AFFECTION FOR MOTHER BARAT
Her life, to all outward appearances, flowed on quietly enough at St. Charles, but it was marked by several heavy crosses. The one which caused her the bitterest affliction, and weighed upon her longest was the suspension of Mother Barat's correspondence. It began at the time of her return from the Pottowatomie Mission, 1842, and lasted until 1847. Her letters, all but one, reached Mother Barat; but the first two written after her arrival at St. Charles having remained unanswered, she thought herself in disgrace with her Mother General, to whom she had always been so tenderly united, and did not venture to write again except on one or two important occasions. The silence of Mother Barat, or the suppression of her letters to Mother Duchesne, if it really took place, is a mystery which will probably never be explained. The Superior General had no reason for displeasure against her old friend and one of her dearest daughters; nor was there any one, either in the Mother House or in St. Charles who could have any motive for intercepting her letters, or was capable of conduct so unworthy and so cruel. The motive which led Mother Duchesne to write to Mother Barat in 1843, and again in 1846, was to save the houses of St. Charles and Florissant from the suppression with which they were threatened. The former escaped, but the latter was closed, to the great sorrow of the holy mother, who grieved not from personal motives, but because of the loss it would entail upon the poorer people of the town, since it was the only Catholic school in the place. From the beginning the house of Florissant had been scarcely supporting itself; and Reverend Mother Cutts, the Vicar, thought it better to close it, and so strengthen the other two communities.
In 1847 a business affair required Mother Duchesne to write to the Mother House. This time, not venturing to address Mother Barat in person, she directed her letter to one of the Assistants General, who was well known to her; but her anguish of soul was too keen not to find expression in it. The kind heart of the Mother General was filled with sympathy and compassion; and as she was about to send to America, Mother Aloysia Jouvé, a niece of Mother Duchesne, she directed her to go to St. Charles immediately on arriving, in order to comfort her aunt by her presence. At the same time she made her the bearer of a letter full of the warmest affection. Mother Duchesne's joy and gratitude were in proportion to the bitterness of her past sorrow, and for the remaining years of her life, her correspondence with her beloved Mother General was all that her faithful heart could desire. The latter often sent her presents, which she knew the aged Mother would be happy to bestow upon the other houses, or upon the Indians, or upon the poor.
During the latter years of her life, many of her most valued friends, both in France and in America, passed into their eternity, among others Father Van Quickenborne, and Bishops Dubourg and Rosati, with whom, during so many years, she had borne the heat and the burden of the day, in the harvest field of her Missouri mission. Several times, also, during those years, she was tried by severe illness, to say nothing of the infirmities which overtook her after her arrival in America, and caused her a great deal of suffering without impairing her wonderful activity or inducing her to relax either in her austerities or in her devotions. As she advanced in years, though growing naturally weaker, she was never idle for a moment. When not on her knees in the chapel, she was busy knitting, seated with a prayer-book open before her, in her narrow cell, which to her great consolation, was separated from the chapel only by a partition wall. Sometimes, when the weather was fine, she would go and sit under an old pear-tree in the garden with her knitting. This she would lay down now and then to take up her French hymn book, and with a weak and quavering voice, she would sing the beautiful hymns she had always loved. One of them, entitled "Beau Ciel," was her favorite, for it gave expression to the longing of her soul for her eternal home.