses of country; and a thin haze, so exquisite that it might be the cast‐off mantle of Beauty herself, half veiled, while it embellished, the landscape. It was quite in keeping to see an open church door. One who loitered on the steps explained that there was to be an organ recital, but could not say who the organist was to be.

Miss Rothsay entered, scarcely seeing her way at first, seated herself, and looked about. The atmosphere of the place suited her taste. None but noble and sacred images presented themselves. Art was there in its sublimity, and in its naïve simplicity. Here was a form full of austere beauty, there one whose grace verged on playfulness. The scene had the effect of a sacred picture, in the corner of which one can see children playing or birds on the wing.

Miss Rothsay, without knowing it, made, herself, a lovely picture in the place. Her oval, pale face was lighted by liquid gray eyes, now lifted, and drinking in the upper light. On her fair hair was set a foreign‐ looking black hat, turned up over the left temple with an aigrette and feather. A slight and elegant figure could be perceived beneath the dark‐ blue mantle.

Wondering a little, while she waited, who the organist might be, she ran over in her mind those she had known before going abroad. From that, dismissing the present, her thoughts glanced over those she had known abroad, and at last rested on one she had not seen nor heard of for eight years. Eight years before, Laurie had gone to Germany to study, and he was probably there yet. She recollected his face, more youthful than his years, and full of a dreamy beauty; the figure, tall and graceful, yet wanting somewhat in manly firmness. She heard again, in fancy, that changeful voice, so low, eager, and rich‐toned when he was in earnest; she met again the glance of his sparkling blue eyes, full of frankness and enthusiasm. Where was he now?

Had he been a common acquaintance, she would have inquired concerning him freely; but he was a rejected lover, and she would not, by mentioning his name, remind people of that fact. Why had she rejected him? Simply because he had seemed to her not to reach her ideal. It had occurred to her since that time that possibly his manner and not his character had been at fault. At twenty years of age, she had been more mature than he at twenty‐ five. She liked an appearance of dignity and firmness, and had made the mistake often made by those older and wiser than herself, of thinking that dignity of soul must always be accompanied by a grave manner, and that an air occasionally or habitually demonstrative and variable, which is merely temperament, indicates a fickle or superficial mind. Sometimes, indeed, the strongest and most profound feelings, in reserved and sensitive persons, seek to veil themselves under an affectation of lightness or caprice, and the soul looks forth with a sad scorn through that flimsy mask on the hasty and egotistical judge who pronounces sentence against it.

“And you must love him, ere to you He will seem worthy of your love,”

is true of some of the finest natures.

Miss Rothsay, during these eight years of her separation from Laurie, had more than once felt a misgiving on his account, lest she had done him injustice. Observing and studying the manners of those she met, she saw that what passed for dignity was sometimes only the distrustfulness of the suspicious, the caution of the worldly‐wise, the unsympathizing coldness of the selfish, or the vanity of the conceited. She had lost not only her admiration, but her respect for that unchangeable loftiness which chills and awes the demonstrative into silence; and she had remembered, with a growing regret, Laurie’s cordial ways, that seemed to expect friendliness and sympathy from all, and to appreciate the purity of his soul, that never looked for evil, and turned away from it when it intruded itself, and thus seemed scarcely aware that evil existed. Still she had been too deeply engrossed in her studies to give him much thought, and it was only now that she became conscious of regret.

Meantime, the organist had taken his place, and was arranging his music. The light of the lamp shone on a face wherein were exquisitely blended strength and refinement. One could see there passion purified by prayer, and enthusiasm too deep for trivial excitement. The face showed, too, when studied, that tranquil reserve, not without sadness, which is learned by those who have too often cast their pearls before swine, yet who do not despair of finding sympathy.

He placed the music, sat an instant in fixed recollection, as though he prayed, then lifted his tapering hands, so nervous, light, and powerful, and let them fall on the keys. To the listener beyond the screen, it was as though her reverie had been broken by a burst of thunder. Then the sea rolled in its waves of sound, strong, steady, a long, overlapping rhythm. What did it mean, that fugue? Did it symbolize the swift‐coming assaults of evil that seek to drag the race of man downward, as the persistent sea eats away, grain by grain, the continents? Was it, perhaps, the ceaseless endeavor of the faithful will that, baffled once, returns ever to the charge, and dies triumphantly struggling? Did it indicate the generations of men flowing on in waves for ever, to break at the feet of God; or the hurrying centuries, cut short, at last, by eternity? However it might be interpreted, the music lifted and bore the listener on, and the silence that followed found her otherwhere than the last silence had left her. She was the same in nature, but her mood was higher; for music does not change the listener, it merely intensifies what is positive in his nature, whether it be good or bad, to its superlative degree.

Vibrating and breathless still with the emotion caused by that grand composition so grandly rendered, Miss Rothsay perceived a slip of paper on the cushion, and reached her hand for it. It proved to be a programme of the Recital. She glanced along the list, and read the name of the organist at the end—it was Duncan Laurie!

She heard, as in a dream, the soft‐toned Vorspiele that followed, and only came back to music when the third number, a toccata, began. But the music had now to her a new meaning. It seemed to triumph over and scorn her. She heard through that melodious thunder the voice of Nemesis.

But when the closing piece, a noble concerto by Handel, sang out, it reproved that fancy of hers. There was no spirit of revenge nor mean triumph in Laurie’s nature.

The audience, small and select, went out quietly. The organist closed the instrument, and prepared to follow, yet waited a moment to recover full consciousness of the everyday world he was going to meet. The air seemed to pulse about him still, and wings of flying melodies to brush his face. Never had he felt less inclined to meet idle compliment or talk commonplace. “I hope no one will wait for me,” he muttered, going out into the vestibule.

But some one was waiting, a pale‐faced, lovely woman, who looked at him, but spoke not a word. The look, too, was short; for when he exclaimed and reddened up to the eyes, and held out a trembling hand, her eyes dropped.

There is a commonplace which is but the veil to glory or delight, like Minerva in her russet gown. The conventional questions that Laurie properly asked of the lady, as they walked on together, were of this sort. When did she come home? was as one should say, When did Joy arrive? When do the stars come? And the steamer that brought her could be as worthy of poetical contemplation as the cloud that wrapped a descending Juno, or the eagle that bore away a Ganymede.

Not long after, when some one asked them who was their favorite composer, each answered “Bach!” and, when alone together, each asked the other the reason for that answer.

“Because,” said the lady, blushing, “it was on the waves of one of Bach’s fugues that I reached the Happy Islands.”

“And because,” returned the lover, “when some of Bach’s music had rolled back into the ocean, it left a pearl ashore for me.”

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The Benefits Of Italian Unity

From The Etudes Religieuses.

Revolution is a dangerous syren. The nations of the earth have yielded to her seductions, but the day is coming when with one voice they will curse the great enchantress who has lured them on to apostasy. For a century she has not ceased to announce an era of prosperity to the rising generation, but at length we see her promises are as deceptive as her principles are corrupt. From the heart of all nations rise up groans and maledictions against her teachings, and against her agents who have betrayed the hopes of their partisans, brought death instead of life, ruin instead of prosperity, and dishonor instead of glory. In a word, revolution is in a state of bankruptcy. This is not acknowledged by the politicians of the tiers‐parti and their followers. They still continue to proclaim the sovereignty of the “immortal principles,” declare revolution a success, celebrate its material and moral benefits, and boast that “real social justice was for the first time rendered in 1789”—after eighteen centuries of Christianity! But people are ceasing to be duped by any such political sophisms; they are beginning to regret profoundly the peace, order, and security, and all the benefits assured to the world by the supremacy of religion, and lost through social apostasy. The wisest of politicians are tired of revolutions. People who have lost their sacred heritage, and find themselves deprived of the highest blessings of life, are beginning to remember their baptismal engagements, and to feel the necessity of putting an end to revolution, and returning to the social order established of God. The prodigal son, famished with hunger, makes an energetic resolution: Surgam et ibo ad patrem! Hesitation is no longer possible. Weary of your modern theories, we will return to our Father’s house—to Christ and his church!

The man who comprehended most thoroughly the Satanic nature of the revolutionary spirit—Count Joseph de Maistre—had an intuitive assurance of the calamities that would avenge the disregard of the laws of order, and lead future generations back to the sacred principles of their ancestors. The foresight and warnings of this eminent writer are well known. Addressing the French, he says: “Undeceive yourselves, at length, as to the lamentable theories that have disgraced our age. You have already found out what the promulgators of these deplorable dogmas are, but the impression they have left is not yet effaced. In all your plans of creation and restoration you only leave out God, from whom they have alienated you.... How has God punished this execrable delirium? He has punished it as he created light—by a single word—Fiat!—and the political world has crumbled to atoms.... If any one wishes to know the probable result of the revolution, they need only examine the point whereon all its factions are united. They all desire the degradation, yea, the utter subversion, not only of the monarchy, but of Christianity; whence it follows that all their efforts must finally end in the triumph of Christianity as well as the monarchy.”(240) In these few words the great philosopher gives us a complete history of the era of revolution in the past as well as the future. He declares it a widespread overturning of order, necessarily followed by terrible misfortunes, till a counter‐stroke turns the nations back to the way appointed by God.(241)

While M. de Maistre was regarding the progress of events from the heights of his genius, he gave the most minute attention to the ravages of the revolutionary spirit in every department. In the Mélanges Inédits, for which we are indebted to Count Joseph’s grandson, and which appeared on the very eve of our great disasters (1870), we find more than a hundred pages devoted to reviewing the benefits of the French Revolution. They contain an inventory drawn up by the aid of the republican papers of the time, in which the moral and material results of revolutionary barbarism are attested by the avowal of the barbarians themselves. A certain historian of the Revolution would have done well to examine this catalogue before officially undertaking, in the presence of the National Assembly, the awkward apology so generally known. And what if he had continued to verify the benefits of the revolutionary syren, still beloved of certain politicians, till the end of the year 1872? How glorious would be the balance‐sheet of the “immortal principles” in the eighty‐fourth year of their reign! Every Frenchman knows what it has cost to be the eldest son of the Revolution!—As statistics are held in such high honor in our day, why not draw up the accounts of ’89, and establish clearly the active and passive of the revolutionary spirit now spreading throughout the world?

We lay before our readers some notes that may be of service in this vast liquidation, taken from two valuable works that have been kindly brought to our notice.(242) We do not feel at liberty to designate the eminent person who wrote these Notes, which, if we are rightly informed, were first published in the Messager Russe. All we feel permitted to state is that we can place full confidence in the probity of this traveller. He belongs to the diplomatic corps, but unfortunately is not of the Catholic religion. We will let him testify for himself. It will at once be seen by the frequent quotations we shall make that he is a man of superior mind, decision and honesty of character, and of an upright and incorruptible conscience.

“Eleven years ago, I witnessed the foundation of the kingdom of Italy. I have just seen the work completed—the edifice crowned—Rome made the capital.—My observations have been made in person, and are impartial, as I had no preconceived opinions. My numerous quotations are taken in a great measure from Italian sources, nay, even the most Italian. My position as an independent observer, unbiassed by any feeling of responsibility, enables me to judge events in a cooler manner than might be done by an opponent of the various publicists that have treated of the successive phases of the great Italian drama.”(243)

Here, then, is contemporaneous Italy studied by an observer of incontestable impartiality—studied on the spot, and from authentic sources. It is by no means uncommon to hear the correspondents of Catholic journals accused of exaggeration. Certain newspapers under party influence, like the Journal des Débats and the Indépendance Belge, are paid to divert public attention from facts that cannot be denied. We are sure the Italo‐Parisian and the Italo‐Belgian press will not say a single word about the Etudes sur l’Italie contemporaine.(244)

I.

How shall we characterize the Italian crisis as a whole? Is it merely one of those accidental revolutions which history is full of, or is it a genuine revolution with its systematic hatred of Christian society? Our readers must not be astonished at such a question. I know some Catholics—a little too liberal, it is true—who have not thereon, even in these times, perfectly correct notions. We remember certain unfortunate expressions respecting the governments of the ancien régime which committed the unpardonable fault of injuring Italian liberty, and even respecting that venerable Christian administration that has been dragged through blood and fire. Did not the honorable M. Dulaurier recently confess in an ingenuous manner the illusions he was under before he set foot on Italian soil, and how he believed in the possibility of a reconciliation between the Pope and the excommunicated king? He says he heard on all sides a sentiment to which he gave credence without much reflection: “Why interpose between the two parties contending for Rome? Pius IX. and Victor Emmanuel are both Italians: they will end by settling the difficulty, and we shall trouble ourselves for nothing.” The reality, the sad reality, forces us to a different opinion.

It was a beautiful illusion—once greatly dwelt upon in official papers—to think Piedmont sincerely and uniquely preoccupied about the freedom of Italy; to believe in the Subalpine posture of disinterested chivalry, and in Napoleon III. going to war in a great cause merely for the glory of being a liberator. Doubtless there was, for some time, a liberal party in Italy dreaming at once of a confederacy and of national independence. But Mazzinism and its ideas of unity prevailed, and it was manifest to those whose eyes were not blinded that the Piedmontese government superseded Giovane Italia by taking advantage of the naïveté of honest liberals.(245) All sincere and upright minds must free themselves from so illusive a deception. The mask has fallen off, so must the scales from their eyes. The Italian movement is essentially revolutionary—or Satanic. It is not one of those transformations so frequent in the political life of a nation: it is a work of subversion, a war on the church, a religious persecution, and “pure impurity,” to use Joseph de Maistre’s words.

It has been demonstrated quite recently in this magazine that the whole tendency of the Italian Peninsula, and its providential destiny, are opposed to unity; that the Revolution has done violence to nature and religion, to the institutions and traditions of the past, and to the faith and morals of the people weighed down by the yoke of unity; and that it has lied to history, to the world, and to God. Les Etudes sur l’Italie contemporaine takes a similar view of the case:

“The unity of Italy was not a national necessity; ... the movement was not spontaneous, but forced.... The Piedmontese government has shown some shrewdness (unscrupulous shrewdness) in borrowing its programme from Mazzini. The campaign of 1859 led the way to this political intrigue. As to the nation, it imagined the promised regeneration would produce a new era of happiness when the foreigner was once got rid of. The masses have given in to the ambition of the minority.

“In the transformation of Italy, we see action precede reflection; we see what Frederick the Great said of Joseph II.—the second step taken before the first.... It must be remembered that the geography of Italy was one of the causes of its division, the length being so disproportionate to its width, which prevented a common centre, and led to separate developments and outlets.... Even if railways are now a means of greatly shortening distances, the union of the remote parts ought to be the result of a natural and progressive tendency—not revolutionary.

“The first idea of Rome as the capital sprang from the classics. It was a rhetorical expression (according to Senator Stefano Jacini).... If official Italy had need of Rome, Rome by no means had need of Italy.... And what do they wish to do with Rome? The unionists in favor of a monarchy wish to transform it into a modern capital that it may become the centre of the general action and influence which united Italy is ambitious of exercising in the world. The Mazzinians, the socialist republicans, and the free‐ thinkers wish to make it the centre of the doctrines they are desirous of substituting for Christianity. These new apostles are not agreed among themselves, but they are all fighting in the breach against the Catholic organization, and their real object is the destruction of Christian principles.”(246)

To effect the unification of Italy, it was therefore necessary to conspire against the natural inclinations of the inhabitants, against the rights of local principalities, and against the real interests of the nation, to conspire not only against the temporal, but the spiritual power of the papacy. Where they do not find the normal conditions of assimilation, they do not hesitate to resort to deeds worthy of brigands. Conspirators, alas! have never been wanting in the country of Machiavelli. In the present age they superabound. “It has been the misfortune of Italy—its robe of Nessus—that for twelve years all who have succeeded to power, even the best, have been conspirators.”(247) Yes; and foremost among them is the great and good Cavour, whom a French diplomatist—an honest man, however—has lately depicted, with an enthusiasm that has hardly died away, as struggling to promote the greatness of his country.(248) We do not dispute Cavour’s ability, or his perseverance in striving after a certain end, or his subtleness and patience in the execution of his designs, or his skill in availing himself of the very passions he pretended to yield to. He succeeded—is it not a glorious title to fame?—in keeping Napoleon III. in leading‐strings till a Prussian Cavour is found to continue the rôle and lead the emperor on to Sedan. But herein Cavour showed himself crafty, deceitful, and—why should we not say it?—criminal. Has not M. Guizot called a certain writer a “malfaiteur de la pensée?” Besides, Cavour spoke of himself to his friends somewhat as we do. Our French diplomatist, M. Henry d’Ideville, in a curious page of his Notes Intimes, lets us into the secrets of the game and those who took part in it.

“You see, my dear d’Ideville (it is Cavour who is speaking), your emperor will never change. His fault is a disposition to be for ever plotting.... With a country as powerful as yours, a large army, and Europe at peace, what is he afraid of? Why is he for ever disguising his intentions, going to the right when he means to turn to the left, and vice versa? Ah! what a wonderful conspirator he makes!”

M. d’Ideville is a man of wit. With all possible courtesy, he replied:

“But, M. le Comte, have you not been a daring conspirator also?”

“I? Certainly,” replied M. de Cavour. “I have conspired, and how could I do otherwise at such a time?... We had to keep Austria in the dark, whereas, your emperor, you may be sure, will remain for ever incorrigible. I have known him a long time! To plot, for ever plot, is the characteristic of his nature. It is the occupation he prefers, and he pursues it like an artist—like a dilettante. In this rôle he will always be the foremost and most capable of us all.”(249)

US ALL! Yes, there it is ably expressed in a word: all conspirators and accomplices, not to speak of the dupes. On the 24th of March, 1860, M. de Cavour, after signing the treaty that ceded Nice and Savoy to France, approached M. de Talleyrand, and, rubbing his hands, whispered in his ear: “We are accomplices now, baron, are we not?”(250) Alas! wrongfully acquired, and never any benefit, we now see why we have lost Alsace and Lorraine!

The entire route from Turin to Rome is marked by the deeds of these conspirators, by their tricks and intrigues, and by their crimes and double‐dealings, which have resulted in the profit of Piedmont and Prussia, and the disgrace of our poor France. M. d’Ideville’s conscience evidently reproached him at last for having liked Cavour so well, and for imprudently interesting himself in the Italian scheme. The other diplomatist, who has anonymously given his Etudes sur l’Italie to the public, seems never to have had the least sympathy with the iniquitous and sacrilegious ambition of the Sardinian government. It is true he does not belong to the French diplomacy infatuated with the ideas of ’89!(251) He finds nothing seductive in the policy of the conspirators. The fiction disguised under the attractive title of national rights, the age of annexations, the trick of the plebiscites, the system of moral agency, the so‐called exigencies of civilization and progress, and the revolutionary messianism which constitutes the foundation of the Napoleonic ideas, have no attraction for him. His style is tolerably forcible when he speaks of all these stratagems: “Such tactics are nothing new. They have always been resorted to in order to palliate schemes of ambition and hypocrisy.”(252)

II.

A government given to conspiracy condemns the nation that supports it, as well as itself, to degradation—to moral and material ruin. If for a while it flatters itself with the hope of systematizing the revolution and directing its energies, it soon becomes its slave and finally its victim. When the hand is caught in machinery, the whole body is soon drawn after it, the head as well as the rest.

Our diplomatic traveller states some aphorisms in connection with this subject that are full of significance, and reveal the genuine statesman.

“A government that owes its existence to a revolution is not viable in the long run unless it has the power and wisdom to sunder all the ties that connect it with the party to which it owes its origin.

“Every government that has a similar origin to the Napoleonic Empire, and, still more, one which owes its existence thereto, will find itself in danger when traditionary principles once more assert themselves for the safety of society.

“Governments of a revolutionary origin have been known to become conservative and renounce their former principles of action. The Italian government may likewise wish to do this, but it cannot.

“All who have risen to power in Italy have had some connection with the revolutionary party, and are obliged to favor it. In particular instances, they have sometimes manifested a certain firmness towards its factions, but in essentials they have yielded to the inevitable pressure.

“Revolution leads to disorder, and, when it triumphs, the destiny of the country is thrown into the hands of its adherents. Political bias must take the place of capacity and often of honor itself.”(253)

One of the first material disasters produced by a triumphant conspiracy is the squandering of the finances. There is an immediate necessity of enriching itself, repairing all deficiencies, paying traitors, buying consciences and votes, keeping a secret reserve of ready money to reward the zeal of journalists, and stimulate or lull the passions according to the exigencies of the moment. The wretched state of the budgets in United Italy will become as proverbial as the marchés of the 4th of September in France. With all the domains Piedmont has received from the annexed states, it ought to be rich—rich enough to pay the debt its accomplice, the Empire, has bequeathed to us. The finances of the different states, especially of Rome, were in perfect order, and, with the exception of the kingdom of Sardinia, the receipts surpassed the expenses. Now the credit of Italy is destroyed, and nothing is heard of but duties and taxes, such as were unknown throughout the Peninsula in 1859, more particularly at Rome. Figures are eloquent—we must refer to them:

“Previous to 1860, there were seven states in Italy, each with its court, ministers, administration, and diplomatic corps. All these governments expended about five hundred millions of francs a year, and the imposts amounted to nearly the same sum. These seven states had a debt of about two milliards and a half. At the present time, without reckoning the interest on the floating debt to the National Bank, Italy annually pays about three hundred millions of interest, corresponding to a debt of seven milliards, and all this notwithstanding the sale of domanial property amounting to six hundred and fifty millions, notwithstanding the alienation of the railways of the state and the manufacture of tobacco, and notwithstanding the seizure of ecclesiastical property, all of which have amounted in nine years to nine milliards three hundred and sixteen millions of francs received at the state treasury. Nevertheless, the public debt amounts to the aforesaid sum of seven milliards. And yet the army is badly maintained, the navy poorly organized, and the administration in a state of chaos and unparalleled demoralization.”(254)

And here is M. Quintino Sella, who has just made known the projected budget for 1873; he acknowledges a deficit of sixty millions, as had been anticipated, while the ordinary receipts amount to eight hundred and five millions. If the kingdom of Italy were administered as economically as in the time of the seven sovereigns, a budget of eight hundred and five millions would leave a surplus of three hundred millions. And yet one of the pretexts of unification was that it would save the expense of so many courts, which bore hard on the people! Poor people! they know now what to think of cheap governments, and will soon see that the ministration of the imposts is leading to bankruptcy, in spite of the fresh confiscations and appropriation of conventual property about to be made at Rome.(255)

And it must be remembered that, in spite of these great budgets, the army is badly maintained and the navy poorly organized. Custozza and Lissa had previously convinced us of this. Austria was well aware of it, and even the France of M. Thiers suspects that, in spite of the valor of the old Piedmontese soldiery, and the discipline of the Neapolitan army; in spite of the aptitude of the Genoese and Venetian sailors, the military forces of Italy are a mere illusion, particularly on account of the inefficiency of the leaders of the army and navy. Since the time of M. de Cavour, whose ability is by no means beyond doubt, there have been only second‐rate men beyond the Alps—not a statesman, not an orator, not a minister, not a financier, not a genuine soldier—everywhere and in everything there is the same disgraceful deficiency. Facundum sed male forte genus.

“I knew well the men of 1848, some of whom are still remaining, but they must have degenerated through ambition and the necessity of sustaining their position, for even in the revolutionary ranks there was more elevation in 1848 than at the present time.

“Previous to 1860, the armies of the different states, including, of course, the Piedmontese army, constituted a more powerful and better organized force than is now under arms. ‘Our army,’ says General La Marmora, ‘has the traditional reputation of being disciplined, but it is demoralized by a want of stability in its organization, and a lack of moral influences.’ La Marmora opposes among other things the exclusion of chaplains and of the religious element among the troops.

“The Sardinian and Neapolitan navies greatly surpassed the Italian. The men were better drilled, and the shipping in better order. Such is the opinion recently expressed by the English naval officers in port at Naples who were at the exposition of the present year.”(256)

And yet the military forces are the only remaining bulwark of order in Italy—I mean material order, for moral order no longer exists anywhere. The so‐called conservative party, that is to say, the moderate revolutionists, rely on the army. But the ultra revolutionary element is also to be found there, and some day the advanced party will, for its own designs, entice away the officers that followed the hero of Caprera in his campaigns. It will not be sufficient to name Cialdini, Cadorna, or even La Marmora, to counteract the fatal consequences of Castelfidardo and the Porta Pia. By excluding religious influences from the army, and giving it a false idea of patriotism, the source of courage and energy is dried up. After all, revolution will never be friendly to the army, and the genuine soldier will always execrate revolution, whether instigated by princes, citizens, or the mob. A soldier who entered Rome through the breach, lately wrote to the Libertà: “The day the King of Italy is satisfied with mere volunteers, as the Pope was, we shall see whether it is the Pope or the king that is loved and esteemed the most by the Italian people.”

In opposing the system of territorial divisions on account of the army, which he considers unsuited to the Peninsula, General La Marmora’s opinion is founded on a proof that has the misfortune to prove too much. “If there were small territorial armies,” says he, “in addition to separate administrations in the various regions of Italy, the unity for which we have done so much, and Providence still more than we, would incur great danger.”(257) Why not boldly declare, general, that there are two Italys—the Reale and the Legale, one of which has a tendency to revolt against the other? And, above all, why utter a blasphemy against the sovereign providence of God?(258) Italia legale labors in vain; the revolutionary impulse given to it by Cavour is an accelerated movement; it will never reascend the declivity that leads al fondo. It will always have against it not only the betrayed interests and the revolted conscience of Italia reale, but, above all, Divine Providence, who will one day show that the favors and proofs of protection accorded to the “regenerators” were merely for them, as for Napoleon III., the snares of avenging justice. In insidiis suis capientur iniqui.

“As to greatness and political importance, admitting even the possibility of indefatigable and intelligent effort, Italy will never equal the glorious traditions of its past history. Italian glory is the glory of the different states of the Peninsula.... To acquire fresh glory, there must be, besides unity, a strength of organization it does not possess, and cannot, because it is a mirage and not a reality.

“The North invades the South: this cannot be called community of interests. It is an attempt at absorption on the part of the North, and at the expense of the South.

“Once at Rome, the programme was to have ended. A new life was to commence; fresh energy was to be the signal of an era of grandeur and prosperity; interiorly, there was to be a more perfect administration; exteriorly, a prudent national policy, that is to say, the Napoleonic idea of the Latin races that Italy was to revive. Rome was to be the great centre of liberal influences.... All this had been announced and promised. As for me, I see no choice between a blind alley and a politique d’aventure.

“It seems to me the union, at a critical moment, should find protection in the wishes of the inhabitants. I can testify that if the former sovereigns of Naples, Florence, Parma, and Modena could return, the day would be hailed by a majority of the inhabitants as one of deliverance. In Lombardy it is different, I acknowledge. The noblesse say, as I myself heard a personage of great note: We are badly governed, but at least it is no longer by foreigners. The middle classes are republicans, and in the country the Austrian rule is regretted. The people of Venice either aspire to a republic or regret the unfortunate Archduke Maximilian, whom they would have liked as an independent sovereign. In the old pontifical provinces called the Legations, they would not care to return to the former condition of things as they were, but some would be satisfied with the Pope and a local autonomy; the remainder form a sufficiently numerous republican party.”

“In a word, THERE IS EVERYWHERE DISSATISFACTION AS WELL AS DISAPPOINTMENT, AFTER TWELVE YEARS OF EXPERIENCE.”(259)

It is not astonishing, therefore, that at an audience on the 18th of last Nov., the Grand Duke Nicholas, nephew of the Emperor of Russia, said to Pius IX., with all a young man’s frankness: “Most holy Father, since I have been in Italy, everywhere I go, I hear nothing but evil of King Victor Emmanuel and his government.”(260)

We need only open our eyes to see the interior condition of united Italy as soon as there was any question, no longer of conspiring and declaiming, but of organizing and governing. And its exterior political relations compare quite as unfavorably with the programme of emancipation. By a kind of divine irony, Italy has become a mere humble vassal of Germany—of the Holy Protestant Empire of Berlin—and the future King of Rome was only acting his part when he proclaimed himself the King of Prussia’s hussar.(261) It is well known at the Quirinal that, though influenced for the moment by the dominant party, the authorities may some day return, even through interest, to traditional principles and the old political code which does not recognize the revolutionary schemes of nations or parties. Besides, the Italian princes, who represent the law, are still living. Francis II. may be found to be a genuine Neapolitan, Ferdinand IV. a very good Tuscan, Robert I. an excellent Parmesan, and Francis V. the best of Modenais. And, lastly, is not Pius IX. more of an Italian than the Savoyard who styles himself the King of Italy?... And if the French, whose connivance can no longer be expected, even under M. Thiers, should favor the restoration of the throne to a prince, “qui a la justice dans le sang et dans l’âme,” and would at need have it in his hand, the Italian framework, which merely stands through toleration, would be threatened with sudden and ignominious ruin. It is all this that recently induced the prince‐héritier to mount like a Hungarian foot‐soldier behind the triumphal chariot of the German Cæsar.

Another evil: the Prussians are not the most scrupulous people in the world about other people’s property, and their investigations in the Peninsula have excited suspicions as to the object of their cupidity. Let M. de Bismarck, more audacious and grasping than the late M. de Cavour, once succeed in driving the Hapsburgs from Germany, will it not occur to him to take advantage of the title of the Lombardo‐Venetian kingdom for the benefit of the Cæsar of Berlin? For it is skilfully demonstrated in Germany that the Germanic race has the power, and, therefore, the right, to a powerful navy, and, for the benefit of this navy, an outlet on the Adriatic. And there is no other possible ally but Prussia to protect what calls itself the kingdom of Italy!

“Alliances are beneficial when the parties unite their influence for a common end. (Allies, in our day, no longer seek to know each other’s principles or origin.) But when they are not formed inter pares, or nearly so, and especially when they are intended to guarantee the very existence—the vital principle—of the weaker ally, then the alliance loses its true character, and soon ends in subjection on the ground of politics or economy, and sometimes both.”(262)

Such are the glories of Italy free from the Alps to the Adriatic! If, in spite of her presumptuous farà da se, she was obliged to have recourse to a foreign hand in order to rise, and still needs a foreign arm to stand erect, she will, according to appearances, have need of no one to aid her in falling: she will topple over of herself. The so‐called free country is only an enslaved kingdom—a vassal, a satellite without strength and without prestige.

III.

Of all the Italian formulas that have served to mislead the liberal mind, there is not one more odiously false and deceptive than the too famous expression, A free church in a free country. History has already interpreted it, A persecuted church in an enslaved country. The revolutionary factions that have assumed the authority have imposed thereon the complete execution of their plan, and we know that the Masonic lodges, though they denounce Mazzinian deism, have fallen into the atheism of Renan, al fondo!

The sacrilegious frenzy of the Revolution, and the madness of those that encouraged it, have been stigmatized in forcible terms by the august prisoner of the Vatican:

“Unbelief assumes an air of authority, and proudly stalks throughout the length and breadth of the earth, doubtless imagining it is to triumph for ever.... Woe to those who are linked with the impious, and dally with the Revolution under the pretence of directing it! Sooner or later they will be drawn into the abyss. The recent disasters at Naples may be adduced as an example. A great number of curious people, heedless and devoid of all prudence, hastened to get a nearer view of the devouring flames issuing from the fearful mouth of Vesuvius, and many of them became victims of mistaken curiosity. So it is with those who covenant with the Revolution and the revolutionists, hoping to overrule the former and keep down the latter. Rash people! they will all become a prey to the flames that surround them on every side.”(263)

The revolutionary lava floods the streets of Rome and covers the whole Peninsula. It began in the cities, spread into the country, and will end by swallowing up the army. The universities and common schools are invaded, the torrent engulfs the workshops and stalls, and undermines the walls of palaces. Princes even have opened their gates at its approach. In vain the Holy Father sounds the cry of alarm; in vain his prime minister publicly denounces the progress of the deadly current—party spirit seems to have paralyzed all in authority.

We will not describe the exploits of this new Islamism against the papal power. The history of its ambuscades and pillages is sufficiently well known. There never was a richer treasure of dishonor for revolution to endow a people with. “The title of liberators was all the same retained.” Yes, all the same!

Joseph de Maistre somewhere refers to an English functionary as saying that every man who spoke of taking an inch of land from the Pope ought to be hung. “As for me,” adds the witty writer, “I cheerfully consent, in order to avoid carnage, that hung should be changed to hissed.”(264)

Let us wait. An avenging God will do both: subsannabit, conquassabit. Had the plots of the unionists merely aimed at the temporal power, perhaps divine justice would have been satisfied with a hiss at the hour of some Italian Sedan, but the gibbet—it is a law of history—is reserved for persecutors and apostates.

When the Sardinian government knocked at one of the gates of Rome, as it awaited a propitious moment for battering it down, it bound itself before all Europe to solve the problem of the separation of church and state which had puzzled all the doctors of liberalism, and of which it pretended to have found the key. It was said the Roman question and the Italian question were to cease to be antagonistic, or, at least, they were to resemble those rivers that, while mingling their waters, preserve their own colors, as we see in the Rhône and the Saône. It was promised a channel should be made wide enough for this double current of opinions. Hence the origin of the famous law of the Guarantees. This scheme of conciliation is properly appreciated in the Etudes sur l’Italie Contemporaine:

“How many times I have heard it said that the Papacy and the Italian government, even though they never came to an agreement, might at least be like two parallel lines indefinitely and pacifically prolonged! This is a mistake arising from a judgment founded on impressions—and when I say impressions, I mean appearances.

“From the beginning, this law of Guarantees was a one‐sided and fruitless attempt.... The government and the Chambers never had any doubt as to the refusal of the Pope. This law was like an olive branch presented at the point of the sword as a suitable corrective to palliate the violent occupation of Rome.... I do not think a single statesman could really have believed in the success of this law, otherwise than as the decree of the conqueror.

“Besides the moral, juridical, and historic reasons to hinder an understanding between the Pope and a sovereign master of Rome, there was also the impossibility of coexisting with a power that rests on an unstable foundation.

“Even from the point of view of modern but not subversive ideas, A SEPARATION MORE IMPORTANT THAN THAT OF STATE AND CHURCH IS THE SEPARATION OF STATE AND REVOLUTION.”(265)

These are golden words. But our diplomatic traveller is forced to acknowledge that the Italian government cannot break its iniquitous bonds, that it lacks honesty and force, and that all the factions seek their own good first and then the evil of others. Our author, though, unfortunately, too indifferent a spectator to Italian persecution, at least has the advantage of being an unexceptionable witness.

“Practically, it is not the state, it is society, that modern Italy separates from the church.... One of the greatest mistakes the unionists have made since the beginning of the Revolution has been the war declared against the clergy and the church. It is at once a political and historical error, and the greater for being committed at Rome.

“Tolerance (practised from time to time according to orders) has its reaction, and of the deepest die, in a recrudescence of insults, sequestrations and confiscations imposed on the ministers of the sanctuary and even the sanctuaries themselves.

“Anti‐Christianity has established itself with a bold front at Rome—with its schools of free‐thinkers, speeches in which atheism is proclaimed without the least reticence, burial without any religious ceremony, and irreligious books sold at low prices.

“In everything relating to teaching, the choice generally falls on the unbeliever.

“Materialism is taught ex cathedra in all the universities.

“They have not yet touched on the most vital question—the suppression of the convents (at Rome) and the incameration of the property of the clergy. But they will come to that, and speedily.... The attempt at what is called a conciliation must sooner or later end in an outbreak.”(266)

They did come to it—to that shameful encroachment of the government on the religious corporations. The party demanded it, M. de Bismarck advised it, and the diplomatic corps tolerated it. What will not diplomacy tolerate? It was, however, clearly demonstrated to the representatives of different governments the urgent necessity there was of taking under their united protection the independence of the Sovereign Pontiff so poorly guaranteed by the usurper, of declaring the inviolability of church property, the possession of which—and it is a wholly legitimate one—is a sine qua non condition of pontifical independence, without considering that most of these establishments have a double claim as to their origin and destination, to be regarded as international property.(267) Nothing was done. The tolerance of official Europe towards the Piedmontese filibustering has been unlimited, though unrestricted usurpation has been followed by open persecution. Pius IX. had good reason to severely allude to “the so‐called governments” that find amusement in the Revolution. Europe seems to have sent its diplomatists to the court of the usurper in the capital of the Christian world, that they might close their eyes to all the schemes of Freemasonry, and the numberless vexations and spoliations, that they might play the rôle of stage‐dancers in the sacrilegious comedy! Such base complacency justifies the expression of a Catholic writer: “Europe is in a state of mortal sin!”

I am almost ashamed to be obliged to refer to the authority of a diplomatist who belongs neither to our nation nor our religion. I wish I could quote some official report of a minister from France! Might not M. Fournier have employed his time better than in figuring at banquets offered to a renegade, and in listening to heretical and atrocious speeches from the professors of the Romano‐Piedmontese university? I will console myself in transcribing a page from M. Dulaurier, the honorable member of the Institute, likewise an ocular witness, and a witness worthy of credit, even from a subscriber to the Débats:

“These grievances and many others are aggravated by the excesses to which the press—the illustrated press, above all—has given itself up, and by the incessant war it wages against religion. Ignoble caricatures are daily exposed for sale in the sight of the police, and to their knowledge, in all the Kiosques and newspaper shops, and on the walls, or are hawked around by miserable creatures in rags. The Don Pirloncino, a humorous paper, obsequious to the government, diffuses three times a week its abominations on the most august mysteries of the Christian faith and the ministers who dispense them. The cross itself—the cross before which Christians of all communions bow with respect—not only Catholics, but schismatics, Greeks, and Orientals, and even Protestants—is not safe from its insults. My heart swells with horror when I recall one of these pictures—a caricature of the Crucifixion. In the place of the God‐Man is Dr. Lanza, Minister of the Interior. The words put in his mouth, and on the lips of his murderers, are untranslatable. Under his feet, at the lower extremity of the tree of the cross, is fastened transversely an instrument that I dare not designate otherwise than by saying it is made a burlesque use of at the end of the first act of M. de Pourceaugnac. Our French revolutionists, in their senseless fury, have broken the cross in pieces, but it never occurred to them to defile it in such a manner. So revolting an idea could only spring from imaginations the country of Aretino alone is capable of producing.

“In the presence of these abominations echoed by the political press devoted to the advancement of free‐thinking, the Sovereign Pontiff, the clergy, and the Roman people who are fundamentally religious, can only veil their faces, resign themselves, and have recourse to prayer. And prayer rises unceasingly to heaven in expiation of so many horrors. It is the only consolation left to all these afflicted souls. There is a constant succession of triduos, announced by blank notices, headed Invito sacro, and signed by Mgr. Patrizi, the Cardinal Vicar. One of these notices, which I saw affixed to the columns at the entrance to his eminence’s palace near the Church of Sant’ Agostino, gives an idea, in the very first line, of the indignation that is fermenting in every Catholic breast: ‘The earth is full of the most horrible blasphemies. La terra è piena della più orrende bestemmie.’ ”

IV.

We will not deny one benefit—and this time a real one!—that has sprung from the Italian Revolution: it has served to revive the fidelity and fervor of all true Italians. It can be rightly said of it, as M. Guizot says of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, It has awakened, even among its adversaries [we must correct this Protestant writer’s mistake—he should have said among its adversaries alone], religious faith and civil courage. Some natures that were formerly nonchalantes, timid, and delicate, are no longer satisfied with groaning over the evil, but take a bold stand against the inroads of impiety. Italy, somewhat inclined to the far niente, might of itself have yielded; sustained by the hand of a great Pope, she is roused to withstand the unloosed tempest. She no longer falters before the responsibility of a religious manifestation or an anti‐ revolutionary vote. No longer afraid of the threats of the poniard, or of conciliating, through culpable prudence, her temporary masters, she at last ventures to show herself openly, as she really is—the cherished and faithful daughter of the Church of Rome. Roused by provocations and blasphemies, her filial piety towards the Papacy has become more lively and aggressive. She protests solemnly against the schemes of the adventurers who have trampled under foot their faith, honesty, morality, and honor. At the sight of these sublime outbursts of a spirit at once Catholic and Roman, the church is consoled, and observant Christendom begins to hope the reaction will be the more salutary from the extreme violence of the crisis.

One of our co‐laborers has expressed all this much better than we can:

“If there is a country we have reason to conceive such consoling hopes of, assuredly it is Italy, in spite of all the scandals and all the infamy that now degrade it. All who have had a favorable opportunity of observing the moral condition of the country agree in declaring the greater part of the inhabitants faithful to their belief. It is merely the froth and pestilential impurities that are seething on the surface. Some day it will doubtless be with this impure froth as with the stagnant waters for which Pius IX. some years ago made an opening to the sea, giving fresh fecundity to the old Italian soil. Purified by trials, as by a new baptism, this nation, in many respects so highly gifted, will once more have acquired a beneficial discipline of mind and character, the advantages of a robust and manly training, the practice of energetic individual action, and especially of great combined efforts which she is beginning to give us the consoling spectacle of in the recently formed Catholic associations.”(268)

In France we think lightly, or rather we have an incorrect idea, of what our brethren in Italy are effecting. The very people among us who only talk of harmony and compromise reproach the Catholics of the Peninsula for being inactive and inefficient. They even make them partly responsible for the national misfortunes and the decay of moral principle beyond the Alps. We protest against such superficial judgments. We know Italy too well not to have a right to speak in favor of those who are so unjustly accused. Catholics in Italy decline public offices, ne eletti, ne elettori; and they do well, because the Sardinian government imposes an oath after the style of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth. Tell us if it is proper for a Catholic to take a seat in a parliament established at Rome between the Vatican where the Pope is imprisoned, and the Quirinal where the Piedmontese has established himself by the aid of a false key. Does the military career offer much attraction when he might be ordered to assassinate the pontifical zouaves, open a breach in the walls of Rome, bombard Ancona or even the quarter of the Vatican? He might without any great difficulty present himself at the municipal and provincial ballot‐boxes. The faithful Neapolitans, at the invitation of their archbishop, formed a majority there, and this is not an isolated case. But do you, who are the safety of France, set the example of hastening to the polls?—No; good Christians in Italy are far from being inert, nor do the clergy inculcate inertness. Abstaining is quite a different thing from inaction. Is the public aware that the Catholic press is one of the glories of the Peninsula? There are a hundred journals and reviews on the other side of the Alps consecrated to the service of the truth, and some of these publications are of unequalled merit. It is sufficient to name the Civiltà Cattolica, the Unità Cattolica, and the Voce della Verità. We confess our admiration for the courageous journalists who keep their own course in spite of arrests, law‐suits, fines, imprisonment, and threats of coltellate. And the tone of these papers, with some insignificant exceptions, is healthier than with us, the union of sentiment stronger, and their adhesion to the apostolic constitutions more sincere and open. Associations have spread from one end of the Peninsula to the other, and everywhere produce the most beneficial results. I need only mention the Society of Catholic Youth at Bologna, celebrated on account of the generous filial stand it has taken from the first in favor of Pius IX., and the Roman Society for the promotion of Catholic interests, which, by its branches and parish committees, exercises so prodigious an influence over the city of Rome as to excite the anxiety of those in authority.

But let us once more listen to our unexceptionable witness, whom I think every one will feel indebted to us for quoting so much at length: testimonium animæ naturaliter Christianæ.

“The religious reaction is more and more decided, even in the middle and lower classes, owing to the zealous associations that have assumed the direction. This movement is worthy of study.... At Rome, and throughout Italy, this reaction has given rise to societies composed for the most part of men still young, whose object is to oppose all pernicious doctrines. These societies are to be found at Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan, Naples, Turin, Verona, Genoa, Lucca, Padua, Pisa, and Bologna.

“In January, 1871, the following statement was made in the Riforma, the organ of Rattazzi: ‘The clerical party is being more and more reinforced at Rome; the clerical press every day acquires more strength, its organs increase in number and boldness.’... The clerical press is really well sustained, and, in spite of the persecutions and ill‐treatment of all kinds the editors of these journals have to undergo, they do not cease their energetic efforts.

“The administering of the oath has caused wholesale resignations in all the dicastères (at Rome). Many of these functionaries are left without any means of subsistence.... As early as the year 1871, there were more than four thousand resignations.

“Thousands of Romans go to the Vatican to give their plebiscites, and to the basilica of St. Peter to offer solemn prayers for hastening THE DAY OF DELIVERANCE.”(269)

The day of deliverance will arrive, and, in spite of the sneers about our wailing over disappointed hopes, it will come soon! But how will this deliverance be effected? United Italy has against it the upper and nether fires—the Catholic reaction that will never stoop to parley, and the exertions of the demagogues, which are continually increasing. At present the nether fires seem like the prelude of the Internationale.

The intermediate party, which would like to consolidate le fait accompli, and which recruits adepts from the very opposers of the mezzi morali, is not sufficiently free from all alloy of party spirit to constitute a government capable of resistance and of exacting respect from the league of destruction.

Unhappy but beloved Italy! Great and holy city of Rome! shall we have the sorrow of seeing the enemy flamber your palaces, your museums, your churches?

Not long since we were asked at Florence to read the prophecy of Joel, so applicable to the future of Italy: “Hear this, ... tell ye of this to your children, and let your children tell their children, and their children to another generation. That which the palmer worm hath left, the locust hath eaten; and that which the locust hath left, the bruchus hath eaten; and that which the bruchus hath left, the mildew hath destroyed. Awake, ye that are drunk, and weep, and mourn, all ye that take delight in drinking sweet wine; for it is cut off from your mouth.”—Joel. i. 2‐5.

It is true too large a part of the Italian nation have grown giddy from the intoxicating draught of liberalism, and it is to be feared they may be condemned to drink the bitter cup of expiation to the dregs. The international “locusts” will devour that which the Sub‐Alpine “palmerworm” hath left. To‐day, the taxes of Sella; to‐morrow, the communism of Castellani: yesterday, a political revolution; to‐morrow, a radical revolution: yesterday and to‐day, the hypocrisy of the tribune; to‐morrow, the bloody scenes of the national Comitia. After the physicians and lawyers, after the members of the Consorteria and the friends of Rattazzi, the lowest grade of society—the “bruchus” and the “mildew”—like a barbarous horde, will overturn, and destroy, and deluge with petroleum.

Italy, more than France or Spain, has abused the divine gift. She has “the light of Rome and the sun,” but has been ungrateful, proud, impious, shameless, and reckless. The whole land is now a mere haunt for banditti, traitors, and buffoons.

Alas! it is so: but Pius IX. still prays for his beloved Italy! Following the example of its lawful ruler, the nation—at least, the better portion of the nation—have multiplied their holy prayers, which daily grow more frequent from the delay of the benefit and the example of France. It has a clearer sense of equity and justice; it already feels disposed to renew its former covenant with God, return to the path of order, and take up its national traditions of glory. It is awakening from its dreams of moral and social primacy. It will be satisfied with, and glory in, being the patrie environnante of the Vicar of Christ. Would that France, once more regenerated, might speedily aid her in breaking loose from the tyranny of lodges, and shaking off the Prussian suzerainty!

In 1860, the unhappy King of Sardinia said to M. de la Tour d’Auvergne, the French minister at Turin: “I do not wish you to leave me under false impressions. I feel sure you regard me as impious—as an infidel, as people persist in saying. You are wrong.—If I number kings among my ancestry, there are likewise saints. Here, look around.—Well, do you think that in yonder world all these sainted relatives of mine have any other occupation than to pray for me?”(270)

Our Saviour prayed for those who knew not what they did! Pater dimitte illis. May all the saints in heaven and on earth pray for poor Italy! It has need of it.

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Sonnet

FROM THE ITALIAN OF GIOVANNI BATTISTA ZAPPI, UPON THE MOSES OF MICHAEL ANGELO IN THE CHURCH OF SAN PIETRO IN VINCOLI, AT ROME.

Whose form there, sculptured in such mass of stone, Sits like a giant, carrying art so far Beyond all works most beautiful and known? On those quick lips life’s very accents are! That man is Moses: on the awful front The double ray,(271) the glory of his beard, Reveal as much: ’tis Moses from the Mount When much of Deity in his face appeared! So looked he once when he the vasty fount Of sounding waters with his one word stayed. Such was his aspect when the sea obeyed And swallowed Egypt. O ye tribes that bent Before the calf! had you an image made Like this to worship, less were to repent.

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Recollections Of Père Hermann

France has a strange, magnetic power of attracting to herself, and absorbing into her mould, all the great talent of the world. How many men there are in Paris, who, from the ends of the earth, come together to lose their nationality in her appreciative bosom, and to gain there instead a reflected light of popularity ensured by her endorsement alone! All countries have adopted citizens, it is true, some by social, some by artistic, some by political adoption, but no country has a larger share of adopted intellect than France.

To all intents and purposes, the famous artist‐convert and artist‐monk, Père Hermann, was a Frenchman, though he was born a German Jew, in the free city of Hamburg. His biographers have told us all the striking incidents of his life; they have dwelt on his intoxicating success during youth, his mad extravagance of opinion, of expenditure, and of depravity, and, lastly, on his almost miraculous conversion and religious vocation. His death, which was a fitting crown to his life, and can be dignified by no lesser title than martyrdom, has endeared his memory still more to all those who knew him personally and had many secret reasons to admire his sanctity and feel grateful for his spiritual direction. His was a figure not easily forgotten, and perhaps a few touches of personal reminiscences will not be unacceptable to our readers, since all that links us to the saints, and brings the shadow of their sanctity nearer to our littleness, can hardly fail to be of interest.

The first time we were brought in contact with him was in the summer of 1862, when he came by special invitation to spend a few days with us in the country. The house itself had a monastic appearance and origin. It had been, so said tradition, a rural dependency, half farm, half infirmary, of a great Franciscan convent. It had been restored in 1849 and 1850, or thereabouts, and thanks to the good taste of the owner and the talent of the architects employed, had developed into a gem of Elizabethan Gothic and of domestic comfort. The little market‐town adjoining, once a centre of wealthy wool‐merchants and a great mediæval mart, contained several XIVth century buildings in a state of entire preservation, besides the later pile of the almshouses (XVIIth century), which, both as a building and an institution, was the pride of the surrounding country. Twelve old and destitute people, six men and six women, invariably widows or widowers, are generously supported on the fund left in perpetuity for this purpose by Joanna, Lady C——, wife of the great loyalist Baptist, Viscount C——, who burnt down his manor‐house (opposite the almshouses), rather than let it fall, with its treasures of plate and furniture, into the hands of Cromwell’s Roundheads.

It was the yearly custom to feast these good people at the manor, the restored Franciscan dependency, and thither they were conveyed one day during the summer in question, in a large covered cart provided with seats like a French char‐à‐banc. Père Hermann had been in the house since the previous evening, and had stipulated with his cordial host and hostess that he should wear his Carmelite habit while within the limits of the private grounds. The sight of this alone had in it something homely; it was a rest to the eye to see the cowled figure pacing the terrace in the early morning, Breviary in hand, and to lapse into beautiful day‐dreams of what might have been had England kept true to the faith. The Carmelite was delighted at the prospect of seeing this annual feast given to the almshouse people, and no sooner had they all assembled round the ample board spread for them on a shady part of the terrace at the back of the house, than he made his way towards them, and, saluting them, showed how much he sympathized in their enjoyment. His English was, of course, very imperfect; indeed, he never grew to any proficiency in speaking that language, but his interest in the scene was none the less vividly expressed. The old people still wear the costume appointed by the foundress of the institution: for the men, gaiters and a long coat of rough black cloth, with a silver badge or medal; for the women, a narrow, old‐fashioned dress of the same material, and a similar badge. These badges, we believe, have never been renewed since the original endowment, and are handed down from one bedesman to his successor, and so on; the clothes are renewed every two years. If we mistake not, Père Hermann said grace for these poor people, who, though all Protestants, seemed not at all shocked at the “popish” apparition. Indeed, he gained the hearts of all who ever saw him, his gentleness and recollection inspiring a respect for his person which was little short of veneration. He seemed as though he were walking with angels and listening to heavenly converse even while charitably lending his time and his bodily presence to earth. When he had enjoyed, with the simplicity of a child, the sight of the innocent sports and merriment of the old people, he left us for the chapel, where he spent a great part of his time. We cannot help adverting to a little occurrence which took place at one of these almshouse feasts (we believe this very one), and which was certainly very pathetic. A monk might well take pleasure in such unaffected simplicity and gentleness among those whose ancestors had been so intimately linked of old with monastic patrons. One of the old women, speaking to one of her host’s daughters of her little grandchild, a baby girl who was just dead, said, in the broad dialect of the county of Gloucester (which, however, we dare not imitate in print):

“When the child was born, my daughter made me notice how long the little thing’s fingers were, and said, ’Bless its little heart! they are long enough for the baby to be a waiting‐maid on the queen.’ And we agreed, laughing‐like, that a waiting‐maid the child would surely be. But when it died, I said to my daughter, said I, ‘Jane, we were mistaken about the baby’s fingers, you see. I tell you the Lord gave her those beautiful long fingers, not to attend on any great lady or queen on earth, but to play on the golden harps in his kingdom of heaven.’ ”

No truer nor more reverent poetry can be found anywhere than that simple utterance of an unlettered old woman who had not even that instinctive education which belongs to all those who learn the Catholic catechism. Such women and such poetry used to abound in the England of historic times, but error and materialism have but too well succeeded during the last three centuries in making the type rare and not easily discoverable, save in some forgotten nook of the rural districts.

Père Hermann that evening allowed us to enjoy our treat, after giving him his among the bedesmen, by playing a little on a cottage piano‐forte in what we called the oak drawing‐room. The servants were all collected in the next room (the library), and this seemed to give him particular satisfaction, as he was ever most fastidiously thoughtful of the comforts and pleasures of those in inferior station. His playing, though not comparable to his triumphant successes as an artist nearly twenty years before, was still admirable, and, above all, so sympathetic. He played, among other things, the “Prayer of Moses” with great solemnity and expression, and also some of his own Cantiques, which for blending passion with religious earnestness are something unique. He never played anywhere save in private, and then only to small audiences in an informal manner, and never touched the organ save by obedience in his own church, or for the Forty Hours’ Exposition, saying that he wished to have his art ever sanctified by a religious inspiration. The fascination and temptation of artistic triumphs must still have been appreciable stumbling‐blocks in his spiritual career. Therefore, to hear him play at all was no slight favor, and, while on this visit, he repeated this favor more than once. On the last day, he said Mass in the domestic chapel, and distributed the Scapular to the household, enrolling nearly every member in the Confraternity. He gave a short address on the origin and meaning of this devotion, the distinctive one of his Order, and which was further made interesting on this occasion by the fact of the host’s having in former years rescued a picture of S. Simon Stock in the act of receiving the first miraculous Scapular. The figures were life‐size, and the painting after the manner of the later Italian school; the canvas was found riddled with holes, having been used as a target by ignorant or fanatical possessors. The restored picture was hung in the drawing‐room, where it became a great source of interest to the zealous convert Carmelite, our dear guest. During this visit was laid the foundation of a spiritual friendship between him and the writer—a friendship which proved a great benefit and guidance in our after‐life.

Meeting him again in London a few months later, we learnt a singular occurrence connected with his influence over souls. A young girl, not much over seventeen, and of a wilful and rebellious nature, who was under Père Hermann’s spiritual direction, happening to come up to town for a few days, experienced a strange phase of religious excitement. Careless as she was about all serious matters regarding the future state, she was nevertheless seized with a strong feeling of inadequacy in her religious efforts. She rose suddenly (it was a bright moonlight night), and went to the window, where the chastened beauty of the moon made even the monotonous landscape of London roofs and chimneys shine with a weird charm and take on suggestive shapes of startling vividness. Something—the grace of God, we ought no doubt reverently to say—seemed to take hold of her heart and shake her whole being. It was not the fear of punishment, the blank of unsated frivolity, that moved her; only one cry burst from her heart—“I have never loved God enough—I have never loved him at all.” If any but the saints ever feel perfect contrition, she did at that moment; for in that one sin she saw all others contained. Sobs came from the depths of her heart; she paced her room with naked feet, unmindful of discomfort, unheeding the autumn chill that is never long absent from London atmosphere, repeating again and again, like a dirge, those words, “I have never loved God enough—I have never loved him at all.” Then came a wondering feeling as to what this awakening meant; was it conversion, or the beginning of a vocation, or a sign that some special self‐devotedness would be required of her through life? She said to herself, “I will see Père Hermann, and tell him; I wonder if this will last!”

Strange to say, the blessed excitement passed away, and the next morning, though she tried to revive it, it was impossible. Not a trace of emotion was left, although the mind recalled distinctly what an ecstasy of sorrow it had been, and how it had shaken the soul to its very centre. The young girl, however, saw Père Hermann, and told him of it, and in the parlor of the nuns of the Assumption, Kensington Square, he gave her the advice of a father and a saint. She is still living, and none can tell if that prophetic call may not yet have unexpected fulfilment through the prayers of one who is now a saint in heaven. This occurrence led to a very interesting and intimate correspondence, which we have examined ourselves, and of which we would gladly give some extracts were the letters not unfortunately beyond our reach at the present moment.

Père Hermann was peculiarly fond of children, as indeed all saints are. Going one day to the Brompton Oratory, which the finest organ in London and a very perfect and numerous surpliced choir contribute to make one of the leading Catholic churches of the English capital, he was prevailed upon to play a voluntary after the Offertory. There sat a child in that choir, only a little chorus singer, but whose early dream it had ever been to become a musician and play upon an organ such as that majestic, imperial instrument which he listened to with vague awe every Sunday. He knew the story of the great artist who now sat at the organ in his Carmelite habit, and he drank in eagerly the grand strains he could but dimly understand, yet admired so intensively. Things which he never knew technically till many years after, yet seemed not unknown to his sympathetic ear, and, if he understood but little of the science that created those rolling chords and modulations, he could worship the beauty they expressed.

A few days later, the little chorister, with six or seven companions from the Oratory School, was taken to the temporary Carmelite chapel in Kensington. It was all very poor and unpretending, but the spirit of recollection and peace made an Eden of the temporary refuge of these “knights of poverty,” and the children were very much impressed. Père Hermann came to the parlor to see them, and inquired severally after each one from the Oratorian Father in whose special charge they were. Our little chorister was dumb with awe and delight, expecting the holy Carmelite to notice him particularly; but when the Oratorian was questioned about this boy, he answered laughingly:

“Oh! this fellow is going to be a tinker.”

Père Hermann looked amused but incredulous, and the child grew hot and uncomfortable under the laughing gaze of his companions. He had long made up his mind as to what he would like to be, and the tinker suggestion was peculiarly hateful to him, because systematically used by his wise instructor to “break his pride.” But the gentle monk saw the boy’s discomfiture, and came skilfully to the rescue.

“And will you really be a tinker, my little man?” he said, smiling.

“No, father,” readily answered the little one. “A musician.”

“You mean a tinker, Peter,” teasingly suggested the Oratorian, and the boy blushed with annoyance.

“No, no,” said Père Hermann; “he will be a musician, as he says, and a good one. And now,” he continued, “it is nearly time for Benediction, and I am going to play the harmonium; would you like to stay for that?”

The child was speechless with delight, and then the holy monk added:

“You shall pull out the stops for me, Peter,” which was done, and, though it seemed the acme of happiness to Peter, it probably did not improve the music.

After the service, the father called one of the lay brothers, and entrusted the children to his care, saying, with simple glee, and in the broken accent which all who knew him remember as a characteristic of his otherwise terse and appropriate language:

“Now, brother, go and feed these little ones, and mind you give them plenty of good things.”

The order was well obeyed, for the tradition of ample and eager hospitality has never been lost among religious orders, be they poor and struggling and even proscribed, or rich, powerful, and influential. Rich plum‐cake and good wine, with candies of every sort, were set before the little musician and his friends, but the child was even then thinking exultingly that Père Hermann had really said he should be an artist. In later years, when studying his art in Flanders, or earning his bread by it in England, this saying, that from such holy lips seemed a prophetic blessing and an earnest of success, often and often recurred to his mind, and encouraged him in the many dark days through which he had to pass.

To all those who learned to love Père Hermann from personal intercourse with him, every remembrance of his words, however trifling, is now doubly treasured; his death, uniting as it did in itself the heroism of philanthropy, of patriotism, and of divine charity, has already practically canonized him in the eyes of his friends and spiritual children; and as we lay this slender wreath of praise among the more important tributes that literature, art, and religion have heaped around his memory, we are fain to exclaim, with the wise man of Israel, “Blessed are they that saw thee, and were honored with thy friendship.”(272)

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A Daughter Of S. Dominic

Concluded.

It was a singular proof, not only of respect for her character, but of confidence in her judgment and discretion, on the part of the government, to have entrusted her with this right of mercy; knowing, as no one who knew anything about her could fail to know, her extraordinary tenderness of heart and compassion for suffering, especially in the case of the soldiers. It seemed a risk to invest her with a sort of judicial right to interfere in their behalf at the hands of law and justice; but they never had reason to regret it. She showed herself to the last worthy of the trust reposed in her. In the exercise of a privilege whose application was one of the keenest joys of her life, Amélie evinced a mind singularly well balanced, a judgment always clear, and a prudence ever on the alert to guide and control the impulses of her heart. But when her judgment approved the promptings of charity, no consideration could deter her from obeying them. She was by nature very timid, and of late years, owing to her having quite broken off intercourse with the world, properly speaking, this timidity had grown to a painful shyness. Whenever there was a necessity, however, she could brave it, and face a gay crowd or a doughty magnate with as much ease and cheerfulness as if the act demanded no effort or sacrifice of natural inclination. Such sacrifices were frequently required of her. Her name had a prestige that gained entrance through doors closed to persons of infinitely higher social position and importance; and when a community, or a hospital, or a family wanted a mediator in high quarters, they turned quite naturally to Amélie. On one occasion her courage and good‐nature were put to a rather severe test. It was in the case of a poor man who had been condemned to a long term of punishment for some fraudulent act. The circumstances of the case, the hitherto excellent character of the man, the fierce pressure of want under which the fraud was committed, and certain points which threw doubts on the extent to which he had been consciously guilty, along with the misery his condemnation must entail on a wife and young family, roused strong sympathy for him, and a general impulse seized the townspeople to appeal to the emperor for his pardon. But how to do it so as to make the appeal efficacious—who to entrust with the delicate mission? Every heart turned instinctively to Amélie. Her name rose to every tongue. The most influential of the petitioners went to her, and besought her to go to Paris and obtain an audience of the emperor, and implore of his clemency a free pardon for the convict. Her first impulse was to draw back in dismay at the mere contemplation of such a feat; but the petitioners brought out an array of arguments that it was not in Amélie’s nature to resist. She called up her courage, recommended the success of her mission to the prayers of the Marseillese and the protection of N. Dame de Garde, and started off to Paris. Thanks to her previous relations with the ministerial world, she was able to obtain, after some delay, an audience of the emperor. He received her with the most flattering marks of personal consideration, and granted her at once the pardon she sued for. Amélie telegraphed the good news to Marseilles on leaving his majesty’s presence, and was met on her arrival there the following day by her protégé and his family in tears of joy and gratitude.

On another occasion, she was applied to for a rather large sum of money for a very pressing charity. She happened for the moment to have exhausted all her own and her friends’ resources, and knew not where to turn for the necessary sum. Some enterprising person proposed that she should go and beg it at the house of a banker who was giving a grand ball that night, and at which all the wealthy notabilities of the town were to be present. It was quite an unprecedented proceeding, and one that it required the humility and the courage of Amélie to undertake. She hesitated as usual at first, and as usual, seeing that the thing had to be done, and that no one else would do it, she consented. A preliminary step was to obtain the host’s permission. This he at first emphatically refused; and, seeing that it required nearly as much courage on his part to allow his guests to be waylaid as for Amélie to waylay them, it is not much to be wondered at. Courage, however, is catching. Amélie pleaded, and the banker gave way. He opened her list of contributions by a handsome sum, and consented that she should come the same evening and beg the rest at his house. It was a strange episode in the brilliant scene—the pale, dark‐eyed woman, in her homely black gown and neat little black net cap, standing at the door of the ball‐room; and stretching out her little bag to the votaries of pleasure as they passed her: “Pour les pauvres, mesdames! Pour les pauvres, messieurs!” The words must have struck in oddly enough through the clanging of the orchestra, and the rustling of silken robes, and the hum of laughter as the merrymakers swept round in the mazes of the dance. But the low, sweet voice of the beggar rose above the music and the din loud enough to reach many hearts that night; no one turned a deaf ear to the suppliant; the gentlemen gave money, or pledged themselves to give it; the women dropped rings and bracelets into the velvet bag that soon overflowed with its own riches; and when all the guests had arrived, and the festivity was at its height, Amélie, after admiring, as she was always ready to do, everything bright and beautiful that was not sinful—the brilliancy of the scene, the bright jewels and the pretty toilets, and the artistic decoration of the rooms—bade good‐night to it all and to her host, and went home with her heart full of love and gratitude towards her kindly fellow‐creatures.

But we should never end if we were to narrate all the acts of charity and zeal that she was never tired of performing. The following, however, are too characteristic to be omitted:

Late one evening, in her rounds through one of those dark centres of misery and crime that are to be found in all big cities, Amélie heard that a mountebank was dying in a neighboring cellar, all alone and in great pain. She made her way to the place at once. The dying man was lying on a heap of a straw, but he was not alone; a bear and a monkey shared his wretched abode; they had enabled the poor mountebank to live, and now they stood by while he was dying, watching his death‐throes in dumb sympathy. Nothing scared by the presence of his strange company, Amélie went up to the man and spoke to him gently of his soul. If he had ever heard of such a thing as an essential part of himself, he seemed to have altogether forgotten it, but he did not repulse her; he let her sit down beside him on the live, fetid straw and try to soothe him in his pains, and instruct him in the intervals, and prepare him to make his peace with God. By the time her part of the task was done, the night was far spent, but there was no time to lose. Amélie went straight to the priest’s house and woke him up. On the road, she told him what he would find on arriving.

The two went in together. Amélie knelt down in the furthest corner of the place and prayed, and the bear and the monkey looked on while the sweet and wondrous mystery between Jesus and the good thief was renewed before their blank, unintelligent eyes. The mountebank made a general confession of his whole life, and received the last sacraments. Then the priest went home, and Amélie remained alone with the dying man, who expired a few hours later with his head resting on her shoulder.

On another occasion, she heard that a woman whose life had been a public scandal in the town was at the point of death. She rose at once to go to her, and, in spite of the remonstrances of those present, she did go. The character of the woman and her associates, and the place where she lived, were indeed enough to deter a less daring spirit than Amélie, but whenever an objection was raised on prudential grounds to her visiting here or there, she would playfully point to her hump, and say:

“With a protector like that, a woman may go anywhere.”

The woman at first repulsed her fiercely and bade her begone, and refused to hear the name of God mentioned; but Amélie held her ground, pleading with all the eloquence at her command—and those who have heard it in moments when her soul was stirred by any great emotion declare that it was little less than sublime. She caressed the wretched creature, calling her by the most endearing names, till at last the obdurate heart was softened, she let Amélie stay and speak to her, and even asked her to come back the next day. “But,” she added, “you’ll find a monsieur at the door, and he’s capable of beating you if you try to come in against his will.”

But Amélie was not likely to be deterred by this. She came the following morning, and found the monsieur. He met her with insulting defiance, and dared her to enter, and, on her attempting to do so, he raised his hand and clenched it, with a savage oath threatening to strike her.

“Hit here!” said Amélie, coolly turning her hump to him.

Confounded by the words and the action, the man let his arm drop. Before he had recovered from his surprise, she had passed into the sick room, and he stood silently looking on and listening in wonder to what was going on before him. Amélie left the house unmolested, and returned a few hours later with a priest. The unhappy woman had been a Christian in her youth. She made a general confession in the midst of abundant tears, and died the next day in admirable sentiments of contrition and hope. The example was not lost on her companion; he made a sudden and generous renunciation of his sinful life, and Amélie had to rejoice over the return of two souls instead of one.

As we have said before, her charity was essentially catholic, universal in every sense. She was ready to pity everybody’s troubles, and, with Amélie, to pity meant to help. The poor widow toiling broken‐hearted for her children in the courts and alleys of the big town; the father struggling with adversity in another sphere, trying to educate his sons and marry his daughters and pay the inexorable debt of decency that society exacts from a gentleman; the poor, lone girl battling with poverty, or perhaps writhing in agonized shame at having fallen in the battle; the rich mother weeping over the wanderings of a son; the poor orphan without bread or friends; the rich orphan pursued by designing relations, or in danger of falling into the hands of a worthless husband; high and low, rich and poor alike, all came to Amélie for sympathy and counsel, and no one was ever repulsed. Even those difficulties which are the result of culpable weakness, and which meet generally with small mercy, not to say indulgence, from pious people, found Amélie full of indulgent pity and a ready will to help. An officer on one occasion was drawn inadvertently into contracting a debt of honor which he had no means of paying. In his despair he thought of Amélie, and, half maddened with shame and remorse, he came to her to ask for pity and advice. The sum in question was two thousand francs. Amélie happened to have it at the moment, and, touched by the distress of the man of the world, she gave it to him at once. There was no spirit of criticism, no censoriousness in her piety, no fastidious condemnation of things innocent in themselves, however apt to be dangerous in their abuse. She loved to see young people happy and amused, and would listen with real interest and pleasure to an account of some fête where they had enjoyed themselves after the manner of their age. This simplicity and liberty of spirit enabled her often to take advantage of opportunities for doing good that never would occur to a person whose piety turned in a narrower groove; she was wont to exclaim regretfully against good people for being so overnice in the choice of opportunities, and thus cramping their own power and means of usefulness. With regard to the choice of tools in the same way, she would often deprecate the fastidiousness of certain pious people, urging that, when there was a work to do, an aim to accomplish, an obstacle to overcome, we should take up whatever tools Providence put in our way, not quarrelling with their shape or quality, but doing the best we can with them, profiting by a knave’s villany or a fool’s folly to further a just purpose, or a noble scheme, or a kind action, making, as far as honesty and truth can do it, evil accomplish the work of good.

Faithfully bearing in mind that we may do no evil that good may come of it, Amélie had withal an ingenious gift of turning to good account the evil that was done by others; but she was slow to see the evil, and, when it was forced upon her, she had always more pity than censure for it. Her lamp was always lighted, and she was ever ready to help the foolish ones who go about this world of ours crying out to the wise ones: “Give me of your oil!” For it is not only when the Bridegroom comes that we need to have our lamp lighted, we want it all along the road, for others as well as for ourselves; we must even adapt it to the necessities of the road by changing the color of its light. This we can do by changing the oil. We must use the oil of faith when we want a strong, bright blaze to keep our feet straight amidst the ruts and snares and pools of muddy water that abound at every step; we must burn the oil of hope to frighten away despondency and cheer us when our hearts are heavy and our courage ebbing; but we must be chiefly prodigal of the rich and salutary oil of charity, for the flame it sends out is often more helpful to others than to ourselves. Sometimes, when our lamp is so low that it hardly shows the ground clear under our own feet, it is shedding—thanks to this marvellous oil of charity—a heavenly radiance on the path of those journeying behind us; its flame is luminous as a star and soft as moonlight; people on whom we turn its roseate glow rejoice in it as in sunshine: it softens them, it heals them, it takes the sting out of their worst wounds. The lamp fed with this incomparable oil is, moreover, often brightest when we ourselves are sick at heart, and when it costs us an effort to pour in the oil and set the wick in order. We do not realize it, but we can believe it by recalling the effect of kindness on our own souls in some well‐remembered hour, when it came from one in great sorrow, and who we knew was setting aside her own grief to enter into ours. Let us be brave, then, to hold up our lamp arm‐high to the pilgrims who are toiling foot‐sore and faint up the steep and rugged path of life along with us; its flame soars on to heaven, and shines more brightly before God than the fairest and loveliest of his stars.

We mentioned already that Amélie, on her father’s death, made a vow of personal poverty. She observed this vow with the utmost rigor as far as was consistent with decorum and the absence of anything approaching to a display of holiness—a thing of which she was almost morbidly afraid. Her usual dress was a black woollen gown and a shawl of the same material; her appearance in the street was that of a respectable housekeeper, but no one who saw the outward decency of her attire suspected the sordid poverty that often lay beneath it. She limited herself to a pittance for her clothes, and she would submit to the most painful inconvenience rather than exceed it. Once she gave away her strong boots and a warm winter petticoat to a poor person at the beginning of the winter, and, though the cold set in suddenly with great severity, she bore it rather than replace either of them till her allowance fell due. How her health bore the amount of labor and austerities that she underwent it is difficult to explain without using the word miraculous.

When, under the pious auspices of Monseigneur de Mazenod, the devotion of the Perpetual Adoration was established at Marseilles, Amélie at once had herself enrolled in the confraternity; unable to spare time from her multiform works of mercy during the day, she entrenched upon her nights, and used to spend hours in adoration before the Tabernacle. Fatigue and bodily suffering were no obstacle to the ardor of her soul; her spirit seemed to thrive in proportion as her body wasted. After a day of arduous labor, constantly on her feet, going and coming amongst the poor and the sick, breathing the foul air of hospital wards, and dingy cellars, and garrets, fasting as rigorously as any Carmelite, and grudging her body all but the bare necessaries of life, she was able to pass an entire night on her knees before the Blessed Sacrament, and be apparently none the worse for it. Such wonderful things are those who love God strengthened to do for him. Yet this woman was made of the same flesh and blood as ourselves; she had the same natural shrinkings and antipathies; her body was not made of different clay from ours, or supernaturally fashioned to defy the attacks of the devil and the repugnances of nature, to endure hunger, and pain, and fatigue without feeling them; she had the same temptations to fight against, the same corrupt inclinations to overcome, and the same weapons of defence against her enemies that we have—faith and prayer and the sacraments. What, then, is the difference between us? Only this, she was generous and brave, and we are mean and cowardly. We bargain and hang back, whereas she made no reserves, but strove to serve God with all her heart and all her strength, and he did the rest. He always does it for those who trust him and hearken unconditionally to that hard saying: “Take up thy cross and follow me!” For them he changes all bitter things into sweet, all weakness into strength; for the old Adam that they cast aside he clothes them with the new, thus rendering them invincible against their enemies, and repaying a hundred‐fold, even in this life, the miserable rags that we call sacrifices; he fills the hungry with good things, and in exchange for creatures and the perishable delights which they have renounced for his sake he gives them himself and a foretaste of the bliss of Paradise.

During her solitary vigils before the altar, the thought of the ingratitude of men and their cruel neglect of our Saviour in his Eucharistic prison sank deeply into Amélie’s heart, and filled it with grief and an ardent desire to make some reparation to his outraged love. We have all read the wonderful chapter on Thanksgiving in that wonderful book, All for Jesus. Most of us have felt our hearts stirred to sorrowful indignation at the sad picture it reveals of our own unkindness to God, and the tender sensitiveness of the Sacred Heart to our ingratitude, and his meek acceptance of any crumb of thanksgiving that we deign once in a way to throw to him; we have felt our tepid pulses quicken to a momentary impulse of generosity and passionate desire to call after the nine ungrateful lepers, and constrain them to return and thank him; we watch them going their way unmindful, and we cast ourselves in spirit at the feet of Jesus, gazing after them in sad surprise, and we pour out our souls in apologies—so bold does the passing touch of love make the meanest of us in consolations to him for the unkindness of his creatures. Alas! with most of us it ends there. Next time he tries us we follow the nine selfish lepers, and leave him wondering and sorrowing again over our ingratitude. But with Amélie it was different. No inspiration of divine grace ever found her deaf to its voice; her love knew no such things as barren sighs and idle mystic sentimentalities. Her whole heart was stirred by that touching and powerful appeal of Father Faber’s, and she began to consider at once what she could do to respond to it. The idea occurred to her of instituting a community, to be called Sœurs Réparatrices, whose mission should be to give thanks and to console our divine Lord for the ingratitude of the world by perpetual adoration before the Tabernacle, and at the same time of getting up a regular service of thanksgiving among the faithful at large, to have short prayers appointed and recommended by the church to their constant use, for the sole and express purpose of thanking God for his countless mercies to us all, but more especially to those among us who never thank him on their own account. Both suggestions were warmly approved of by many pious souls to whom she mentioned them.

In order, however, to carry them out effectively, it was deemed advisable that Amélie should go to Rome and obtain the authorization and blessing of the Holy Father. She had never been to Rome, but it was the desire of her life to go there; it drew her as the magnet draws the needle; Rome, to her filial Catholic heart, was the outer gate of heaven; it held the Father of Christendom, the Vicar of Christ; it held the tombs of the martyrs, its soil was saturated with their blood, all things within its walls were stamped with the seal of Christianity, and told of the wonders that it had wrought. Amélie, glad of the necessity which compelled her to fulfil her long‐cherished desire, set out for the Eternal City. She received the most affectionate welcome from the Holy Father, who had been long acquainted with her by name, and knew the apostolic manner of life she led. With regard to the community which she desired to found, and of which she was to become a member, but not superioress, His Holiness approved of it, but beyond this, of what passed between him and Amélie on the subject, no details have transpired. She said that the Holy Father encouraged her to carry out the design and gave her his blessing on it, and promised her his fatherly countenance and protection; but whether she submitted any rule to him at this period we have not been able to ascertain. As to the scheme of general thanksgiving that she proposed to inaugurate, he gave her abundant blessings on it, and indulgenced several prayers that she submitted to his inspection. Unfortunately, we have not been able to procure a copy of the little book which contained them all; this is the more to be regretted, that some of them were drawn up by Amélie herself and full of the spirit of her own tender piety; they were also preceded by a preface in which she appealed very lovingly to the children of Mary and the members of the Confraternity of the Sacred Heart, and begged their zealous co‐operation in the service of thanksgiving. We may mention, however, that she was in the habit, during the few remaining years of her life, of constantly recommending to her friends the use of the Gloria Patri and the ejaculation Deo Gratias! as having been particularly commended to her devotion by the Holy Father himself.

An incident occurred to Amélie during her stay in Rome which she often narrated as a proof of the extreme need we have of a service of thanksgiving. She went one morning to an audience at the house of a cardinal, and while she was waiting for her turn she got into conversation with the Superior of the Redemptorist Fathers in France. Always on the watch to gain an ally to the cause, she told him the motive of her journey to Rome, and begged that he would use his influence in his own wide sphere to forward its success amongst souls.

“Ah! madame!” exclaimed the Redemptorist, “it was a good thought to try and stir up men’s hearts to a spirit of thanksgiving, for there is nothing more wanted in the world. The story of the nine lepers is going on just the same these eighteen hundred years. I have been forty years a priest, and during that time I have been asked to say Masses for every sort of intention, but only once have I been asked to say a Mass of thanksgiving!”

Yes, truly the story of the nine lepers is being enacted now as in the old days when Jesus exclaimed sorrowfully, “Is there no one but this stranger found to return and give thanks?”

But for all her clear‐sighted sensitiveness to the sins and shortcomings of her day, Amélie was full of hope in it; nothing annoyed her more than to see good people lapse into that lugubrious way so common to them of always crying anathema on their age and despairing of it; she used to say that she mistrusted the love and the logic of such; that those who love God and their fellow‐creatures for his sake never despair of them, but work for them, trusting in God’s help and in the ultimate triumph of good over evil; that despair was a sign of stupidity and cowardice. And was she not right? Surely every age has in its ugliness some counterbalancing beauty, some redeeming grace of comeliness, in the tattered raiment that hangs about its ulcers and its nakedness. God never leaves himself at any time without witnesses on the earth, and it is our fault, not his, if we do not see them. There are always bright spots in humanity, and those who cannot discern them should blame their own dull vision, not their fellow‐ men. As poets who have the mystic eye see beauties of hue and color in the material world where common men see nothing but ruin and decay, so do the saints and the saint‐like, with the keen vision of faith and hope, alone penetrate the external darkness and decay of humanity, and discover in the midst of gloom and evil much that is promising and fair; they see elemental wines boiling up in the cauldron of travail and suffering, and they know that their bitterness is salutary and their fire invigorating unto life.

Amélie returned to Marseilles well satisfied with her visit to the Holy City, and resumed her labors with renewed zest. But she had left her heart behind her, and from the day she left Rome she had but one desire, and that was to return and end her days there. Her health had of late grown so feeble that it was more and more a subject of wonder to those who witnessed it how she was able to continue her life of superhuman activity without flagging for a day. Amélie felt, however, that it could not last much longer now. She had frequently expressed in the midst of her busy, active life a longing for a life of contemplation, and in proportion as the end drew near, the yearning for an interval of silence and solitude increased. She was often heard to say to her fellow‐laborers:

“It is time I left off looking after other people’s souls, and attended a little to my own; I feel the want of more prayer, of more time before the Blessed Sacrament; really, I must begin to get ready.”

In the year 1869, she determined to carry this desire into execution, and begin to get ready, as she said, by withdrawing into a more solitary life. Her love for the church had taken a new impetus from her intercourse with the Holy Father; from the first the Denier de S. Pierre counted her among its most zealous promoters, but more so than ever now. An abundant collection which she made just at this time offered a plausible pretext to her for going to Rome, in order to lay it at the feet of Pius IX. So after putting her affairs in order, and bidding good‐by to only her immediate and intimate friends, so as to avoid anything like resistance or a demonstration on the part of the multitude of people to whom she knew her departure would be painful, Amélie took leave of the hospitable old home in the Rue Grignan, and set her face once more toward the Eternal City.

But she had a last work to do for her native town on the road. The splendid military hospital of Marseilles, in which she had taken so deep and active an interest, was served by lay nurses, and both the soldiers and the civil authorities were anxious to have these replaced by Sisters of Charity. Easy as the thing seemed, up to the present all endeavors to effect the substitution had failed. It rested with the government to make the appointment and to grant a certain sum for the maintenance of the community when attached to the hospital, but, owing either to the case not being properly represented, or to the ill‐will of certain officials who put obstacles in the way, every application on the subject had been met by a refusal. The authorities, seeing all else fail them, turned to Amélie. They remembered her success on a former occasion, and requested her to take the affair in hand on arriving in Paris, and get from the minister the desired concession. The mission was repugnant to her, because she foresaw it would involve her having to come forward and put herself in the way of notabilities and magnates; but, as there seemed just a chance of being able to perform a last service to the soldiers, she accepted, and promised to do her best.

She had a military friend in Paris, who, though a practical Catholic, occupied a distinguished position in the service, and was on good terms with its chiefs. This gentleman procured an audience for her of Marshal ——, who was then in the ministry, and the person to whom she was directed to apply in the first instance.

The marshal, who had been made aware of the subject of her visit, received her, according to his custom, in shirt‐sleeves and a towering rage, asked her a dozen questions, one on top of another, without giving her time to edge in a word of protest, wondered very much what she or anybody else meant by interfering with soldiers and their hospitals and the supreme wisdom of the government, of dictating to them what they ought to do; but that was the way with women; women were always meddling with what didn’t concern them; they were the most difficult subjects to govern; for himself, he would rather have the management of ten armies than a village full of women, etc. In fact, his excellency bullied his visitor after the usual manner of his peculiar courtesy, and Amélie was obliged to take her leave after a very brief audience, during which she had been rated like a naughty schoolboy and not allowed to say three sentences in self‐defence. Clearly there was not much to be done in that quarter. Her friend then proposed getting her without further preamble an audience of the emperor. Amélie preserved a grateful recollection of the reception she had met with from his majesty some years before, and the idea of entering his presence again inspired her with less terror than the prospect of a second edition of the marshal; she thought, moreover, that there might be a speedier and better chance of success by applying directly to the emperor than by beating about the bush with his ministers, admitting even that they were not all of the same type as the one she had tried. Amélie accepted the offer, therefore, and, after a shorter delay than any one but a cabinet minister might have been obliged to undergo, she received a letter from the Lord Chamberlain notifying the day and hour when she was to present herself at the Tuileries.

She was shown into the antechamber, where generals, dignitaries of the state, bishops, and other important personages were waiting their turn to enter the imperial presence. His majesty was giving audience to an ambassador when Amélie arrived, and there was rather a long delay before the door opened. When it did, it was not his chamberlain, but the emperor himself who appeared on the threshold; he stood for a moment, and looked deliberately round the room, where he recognized many noble and influential personages, and then, perceiving an elderly lady in a rusty black gown sitting at the furthest end of it, he walked straight up to her, and held out both his hands. “Mademoiselle Lautard,” said his majesty, “I thank you for the honor you do me by this visit; I am sure I have only to mention your name for every one present to admit your right to pass before them.”

There was a general murmur of assent, though it must have puzzled most if not all of the spectators of this strange scene who this poverty‐stricken, humpbacked elderly lady was to be thus greeted by Napoleon III., and handed over their heads to the presence‐chamber. As soon as they were alone, the emperor drew a chair close to his own, and, inviting his visitor to sit down, he said:

“Now, tell me if, over and above the pleasure of seeing you, I am to have that of doing something that can give you pleasure?”

Amélie, in relating the interview to her friend, said that, when she saw his majesty bearing down upon her before the assembled multitude in the antechamber, she felt ready to sink into the ground, and wished herself at Hongkong; but the moment he spoke her terrors vanished, and she had not been two minutes with him before she felt perfectly at her ease, and talked on as fearlessly as if he had been an old friend. She told him her wishes about the hospital, and he promised unconditionally that they should be carried out. For certain formalities, however, it was necessary to refer her to his minister.

“You will call on Marshal ——,” said his majesty; “he is the person to do it.”

“Sire!” exclaimed Amélie, throwing up her hands in dismay, “anything but that; your majesty must really manage it without sending me again to Marshal ——.”

“Ah! you have been to him already,” said the emperor, with a quiet smile; “well, try him again, and this time I warrant you a better reception; he is bon enfant au fond, but you must not let him think that you’re afraid of him.”

Thus warned and encouraged, Amélie promised to take her courage in both hands, as the emperor said, and beard the lion once more in his den. Before letting her go, his majesty questioned her minutely about the condition of the hospitals and other charitable institutions at Marseilles, concerning all of which he appeared to be singularly well informed.

The next day, she presented herself at the ministère, and was ushered into the marshal’s presence. He had his coat on this time; whether the fact was due to accident, or to a desire to propitiate the lady who had complained of him to his master, history does not say; but, as soon as Amélie entered, his excellency accosted her with: “Well, so you were affronted with me, it seems! What did you say about me to the emperor?”

“Excellency,” replied Amélie, “I told his majesty that I had expected to find a minister of France, but I found instead a man in a passion.”

The marshal grunted a laugh, and told her to sit down and explain her business. She did so, this time with perfect satisfaction to both parties, and they parted the best friends in the world.

This closed her career of usefulness in France; she waited to make the needful arrangements for the departure of the nuns, their reception at Marseilles, etc., and then she started for Rome.

On setting out for the Eternal City, Amélie seemed to have had the presentiment that she had entered on the last stage of her pilgrimage. The sense of her approaching end, which betrayed itself, perhaps unconsciously, in conversing both by word and letter with her most intimate friends, was accompanied by an increase of fervor and a serenity which struck every one who approached her as something almost divine. The project which she had formed of founding and entering a community of Sœurs Réparatrices was still unrealized, but she hoped now to carry it into effect, to make the remainder of her life a perpetual Deo Gratias! and to die in the outward livery of the religious state whose spirit her whole life had so faithfully embodied. But God had other designs upon her. Meantime, in the twilight interval of comparative leisure that she had looked forward to so long and enjoyed so thankfully, Amélie did not give up all active work; she prayed more, and lived in greater retirement; but she still gave a fair proportion of each day to her accustomed service of the poor and the sick.

These were troubled days that she had fallen upon in Rome. The sacrilegious hand of parricides had robbed the church of her possessions, and reduced Pius IX. to the nominal sovereignty of the capital of Christendom, as a prelude to making it, what it is now, his prison. Catholic hearts were sad; but, amongst all his children, the Vicar of Christ had no more faithfully sorrowing heart than Amélie’s, none who entered more keenly into his griefs or responded with more filial alacrity to their claim on her sympathy and participation and righteous anger. She beheld the persecutions of God’s church, the hatred and malice of its enemies, the cowardice of those who called themselves its friends, but stood by passive and cold while the crime perpetrated outside Jerusalem eighteen hundred years ago was renewed before their eyes on the body of that church which Christ had died to found; she saw pride and materialism everywhere at work striving to undo his work, to prevent the coming of his kingdom, and to establish the kingdom of sin upon earth; and the sight of all this filled her heart with grief, but not with despair. It was indeed an hour of unexampled grief for Christendom, but it was also an hour for activity, and zeal, and renewed courage; it was a time for each individual member to prove himself, for all to put their hand to the plough that was furrowing the bosom of the church, and to water the travailed soil with fertilizing tears, and, if need be, blood, thus preparing it for the future harvest that was inevitable. For even as God’s enemies of old had stood at the foot of Calvary, and shook their heads at the bleeding victim of their own hate and envy, and bade him come down from the cross, knowing not the dawn of the Resurrection was nigh, when the victim would arise triumphant over death, and compel his murderers to acknowledge that this man must indeed have been the Son of God—so now the enemies of his church had their hour of triumph, and clapped their hands for joy to see the church that he had built upon the Rock, and promised that the gates of hell should not prevail against, tottering and crumbling under the blows of progress and an enlightened civilization and the force of arms. But their triumph was but the hour of the powers of darkness that was not to endure, but would perish at the appointed time before the manifestation of the Sun of Justice.

Still, even faithful hearts quailed before the storm, and were scandalized at the way in which God seemed to forsake his own, not recognizing in this mysterious abandonment another trait of resemblance between his Vicar and the divine Model, who cried out in his dereliction, “Why hast thou forsaken me?”

Amélie was forced to hear and see much that was unutterably painful to hear as a true child of the church; many who called themselves such, and who were glad enough to draw upon her magnificent sacramental treasury, and to praise and serve her in the days of peace, were not stout‐hearted enough to share her tribulations or even to understand them, and stood aloof when they ought to have acted, or remained dumb when they ought to have spoken, or spoke what they had better have left unsaid. But alongside of this indifference or treachery she witnessed a great deal that was beautiful and consoling. Pilgrims were flocking from the four quarters of the globe to lay at the feet of Pius IX. the tribute of their fidelity and abundant offerings, often collected in perilous journeys at great risk and sacrifice. Then there were the Zouaves, nos chers Zouaves, as Amélie always called them, presenting a noble example to us all by their heroic devotion to the cause of God, their spirit of immolation, their chivalrous valor in action, and the marvellous purity of their lives. These modern crusaders replaced the suffering soldiers of Marseilles in Amélie’s solicitude during her stay in Rome. She tended them and worked for them indefatigably, and dwelt continually in letters home on the consolation the spectacle of their childlike piety afforded her.

Early in December she wrote to a friend at Marseilles: “Our dear Zouaves have made their entry into Rome. They passed under my windows. They are the flower of the French nation. They are full of that energy which nothing but the spirit of the faith gives. It is beautiful to see them receive Holy Communion before arming themselves. This morning eighteen hundred of them, bent on shedding their blood in the cause of God, marched proudly into the Eternal City with the band playing and colors flying; they reminded one of the Theban legion. I witnessed a touching sight. The Holy Father met them on their way, and they fell on their knees like one man to get his blessing. He blessed them with visible emotion. How could a father not be moved at seeing the devotion of his children? The Flemish and the Bretons are particularly conspicuous; ancient traditions have been preserved amongst them, and have come down from the fathers to the sons. This evening they accompanied His Holiness to the Vatican, where they cheered him with the enthusiasm of Christian hearts. It was impossible to withhold one’s tears as one beheld the venerable Pontiff rest his loving and gentle gaze on all this youth, so devoted to him, and burning to prove their fidelity. In these days, the position of the Zouaves amongst Christian soldiers is a noble one. Oh! if the idle youth of France knew what a happiness it is to serve God, how many families would be happy and blest even in this world as well as the next! I see here numbers of young men who had strayed away from the right path for a time, but who had the grace to return to it, and are now as happy as children, pure as angels, attached to the church and the Vicar of Christ. Their sole ambition is martyrdom; their joy is to look forward to it. Oh! I see here admirable things. Adieu, dear friend. Let us pray always.”

Sinister reports and wild alarms, sometimes the result of malice, sometimes of fear, were constantly starting up in Rome, terrifying the weak, and stimulating the brave to greater vigilance and courage, but keeping every one on the qui vive from day to day. In the midst of the general excitement of expectation or terror, the serene confidence of Pius IX. remained unshaken, like the rock on which it rested. Amélie, who was admitted frequently to the honor and happiness of speaking to the Holy Father, was lost in wonder at it—at the unearthly peace that was visible in his countenance and pervaded every word of his conversation. Shortly before the date of the foregoing letter, she wrote to the same friend:

“The most contradictory stories are current here, but the peace, the calm, the abandon of the Holy Father are indescribable, and go further to inspire confidence than the most sinister conjectures to create terrors. The daughters of Jerusalem followed our Redeemer to Calvary: a sort of filial sentiment holds me in Rome. I cannot go away.... Let us pray! The power of prayer obtains all things.”

Let us pray! This had been the lifelong burthen of her song, and the cry grew louder and more intense as she drew near the close. It was not the shrill cry of those who say, Lord! Lord! but the irrepressible voice of a soul whom the spirit of prayer possessed in the fulness of its availing power, and side by side with whose growth grew the spirit of sacrifice, the thirst for self‐immolation. She clung firmly to hope as the anchor of courage and resignation in the present trials of the church, but the sense of the outrages that God’s glory was enduring in the person of His Vicar increased in her soul to positive anguish. The consideration of her own nothingness and utter inability to lighten the cross that was pressing on the saintly Pontiff, pursued her day and night with the mysterious pain that is born of the love of God.

What a wonderful thing the soul of a saint or even a saintlike human being must be! How one longs to go within the veil and get a glimpse of the life that is lived there! It is so strange to us to see a creature take God’s cause to heart, and pine and suffer about it as we do about our personal cares and sorrows. It sets us wondering what sort of inner life theirs can be, and through what process of grace and correspondence and mysterious training they have grown to that state of mind when the things of God and his eternity are poignant realities, and the things of earth hollow phantoms that have lost the power to charm, or terrify, or touch. We see them hungering after justice as we hunger after bread, pining actually for the accomplishment of God’s will as eagerly as we pine for the success of our puny enterprises and the triumph of our small ambitions; and we are astonished, as it behoves our stupidity and hardness of heart to be, at the incomprehensible character of their faith and love. When life presses heavily upon us, and the cross is bruising our shoulders, and all things are dark and dreary, we catch ourselves occasionally sighing for death. This is about our nearest approach to that homesick yearning expressed in the words of the apostle: “I long to die, to be dissolved, and to be with Christ!” What an altogether different feeling it must be with these saintlike souls when they long for death! They are not impatient of life, or, like tired travellers, angry with the dust and sun of the road, and disgusted with the uncomfortable wayside inn where they put up; they are impatient of heaven and of the vision that makes the bliss and the glory of heaven. Too jealous of their Creator’s rights to rob him even in desire of one year, or day, or hour of their poor service while he sees good to employ them, they are willing to go on toiling through eternity if he wishes it; but they are homesick, they long to see him, they yearn after his possession with a sacred unrest that we who have but little kinship with their spirit cannot understand. They are saddened by their exile and by the sight of sin and of the small harvest their Lord’s glory reaps amidst the great harvest of iniquity that overruns the world. They watch the sea of humanity rolling its waves along time, moaning with conscious agonies of sin, storm‐lashed and terrible, breaking in billows of impotent rage against the Rock of redemption, and dashing headlong past it into the gulf, where it is sucked down into everlasting darkness; and seeing these things as God sees them, and as they affect his interests, they are filled with sorrow, and call out for the end, that this mighty torrent may be stayed. They call out to the stars to rise on the far‐off heights, that loom dim and gloomy through the swirl and vapor of the storm. They would fain hush the winds and the waves, and hasten the advent of the Judge before whose splendor the dark horizon will vanish, and whose glory will outshine the sunrise and fill the universe with joy. It is not their own selfish deliverance or the world’s annihilation that they long for, but its consummation in man’s happiness and the Creator’s glory.

Amélie longed with all the strength of her generous heart to do something for her Lord, to help ever so little towards hastening the coming of his kingdom before he called her away. One morning, after communion, as she was praying very fervently for the Holy Father, whose health just then was a source of great anxiety amongst the faithful, this longing came upon her with an intensity that she had never felt before; she was seized with a sudden impulse to make the sacrifice of her life in exchange for his, and to offer herself as a victim that he might be spared yet awhile to guide and sustain the church through the trials and temptations that were afflicting her. The impulse was so vehement that it was with difficulty she restrained herself from obeying it on the spot; the desire, however, to obtain the blessing of obedience in her sacrifice enabled her to do so. She quietly continued her thanksgiving, and, on leaving the church, went straight to the Vatican. There, kneeling at the feet of the suffering Vicar of Christ, she told him of the desire that had come to her, and begged him to bless it, and to permit her to offer herself up next day at Holy Communion as a victim in his place if it should please God to accept her.

Pius IX. was silent for some moments, while Amélie, with uplifted face and clasped hands, awaited his reply. Then, as if obeying a voice that had spoken to him in the silence, he laid his hand upon her head, and said, with great solemnity: “Go, my daughter, and do as the Spirit of God has prompted you.” He blessed her with emotion, and Amélie left his presence filled with gladness and renewed fervor. She spent the greater part of the day in prayer. In the afternoon she wrote two letters: one of them, of too private a character to be given at length, contained the foregoing account of the morning’s occurrences; the other we transcribe. It is a revelation beyond all comment of the state of her soul as it stood on what she believed to be the threshold of eternity.

SATURDAY, Dec. 15—ROME.

“We still continue in the greatest calm. Nos chers Zouaves have the courage of lions; they draw their strength from the blood of the martyrs. Generally speaking, they are pious as angels. You see them constantly during their free hours slipping off their knapsack and their arms to go and kneel at the feet of the priest in the confessional, or to pray at the shrine of the queen of martyrs; they are truly the children of the church, and—”

Here the letter broke off.

The next morning was Sunday. Amélie repaired, as usual, to early Mass at S. Peter’s. She received Holy Communion, and then, with the Eucharistic Presence warm upon her heart, she offered up her life to him who had been its first and last and only love. The words were hardly cold upon her lips, when she was seized with sudden and violent pain, and fell with a cry to the ground. She was surrounded immediately, and carried home. Priests and religious of both sexes who were in S. Peter’s at the moment, and knew her, filled with alarm and distress, accompanied her to the Strada Ripresa dei Barberi. Medical aid was sent for, but it was soon evident that her illness was beyond the reach of human skill. All that day and the next she continued in agonizing pain, unable to speak or to thank those about her except by a smile or a pressure of the hand. Early on the following morning, Wednesday, she grew calmer, the pain subsided, and Amélie asked for the last sacraments. She received them with sentiments of ecstatic devotion, and for some time remained absorbed in prayer. Her thanksgiving terminated, she took leave tenderly of those friends who surrounded her, and then begged they would begin the prayers for the dying; they did so, and she joined in the responses with a fervor that went to every heart. When they came to those grand and solemn words with which the church speeds her children into the presence of their merciful Judge, “Depart, Christian soul, in the name of the Father who created thee, in the name of the Son who redeemed thee, in the name of the Holy Ghost who sanctified thee,” Amélie bowed her head and died.

The news was conveyed at once to the Vatican. When Pius IX. heard it, he evinced no sudden surprise, but raised his eyes to heaven, and murmured with a smile:

“Si tosto accetato!”(273)

The announcement of Amélie’s death was received with universal expressions of dismay and sorrow. It was not only the poor, who had been her chief and most intimate associates in Rome, that mourned her, all classes of society joined in a chorus of heartfelt regret, and proved how well they had appreciated the gentle French sister who had dwelt humbly amongst them doing good. The house where she lay in her beautiful and heroic death‐ sleep was besieged by people from every part of the city; all were anxious to gaze once more upon her face, to touch her hands with crosses and rosaries, to kneel in prayer beside the victim who had offered herself for the sins of the people, and been accepted by him who delighteth not in burnt‐offerings, but in the sacrifice of a contrite heart. To her truly it had been answered: “O woman, great is thy faith: be it done unto thee according to thy word!”

The miraculous circumstances of her death were soon proclaimed. In the minds of those who had known her well they excited no surprise. From all they called out sentiments of admiration and praise. Tears flowed uninterruptedly round the austere court where the virgin tabernacle rested from its labors, but they were tears sweeter than the smiles and laughter of earth; prayers for the dead were suspended by common impulse, and the spectators, exchanging the De Profundis for the Te Deum and the Magnificat, broke out into canticles of triumph and hymns of rejoicing.

The Zouaves, her beloved Zouaves, hurried in consternation to the house as soon is the news reached them that the gentle, devoted friend of the soldier was no more; and it was a beautiful and stirring sight to see them sobbing like children beside her, touching her hands with their sword‐ hilts and their rosaries, and swelling in broken but enthusiastic voices the hymns of thanksgiving.

The Holy Father, wishing to pay his tribute to the general testimony of love and admiration, commanded that the child of S. Dominic should be carried to her grave with a pomp and splendor befitting the holiness of her life and the heroic character of her death. The remains were conveyed accordingly first to the Basilica of the Apostles in solemn state, escorted by a vast concourse of people, priests and religious, and exposed there throughout the morning to public veneration; a requiem Mass and the office of the dead were chanted; in the afternoon, the body, followed by all that Rome held of greatest and best, was transported to the Church of Santa Maria in Ara Cœli. The Zouaves claimed the privilege of bearing the precious remains upon their shoulders, and it was granted them. By special permission of His Holiness, Amélie was interred in Santa Maria; but her death was no sooner known at Marseilles than the townspeople spontaneously demanded that the body should be returned to them. But Pius IX. replied that Rome had now a prior claim to its guardianship; Amélie had made the sacrifice of her life at Rome and for Rome; it was fitting that the ashes should remain where the holocaust had been offered and consumed. Marseilles yielded to the decision of the Sovereign Pontiff, and the daughter of S. Dominic was left to sleep on under the august dome of the Ara Cœli, there to await the angel of the resurrection, whose trumpet shall awake the dead and bid them come forth and clothe themselves with immortality.

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The following is the authentic record of this miraculous death, as copied from the original, legalized by Cardinal Patrizi, Vicar of His Holiness:

“Je soussigné, curé de la trèssainte basilique constantinienne des douze saints apôtres de Rome, certifie que dans le registre XII. des défunts, lettre N, page 283, se trouve l’acte dont l’extrait mot à mot suit:

“Le vingt‐deux décembre mil‐huit cent soixante six.—Mademoiselle Claire‐ Françoise‐Amélie Lautard de Marseille, fille de M. Jean Baptiste Lautard, vierge très pieuse, pendant quelle offrait Dimanche dernier à Dieu sa propre vie pour le salut du souverain Pontife, Pie IX. de Rome et de la sainte église, a été saisie sur le champ par la maladie, et ayant reçu très pieusement les sacraments de l’église, jouissant de la plenitude de ses facultés, en prière, entourée de plusieurs prêtres et vierges, a rendu son âme a Jésus Christ son époux, avec la plus grande sérénité, le Mercredi dix‐neuf à neuf heures et demie du matin dans la maison Rue Ripresa dei Barberi 175, l’âge de cinquante neuf ans; son corps, le lendemain vingt, après le completuum a été conduit accompagné par un grand nombre de religieuse en cette basilique et y a été exposé pendant la matinée suivant l’usage des nobles, l’office et la Messe ont été dit, dans l’après‐midi le corps a été transporté à l’église de Sainte Marie in Ara‐ Cœli, òu il a été enseveli dans le tombeau des Sœurs de St. Joseph de l’Apparition.

“Donné à Rome,” etc.(274)

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