MADAME DE SWETCHINE.
BY REV. FATHER LACORDAIRE.
Many times already have I rendered to illustrious Catholics who have died in our day, a funeral and a pious homage. In turn, General Drouot, Daniel O'Connell, and Frederic Ozanam have heard my voice above their tomb, a voice far below that which their glory merited, but which, nevertheless, holds from a sincere admiration the right to praise them. To-day, after these familiar names for which praise can do nothing, I pronounce another name, a name which may appear almost unknown, perhaps even that of a foreigner, which, however, belongs to the nation of the great minds of our age. A superior writer, Madame de Swetchine published nothing; a conversationalist of the first order, the fame of her salon never penetrated beyond that circle which, though not public, is more than privacy; a woman of antique faith and of active piety, she neither founded nor presided over any orders; and yet, for more than forty years she swayed an empire, to which the Count de Maistre submitted, before which Madame de Staël inclined, and which retained around her, even to her last days, admirers accustomed to act on public opinion, but still more accustomed to enlighten their own by hers. To the Count de Maistre succeeded M. de Bonald. The Abbé Frayssinous, M. Cuvier, to these M. de Montalembert, the Count de Falloux, Prince Albert de Broglie, and many others, a younger generation, but not less submissive to the ascendency of a soul where virtue served genius.
Why should we be silent? Why not tell the living what they have lost in the dead? While a man lives, modesty should guard all his actions, and friendship itself should be restrained by it; but death has this of admirable; that it restores to memory as to judgment all its liberty. In taking away those from whom it strikes the double rock of weakness and envy, it permits those who have seen to lift the veil, those who have received to acknowledge the benefit, those who have loved to pour forth their affection. Even the obscurity of merit adds to the desire of making it known; and if this merit was illustrious, being all hidden, it is almost a religious duty to draw it forth from the tomb, and to render it before men the honor it has before God. So I hope I shall be pardoned these few pages; but did I not, yet I should still write them. I owe them to a friendship which began in the shadows and perils of my youth, and which since, through all the vicissitudes of a quarter of a century, never ceased to open to me perspectives of honor so difficult to recognize in the confused and agitated times when faith itself is troubled by earthly events, and seeks a route worthy of its mission.
Madame Sophie Jeanne de Swetchine was born in Russia, on the 4th December, 1782. Her family name was Soymonoff. She had a sister who married the Prince de Gagarin, a former Russian ambassador at Rome; she herself was united at the age of seventeen to General de Swetchine, Military Governor of St. Petersburg. She belonged by birth to the Greek religion, but her education had abandoned her to the scepticism of the eighteenth century, and [{737}] according to the natural course of things, she would have died an unbeliever or a schismatic in the depth of some half-oriental estate. God willed it otherwise, and hence arises from the first the lively interest attached to her life. For a Christian, a soul's predestination, and the mysterious ways by which God conducts it to its end without infringing its liberty, are a spectacle that has above all others an inexhaustible charm. The secrets of grace and free will, so intimate in our own hearts, are less enlightened in a history which is not our own; and the communion of saints which makes us all, believing and loving, one in a single light and a single goodness, gives us, in the account of a difficult conversion, the feeling of a conquest in which we ourselves have shared.
The young Sophie de Soymonoff was then a Greek and an unbeliever. She had been beguiled from her birth by the illusions of rationalism, and the snares of the most singular fortune which error ever had; for the Greek religion has this trait solely its own, that it presents a much restricted and very firm negation to the true faith, under an authority cut loose from its base; yet which, however, preserves all the rest with a profound respect for antiquity. In seeing this exact episcopal succession, this unaltered symbol, this inviolable discipline, these sacraments which Rome herself recognizes, we ask if an error, respecting so long and so well the limits which it traced when it first arose, does not seem like those rocks which an irruption has thrown from their foundations and which remain immovable under the eye and the action of ages? Whilst in the West, Protestantism is unable to create either dogmas or discipline or hierarchy, and floats as a wandering cloud from mind to mind, the East, on the contrary, sees produced the fixity of error. Here dissolution, there petrifaction; and between the two the truth which is immutable without being inert, progressive without being subject to change. However surprising may be this contrast, it is not difficult to account for it, if we consider, on the one hand, the difference of nature between the eastern man and the western; and on the other, the diversity of the political destiny assigned them. The eastern man contemplates and adores, while his rival, less happy in contemplation, is more so in acting. Thus the one has created generous institutions, under which he has from age to age extended his empire, while the other has passed from servitude to servitude, incapable of seating himself in the shade of a regular authority, and of developing in a free atmosphere either the evil or the good which, he has conceived. Hence in Europe error takes a character of life which conducts it to its most extreme logical consequences, at the same time that it wears at Constantinople a character of death, which leaves it what it was, by impotence, not by virtue.
Nevertheless, it is easy for a vulgar intelligence to be deceived, especially where family and national traditions give to error the reflex of patriotism, and when an absolute government, the jealous guardian of a religion of which it is the head, suffers no emanations of the truth to reach the soul. Sophie de Soymonoff was born a prisoner in an empire of seventy millions of souls. She was six hundred leagues from St. Peter's, and a thousand years from the true faith. But, however vigilant despotism may be, however thick its dungeon walls, God remains ever near, and he draws therefrom, when he wills, the instruments which his Providence uses to preserve for man the share which he assigns him in all his works. At an age when Madame de Swetchine could not yet sound either the poverty of the Greek schism or the abyss of unbelief, a man of God came to her. He was not a priest, but an ambassador of a king despoiled of the greater part of his possessions, shut up in an island of the Mediterranean, and who, in sending to St. Petersburg a [{738}] representative of his misfortunes, thought not that he sent there a chargé d'affaires of divine grace, marked with the seal of the elect. Count Joseph de Maistre, tor he it was, detested with all his soul the two Colossuses of his day, the French revolution and the French empire, because in the one he saw the oppression of European nationalities; and the other, because he thought he saw it imprinted forever with an anti-Christian spirit. But he loved France, because, though it was the seat of the revolution and of the empire, he discerned there an indestructible faith, the faith of Clovis, of Charlemagne, and of St. Louis, and I know not what predestination that ravished his judgment, and rendered him the prophet of that very country which he esteemed so culpable and yet so great. Born in Savoy, in the country of St. Francis de Sales, and of Jean Jacques Rousseau, he was French like them in his genius, but even more so by his faith and his heart, which had but two pulsations, one for the church, the other for France; generous mortal who silenced his antipathies by his convictions, in whom blindness did not extinguish the light, and who, like Philoctetes, wounded by the arrows of Hercules, could be separated from Greece, neither in his accusations nor in his affections. Madame de Swetchine soon met this extraordinary man in the saloons of St. Petersburg, and it was the first great event of her life. A positive spirit, but amiable, as his posthumous correspondence proves, M. de Maistre loved conversation. He did not love it as a throne from which his genius could display its brilliancy, but as a free and delicate interchange of thoughts, in which grace unites with intelligence, taste with boldness, freedom with reserve, bringing together in an hour all times and all gifts; and forming a bond of union between men who are pleased with sentiments of kindness and esteem. Generous focus of cultivated minds of all countries, conversation is the last asylum of human liberty. It speaks when the tribune is silent; it supplies the place of books when books are not to be had; it gives currency to thoughts which despotism persecutes; finally, it warms, and agitates; it moves, and is, where it can live, the principle and the all-powerful echo of public opinion. It is not astonishing then that great men find in it a pleasure which is for them like the accomplishment of a duty. So long as society converses it is safe.
It did not look much as if the Count de Maistre could find at St. Petersburg an aliment for this noble want of his heart. The Russian is endowed with facility of expression, a quickness of apprehension, and it is no flattery disrobed of justice which has named him the Frenchman of the North. But he is closed up as soon as he comes into the world; deprived of all political liberty, he has not even in his religion room for his breast to expand, and the Christ he adores appears to him only under the sceptre of his masters and behind their implacable majesty. A fortress encloses at St. Petersburg the temple where sleep the Czars, and, once dead, their people cannot even freely visit their ashes. Fear, suspicion, doubt, all the shades of inquietude dwell in the Russian, and are translated on his brow by a calm which nothing destroys, on his lips by a reserve which nothing dissipates. To converse it is necessary to be open; and to open one's self, one must possess his life, his goods, his honor, his liberty. When therefore the Count de Maistre entered St. Petersburg, he might say that he entered the capital of silence, and that his genius would be there only a monologue.
He was deceived. I knew Madame de Swetchine only during the last twenty-five years of her life; and she was fifty when I first rested my eyes on her benevolent countenance. Doubtless age had ripened her art of thinking and speaking, but it is impossible that she should not have had something of it in that young outburst which early announced to others, and to herself, the treasure which was carried in her bosom. Certain it is that M. de Maistre had soon discovered it. In [{739}] the midst of that society of great lords and diplomatists, he discovered a young woman who bore in her language the marks of superiority, and whose conversation, springing from a source still purer than the mind, touched with remarkable tact the frontiers of liberty, without ever passing beyond them. Confidence is an irrepressible want of our poor heart; it cannot live alone; it opens itself unconsciously, and when life's experience has revealed the peril of abandoning it to itself, it becomes wiser but no fonder of reserve, and counts it a supreme happiness to meet with security in the intercourse of society. Less happy, however, than the greater part of men, the man of genius has need also of a certain elevation in the minds that come in contact with his own; and, though the crowd has its charm and its power, were it only in hearing him who rules, yet it is in the shock of two intelligences, each worthy of the other, that conversation has its highest flight, and reaches the last fibres of our being, and reveals to it the eternal pleasure of minds speaking with minds. Demosthenes discoursing before the Athenians, Cicero pleading in the Forum or the Senate of Rome, did not make, as perhaps some may think, a monologue: the multitude responded, and their eloquence was the fruit of a great soul heard by a great people. There is no solitary eloquence, and every orator has a double genius, his own and that of the age that hears him.
Madame de Staël, who was the first conversationalist of her time, said she was unhappy because of the universal mediocrity, and yet she conversed at Paris among the people the most prompt in the world to speak, and the most confiding: what would she have said at St. Petersburg? M. de Maistre was there, but he was there with a Frenchwoman, born in Russia, who would one day, recognizing the mistake of her birth, live and die in her true country, the country of an incorruptible faith, and of a liberty which had only an eclipse, because conversation has always sustained it. Louis XIV. conversed at Marseilles without suspecting that conversation would kill his despotism. In the East, the destined seat of absolute power, the prince does not converse; he gives his order, and is silent.
It is impossible for two souls to meet each other in a conversation which mutually pleases them, without having religion, sooner or later, enter into their discourse. Religion is the interior vestment of the soul. There are some who tear this vestment to tatters; there are others who soil it; but there are a few who despoil themselves of it all save some shred, and this shred, such as it is, is sufficient to prevent them from appearing absolutely destitute of divinity. Madame de Swetchine was an unbeliever, and, she had behind her, and beyond her unbelief, the Greek schism. The Count de Maistre was a Catholic, not only by faith, but by direct mental intuition. He was at that point where a man can say, so obvious was the truth to him: I believe not, I see. What were the talks of these two souls on a subject in regard to which they had nothing in common, except their genius? What did they say from 1803 to 1810, from the day when they met for the first time, to that on which one of them bent before the other, owned herself vanquished, and, on the bosom of friendship, sighed the last sigh of error? Doubtless God alone knows. God alone knows the stratagems which suspended for seven years the efficacy of an eloquence sustained by divine grace, and disputed with it, step by step, the victim and the victory. However, two immortal books of the Count de Maistre: Soirées de Saint Petersbourg, and the book Du Pape, may give us the secret of that controversy lost to the memory of man, but which we shall one day find in that of God.
It is manifest that the wife of the Governor of St. Petersburg opposed from the first to the ambassador of Sardinia all the negations of the eighteenth century, those shadows which Voltaire had invested with all [{740}] the transparency of his mocking spirit, and around which Jean Jacques Rousseau had thrown the poetry of his melancholy imagination. Doubt, which in all men is a profound abyss, is still more so in the heart of woman. Nature cannot be denied with impunity, and the nature of woman is to believe, for it is her vocation to love. Happily Madame de Swetchine was strong and sincere; she could follow with her mind's eye her friend's thought, and penetrate, little by little, as she became accustomed to it, into those regions of truth where mockery had not left even a trace, and where imagination raised not a single cloud. Laughter ceases as we ascend nearer to God, and so also do tears without cause; the intellect becomes serious, and the heart contented.
When the Count de Maistre had dispelled the phantoms, did Madame de Swetchine see at a glance the whole reality of Christianity, or did the Greek Church interpose itself, as a half-light between a doubt which was no more, and a faith which was not yet? In considering the slowness of her progress it is natural to believe, and the Count de Maistre's correspondence confirms it, that the neophyte took the longest route, and that she did not give herself up to any sudden illumination. It was then the book Du Pape which succeeded to the Soirées de Saint Petersbourg. M. de Maistre had dictated it with one eye on Russia and the other on France. Not that there was any relation between the two countries in the point of view of religion. France, since God had made her the eldest daughter of the church, had not been for a single day a traitor to the sacred unity of her mother; and from the battle-fields of Tolbiac to the scaffolds of the Reign of Terror, she held herself faithful on the only and immovable rock where God had sealed in this world the mystery of truth. But if is true that she was withdrawn from the public law of Europe, which during several centuries had accorded a political supremacy to the Roman pontiff and that she had derived from this sort of resistance, I know not what of personal independence, which without detracting from her theological submission, had given her in certain matters a more apparent reserve. Yet if Louis XIV. had not taken it into his head to establish as a maxim what was only a national instinct, regulated by a profound faith, the sentiments of France would never have assumed in the eyes of Christendom the doubtful coloring which after the ruins of the revolution struck the genius of the Count de Maistre and inspired him with the book, Du Pape. He saw in Russia the immense fall of the Greek Church, caused by this single point of infidelity to St. Peter, and without fearing for France what no one feared for her, he erected to the papacy that beautiful and proud, statue, which posterity will ever regard with honor, even though they should accuse the artist of having known the past less well than the future.
Thou art Peter, and on this rock I build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. These simple words, regarded in the gospel and in history, taught Madame de Swetchine that the Greek Church, although preserving the traditions of episcopal authority, was detached from the centre of unity, and consequently from the throne itself of life. After this it was easy to recognize its effects in the spiritual miseries she had under her eyes. The clergy are not the whole church; they are only a portion of it. The church is the assemblage of all souls who know God, and do not consciously reject either the words he has given the world, or the authority which he has founded to preserve and propagate his words and his grace. Though a visible body in the faithful exteriorly marked with his seal, she yet embraces under the eyes of God, who penetrates and judges all consciences, a multitude unknown to herself, in whom invincible ignorance [{741}] creates good faith, and who live unknowingly the truth of which she is the depositary. This is the church. As to the clergy, all is said in these words of our Lord ascending to heaven: Go and teach all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to keep my commandments. The clergy are the apostolate of the church; they are the venerated summit of faith, the army of souls called by God to spread the only law which is infallible, the only force which conquers the flesh, the only unction which gives humility. "Who hears you hears me," our Lord has said: "who despises you despises me." All may and must befall the clergy, hate, exile, torture, death; there is but one thing which they cannot and should not merit, contempt. When Christ suffered in the judgment hall under the blows of the vilest executioners, when he bore his cross from Jerusalem to Calvary, when he was raised on it in the face of the whole world, there was against him from heaven to earth, from Satan to man, a hate deeper and broader than the ocean. But respect survived; and Pilate in washing his hands, the centurion in beholding the cross, the virgins in weeping, the sun in hiding its light, were the revelations of a conscience greater than the punishment, and which held the astonished universe in expectation and awe. Now, by a judgment of God, which is the chastisement of a fault of centuries, the Greek clergy are despised. They are despised not only by the unbeliever but by the believer; they are despised by the penitent whose confessions they hear, by the purified Christians to whom they give the body and blood of their God. This contempt is striking and universal; the pope or Greek priest bears it on his forehead as an avenging sign, and even the kiss of the Czar confirms and enlarges it.
Placed between this spectacle and the vision of the Count de Maistre, the whole light came to Madame de Swetchine, and then commenced for her the second struggle, the struggle of the truth against the holiest affections of the heart. Truth is, no doubt, the great country of the mind; it is father, mother, brother, sister, and native land; but man has on earth another family and another country, the better he is the more he loves them, and virtue; in so far as it is human, makes them the cherished centre of all that is good, amiable, and generous. To these ties already so strong, religion adds its divine influence, and from the same table to the same altar man leads his happiness, and there attaches by a single chain time and eternity. What a blow is that when some day, by an evidence which leaves no possible retreat, the daughter shall see God standing between her and her mother, between her and her husband, between her and her native country, and there shall be said to her in the same voice which Abraham heard: "Go out from, thy land and thy kindred, and from the house of thy father, and come to the land which I shall show thee." There are some, it is true, who think this voice should never be heard, but for three thousand years, since Abraham, it has commanded and been obeyed. God is stronger than man, and man is great enough to sacrifice to truth more than himself.
Madame de Swetchine had not only to fear the rending of her heart, she had before her an intolerance which the opposition of our century had only irritated. The Emperor Nicholas did not yet reign, but the conversion of a Russian soul to the Catholic Church was none the less an act of high treason, which exposed her to the severities of the morrow, if she escaped the inattention of the evening. After having endured this stormy situation for six or seven years, Madame de Swetchine turned her eyes toward France, and obtained from the Emperor Alexander, a generous prince, himself agitated by an unknown inspiration, the permission to live there. France received her in 1818 at the age of thirty-four, in the plenitude of her faculties ripened by a long intercourse with men and events.
It is not without a purpose that God draws to himself' a creature condemned to error by all the ties of family and country, and transports her far away to a foreign capital in the midst of a new people. Much less so is it when this grace falls on a choice intelligence, placed in the first ranks of society, and who unites in herself all the gifts of nature, and all those of the world. Paris since 1750 had been the centre of the European mind. It had by half a century's crusade against Christ, drawn the nations from those old certainties to which they owed their existence. An unheard of revolution had been the chastisement of this fault, a chastisement so much the more remarkable, as France had invoked just principles, conformed to its ancient traditions, and as it was the defect of a superior light to restrain herself, that she had traversed everything with a devastating impetuosity. She had remained faithful only to her sword, and still after twenty-five years of victory, worthy of her happiest days, she had just succumbed by excess in the battlefield, and twice the foreigner had soiled with his presence that superb city, the mistress, by the ascendency of her intelligence, of the modern world. It was there on the day after its reverses, that Providence conducted Madame de Swetchine. The question was to know if France, aware of the need she had of God to reconstruct her, would hear the voice of her misfortunes; if recalled to her ancient kings, and reconciled in her old temples, she would, consent to be again Christian in order to give her liberty the sanction of the faith which had always guided and always served her.
Few minds in either camp discerned this relation of Christianity with the institutions of a liberally governed people. The example of England, where the church had always supported the commons, said but little to the publicists who were the most charmed with her Parliament. Madame de Swetchine herself had had in the author of Considerations sur la France, a master who saw plainly the vices of the French revolution, but who without betraying civil and political liberty, did not well comprehend, perhaps, either all its necessity or all its future. Happily she had lived under absolute power; she had had under her eyes for nearly forty years a Christian Church in a servile land, and this lesson could not be lost on a mind as true as hers. The evils of liberty are great among a people who do not know how to measure it, who at every moment refuse it by jealousy, or go beyond it through inexperience. But these evils, great as they may be, belong to the apprenticeship of liberty and not to its essence; they still leave it daylight, space, and life, a resource for the feeble, a hope for the vanquished, and above all the sacred emulation of good against evil. Under despotism good and evil sleep on the same pillow; souls are invaded by a dull degeneracy because they have no longer a struggle to sustain, and Christianity itself, a protected victim, expiates in unspeakable humiliations the benefits of its peace. Madame de Swetchine saw this. Her great heart was full of this when she entered Paris, and amid the roar of tempests she knelt, for the first time in her life, at altars combated, but esteemed. It is necessary to have suffered for liberty of faith to know its price. It is necessary to have passed under the gibbets of schism, to be able fully to know what it is to breathe the atmosphere of truth. How often have I seen Madame de Swetchine's eyes fill with tears at the thought that she was in a Catholic country! How often has she been inwardly moved at seeing a good priest, a good religious, a good brother of the Christian Schools, in a word, our Lord's image on a sincere brow or in a virtuous life! Ah! this it is which here we never lose. We [{743}] can dishonor I know not how many human and even divine things; but in the shipwreck Christ remains visible to us in many who worthily love and serve him.
The life of Madame de Swetchine during the forty years she passed in our midst was one continual thanksgiving. More than once under a reign of persecution, like that of the Emperor Nicholas, she had fears for the security of her sojourn in France. Once, notwithstanding her great age, she believed it necessary not to leave it to the zeal even of her most tried friends, and rushed to St. Petersburg to implore the forgetfulness of the Czar. God still saved her. She had acquired such a prestige, that it might be said that she represented at Paris the honor and intelligence of Russia, and this, it is probable, was what, in the most difficult times, saved her from being recalled.
This dependence which she still had on her country, because her estates there might be held to answer for her personal conduct, imposed on her an extreme prudence in a saloon which was frequented by her compatriots and by men of all ranks and all opinions. But this reserve, which she had acquired as a habit in her own country, detracted nothing from the grace and sincerity of her discourse; whether she was silent or whether she expressed her thoughts, according to the degree of confidence inspired by those present, she never betrayed it; and in her silence even, she seized things on the side which remained accessible, and gave them clearness enough, to instruct without displeasing. An exquisite naturalness covered her speech, though tact and unexpectedness were its most usual characteristics. When she met Madame de Staël for the first time, each knew the other without being told; and happening to be placed at opposite corners of a large hall, they observed each other with curiosity. Madame de Staël, accustomed to homage, waited for Madame de Swetchine to come to her. Seeing she did not, she all at once crossed the long space which separated them, stopped before her, and said in a lively and caressing tone: "Do you know, Madame, that I am much hurt by your coldness toward me?" "Madame," was the reply, "it is for the king to salute first." This remark can give some idea of the ingenuous and submissive style of Madame de Swetchine's conversation. Different from Madame de Staël, who disserted rather than conversed, Madame de Swetchine raised her voice but slightly, and had no accent of domination; she waited her time without impatience, without caring for success, always more happy to please than ambitious to dazzle. An inexhaustible interest in those whom she had once loved, gave to her intimacy a sweet and maternal character. Her genius was approached as a focus of light, no doubt, but with a filial disposition which endeared its brilliancy, which was the fruit of a goodness as manifest as was her intellectual superiority. Introduced into the highest French society by the Duchesse de Duras and the Marquise de Montcalm, sisters of the Duc de Richelieu, she was not long in making felt around her that attraction which is produced in society by acknowledged eminence of character. What she had been when young at St. Petersburg in her husband's salons, she was in the heart of France; but what at St. Petersburg was only a conquest of suffrages and of admiration, became at Paris an apostolate.
When a soul passes to God's side, that is to say, to the side of Christianity, the only expression here below of the divine life, she can find nowhere else the principles and motives of her actions. All in her proceeds from the sacred height and returns to it, Madame de Swetchine lived in the world, but was not of it; she was held to it only by its good—only to make her protest for God, and to serve him; an admirable office in which the world assumes all its grandeur; in which fallen under the strokes of a mind that [{744}] knows what it is worth, it arises and occupies with him every instant of thought and every vibration of the heart. He who is disabused by the simple experience of life, despises the world, while he who is disabused by light from on High esteems it. Being then no longer in the world for the world, Madame de Swetchine was more than ever there for God; she followed his course with all-powerful interest, attentive to seize whatever might remove or approach her to the principle of all life. M. de Maistre was no more. A different school from his was forming; Madame de Swetchine saw unfold its first germs, and she surrounded with her counsels and her affection the young representatives of an idea which her recollections, perhaps, would have repulsed, but which the freedom of her mind rendered her capable of judging, for this was the character as the temper of her genius. In a time of intellectual dependence, in which parties bore away everything in their train, Madame de Swetchine made no engagement, and submitted to no attraction; she isolated every question from the noise around her, and placed it in the silence of eternity. Thus was one sure after having heard all that was said, to encounter on crossing her threshold something which had not been heard, an original view of the truth; and even when she was mistaken, a proof that her thought did not belong to herself alone, because she sought it in God.
It was after the failure of L' Avenir that I first saw her. I approached the borders of her soul as a seaweed broken by the waves, and I remember yet, after twenty-five years, how she placed her light and strength at the service of a young man unknown to her. Her counsels sustained me both against despondeney and exaltation. One day when she thought she noticed in my words a doubt or lassitude, she said to me with a singular accent, the simple words: "Take care." She was wonderful in discovering the point to which one inclined, and where it was necessary to bear assistance. The measure of her thought was so perfect, the freedom of her judgment so remarkable, that I was long in comprehending to whom and to what she was devoted. Where in others I should have known in advance what was to be said, here I was almost always ignorant, and nowhere did I feel myself more out of the world. This charm from above was not diffused over me alone. Other minds, my predecessors or my contemporaries, felt its action, and it is impossible to say for how many souls this single soul was a lamp. Not only the day, at fixed hours, not only the evening until midnight, but at almost every moment, confidence sought her with an importunity which was never complained of. Thus was formed around a foreigner I know not what country, which was of all times and of all lands, for it was the truth which was its ground, its atmosphere, its light, and its motion.
Nature, it is evident, could not suffice of itself to feed this inexhaustible conversation. It was nourished by an assiduous reading of all that was remarkable which appeared in Europe. No book, as no man, escaped her ardent curiosity. After the example of the Count de Maistre, who inspired the taste, Madame de Swetchine pencil-marked every page which struck her, and in her first leisure hour between two conversations she engraved on a light leaf of brass the thought which had illumined hers. She added her own reflections with the rapidity of a first glance, and this triple commerce with books, men, and herself, which was never interrupted, gave to her intelligence a spring which was never exhausted. What, however, in the midst of the contradictions of her century were the principles which guided her, and of which she shed around her the unfailing clearness? In recalling my recollections of her, I should say they were Our Lord the life of heaven and earth; the Catholic Church, the only society of the mind, because it alone possesses the foundation of faith and the [{745}] inspiration of charity; Rome, the centre of the world, because she is the centre of the church; the human family progressive on a basis that does not change; civil and political liberty, the daughter of Christianity; commerce, industry, science, all grand things, but under things grander still, honor and justice; all man's toil powerless to diminish poverty without virtue; France, a people loved by God—its revolution a vengeance and a mercy, a germ under ruins; philosophy, as old as man, the vestibule of Christianity when not as yet enlightened by faith, and its crown when faith has transformed it; reason, the inborn light whence philosophy proceeds, and which Christianity perfects; the future, an uncertain abyss, but in which God is ever found; error, a crime sometimes, a weakness oftener; tolerance, an homage to the truth, a proof of faith; force, which is next to impotency; authority, an ascendency which has its source in antiquity and in right; property, the union of man with the earth by labor, the first liberty of the world, without which no other subsists; liberty the guaranty of right against whatever is not right. These, if my memory is faithful, are the sound which at every hour and under every touch was given forth by that harmonious lyre which we now hear no more. A constant simplicity in an equal elevation, a goodness which came from Christ, gave to her doctrines, apart from their merit as truth, a personal influence. In hearing her this double charm might be resisted, but she could not be hated or despised; she could not but be loved, and inspire the desire to become better. Happy mouth, which for forty years made not an enemy to God, but which poured into a multitude of wounded or languishing hearts the germ of the resurrection and the rapture of life.
Yet, perhaps I deceive those who read me. They may persuade themselves that the friend of the Count de Maistre and of so many eminent Christians won their friendship only by the merit of a superior intelligence. That would be much, but in Madame de Swetchine it was not all. Intellect, when it comes from God, is inseparable from charity. Madame de Swetchine loved the poor. Like Frederic Ozanam, another blessing of Providence that we have lost, she knew how to forget science in presence of misfortune, and her lips, accustomed to things profound, had only divine things in the face of suffering and death. In entering her dwelling this might not be believed. Pictures by the great masters, dazzling candelabras, precious vases, books enclosed under crystals richly encased, flowers and drapery, all suggested the idea of costly magnificence hardly compatible with the secret love of the unfortunate. But, as I have said, Madame de Swetchine had in all things, even in duty, a point of view which was her own. Persuaded that she owed it to her family and to her country, to represent them worthily in the capital of a great people, she had the art of being simple in the midst of a splendor which she considered necessary, and to find economy in unseen privations. Long before her death, for example, she had no carriage. She walked with scrupulous exactness to the offices of St. Thomas of Aquina, her parish church, although she had a private chapel, and though her age as well as her infirmities would permit her to remain at home or go out only in a carriage.
One day her secret escaped her, Troubled, I imagine by something she had read, or some discourse which I had made her, she asked me with a kind of anxiety if I believed that in giving a sixth part of her income to the poor, she accomplished the precept of almsgiving. Another time, when some early vegetables were served at her table, at which I appeared surprised: "What would you?" she said to me; "there are people who raise these for us; would it not be ungrateful for those who can, not to recompense them for their labor?" This remark opened to me a new order of ideas. I understood that riches should not be [{746}] used simply to support those who cannot gain their own living whether from want of strength or want of work, but that they should also, according to their amount, be used to protect all the honest developments of human toil. It is thus that in the beautiful days of Venice, Genoa, Florence, and of Pisa, so many Christian merchants raised immortal monuments to their country, and that at Rome so many cardinals have built palaces. Magnificence is a virtue, says St. Thomas Aquinas, when it is regulated by reason, and very different from luxury, which is vanity and ruin.
At Madame de Swetchine's house was seen a mute, whom she had adopted as if in return for the gift of speech, which she had received in so eminent a degree. It was her custom to associate the care of the poor with the happy events of her life. Each of them recalled a happiness which he represented. She visited them on fixed days; she herself carried them assistance, and above fill the light of her presence. This intercourse kept alive in her the memory of the man, so quick to be effaced from those who have not the memory of God. She continued it even to the last days of her life; and when already the breath was uncertain and trembling on her lips, she asked for accounts of her poor. I saw, when we were seated around the sad couch of this beautiful light, her dear mute watching from an adjoining chamber, a vigilant sentinel of a life which had given her so much of itself, and which was fading away between friendship remaining faithful, and poverty remaining grateful.
Shall I speak, after the poor, of that beloved chapel, where the former unbeliever of St. Petersburg opened her heart before the God of her maturity? It was there, above all, that she lived, and there that she had gathered into a narrow space all that taste and riches could do to express and satisfy her love. Charming and pious sanctuary! you could not contain many souls, but there was one which sufficed to fill you, and which you filled also. Now you are no more. Death has despoiled the seats where so many friends came to pray; where prayer was so sweet, and peace so profound. We shall see you no more, nor your images, nor your precious stones, nor the tabernacle where at the side of the Lord reposed the virtue all entire of our friend. You had her last thought; it was of you she murmured at the moment eternity seized and carried her before God. Can I, then, better end than with you? For whom should I still ask a remembrance, a tear, an admiration?
For several years Madame de Swetchine had had preludes of her end. The consequences of a fall had left on her face a serious hurt which at intervals and without warning, rendered speaking very painful. This pain did not arrest the rapture of her communications. She remained what she had ever been, the mistress of herself, and occupied with all, winning hearts as in the days of her youth, when the Count de Maistre sent her his portrait with these words, written by his own hand:
"Docile à l'appel plein de grâce
De l'amitié qui vous attend,
Volez, image, et prenez place
Où l'original se plait tant."
Happier than this great man who saw only the first dawning of Sophie de Soymonoff, we have enjoyed her perfect day; he formed her for us, and happier herself than her master, she could, by the clearness of a tempered reason, bring to her age a judgment in which hope surpassed fear, and which best indicated the true route to minds desirous of knowing and serving it. But at last we had to lose her. Every star below fades, every treasure vanishes, every soul is recalled. God did not spare his servant the agonies of death, but he left her to surmount them the influence which she had acquired over all things by seventy-five years of combat. Seated in her parlor to the last hour, she continued to receive those whom she loved, to speak [{747}] to them of themselves, and of the future, to foresee all, and to animate all. Her reclining figure raised itself to smile, she kept the accent and the thread of her thought, and her eyes with their serenity still brightened the touching scene in which we disputed for her with God. A last shock took her from us on the 10th September, 1857, at six o'clock in the morning, having a few days before received the viaticum and the unction of eternal life.
Alas! dear and illustrious lady. I cannot attach to your name the glory of those Roman women whom St. Jerome has immortalized, and yet you were of their race: you were of the race of those women who followed Christ through all the stations of his pilgrimage, who watched him as he died, who embalmed him in his tomb, and who were the first to salute him on the morning of his resurrection. You believed all and saw all. Born in schism, brought up in unbelief, God sent you to open your eyes, one of the rarest minds of this century; his hand touched your eyelids, and the sight which your country refused you, came to you from foreign skies. A Christian, you aspired to the liberty of Christ; conquered for, God through the language of France, you wished to live under the French speech, and quitting a country you always loved, you came among us with the modesty of a disciple and of an exile. But you brought us more than we gave you. The light of your soul illumined the land which received you, and for forty years you were for us the sweetest echo of the gospel, and the surest road to honor. No failure annoyed you, no success ensnared you; you were ever the same, because truth and justice do not change. Ah! doubtless your mission was to do us good in our pale West, but you had another mission, I believe; you were near us as an advance guard of the conversion of the East. Daughter of Greece! God wished to show us in your person, as he already had in several of your compatriots, what will, one day, be that old church of our first fathers in the faith, when, brought back from a fatal separation, she shall receive from the might of St. Peter that emission of unity which she formerly sent us from Jerusalem and Antioch, and of which we guard for her with fidelity the precious deposit. Yes, we trust the love which you preserved for your country; trust the presentiments of your Evangelist, the great Count de Maistre; trust in the long hopes of the Latin Church, and its constant respect for Christian Greece. Yes, sooner or later, the East will bend before the West, as a brother before a brother. St. Sophia will hear resound again in the two languages the symbol which has not ceased to unite us. Liberty of conscience, acquired by the human race, will no longer permit error to guard itself by persecution. Veils will fall; the obscure victims of political fear shake off their chains; all minds from one end of Europe to the other will follow the inclination of nature and grace; and if there remain, as there must, unbelievers and Protestants, at least there will remain no longer a nation crucified for error. In those days, dear and noble friend whom we have lost, and live here to weep—in those days, you will raise a little your cold stone at Montmartre, you will breathe an instant the air in which you lived, and recognizing at once the balm of your first and of your second country, you will bless God who called you before others, and to whom you responded with that faith without stain which enlightened us ourselves, and by that unconquerable hope which sustained us against all the failures of a century so fruitful in lapses and abortions.