CHRONOLOGY

IX
EUGÉNIE DE GUÉRIN

She lived a solitary, an almost eremitical life, utterly secluded from the contact, and almost from the knowledge, of the great world. No isolation in America to-day could be quite so complete as that of a lady in a French provincial town a hundred years ago: the same quiet waysides, the same faces at the same corners the same seasons in their eternal change, the bell of centuries tolling a monotonous succession of births, marriages, and deaths. All the varied doings of mankind in hasty cities, kings crowned and uncrowned, new thoughts, new fashions, new vices, new beauty, echoed in that tranquil dwelling like the far passage of some martial pageant stirring a dream. “Two visits, two letters written, one received, fill a day,” she says; “fill a day full for us.”

She did not complain of the solitude, she loved it. She was born in it, grew up in it, and wished to die in it. Every tree, every flower was a friend to her. Old sunlit walls caressed her with a touch like love’s. “I could take a vow to remain here forever,” she says. “No place could be to me so much my home.” The habit of loneliness grows on her, as all our habits do, until one day, returning to a house quite empty, she exclaims, “You cannot think how gaily I took possession of this abandoned dwelling. Here I am alone, absolutely alone, in a place which of itself breeds calm reflection. I hear the passers pass, and do not even turn my head.”

In a life so unbroken little movements made a great stir. Twice she sojourned for a few weeks in Paris and she made a brief visit to a watering place in the Pyrenees. On all these occasions she was quick and wide-eyed to catch what went on about her. She responded to great scenes and notable monuments and was not incurious as to the ways of men and women. But she felt no eagerness to change her own habits and returned with undisturbed delight to the places she had always loved. “Repose is what delights me; not inaction, but the poised quiet of a heart that is content.”

Do not imagine that her solitude meant always quiet, however. Such outward peace perhaps fosters inward turbulence, at any rate leaves room for it. Hearts unvexed by the world’s rash hurry have tempests and revolutions and tumults all their own. How many strange soul-combats go on in quiet tenements! How many fierce struggles pass unperceived and unrecorded, perhaps not worth recording, yet of immense significance to those who conquer or succumb! “All my days are alike, so far as the outer world goes,” writes Mademoiselle de Guérin; “but with the soul’s life it is different, nothing could be more varied, more flexible, more subject to perpetual change.”

Two main, essential objects of all her inner life and thought kept her in this unceasing agitation. One was her brother Maurice. She had another brother and a sister whom she loved and cherished. To her father she was a sympathetic companion and a faithful attendant. But Maurice was confessedly more to her than any one else. He was younger than she. She had supplied for him the place of the mother who died early. She tended him, watched over him, guided him, and when he went out into the great world thought of him and prayed for him perpetually.

He was one who well deserved such affection. Sensitive, delicate in health and in feeling, imaginative, finely touched to all the fine issues of genius, his brief life was torn and tortured by alternate aspiration and doubt, by vast dreams of what he might achieve and miserable distrust of his ability to achieve anything. He died young and left behind him a journal recording these struggles with pathetic fidelity and one short prose poem, which has wide harmonies of classic dignity and echoing grandeur not surpassed by the “Hyperion” of Keats. Who that knows that music can ever forget it? “O Mélampe! les dieux errants ont posé leur lyres sur les pierres; mais aucun—aucun ne l’y a oubliée.”