I have said that Mademoiselle de Guérin’s secluded and in a sense impersonal life was filled by two great preoccupations. One was her brother. It will be evident by this time that the other was God. “There is one thing needful, to possess God,” wrote Amiel at the beginning of his Journal. Assuredly few human beings have possessed God, have been more thoroughly possessed by the thought of God, than Eugénie de Guérin. All thoughts, all passions, all hopes, all griefs are referred constantly, in prayer and meditation, to that one source, to that one end. It is indeed beautiful to see how completely the two great interests of her life merge in each other. Madame de Sévigné adored her daughter more than God, felt and admitted that the earthly idol usurped God’s place in her eager, tender, frantic mother’s heart. Madame du Deffand worshipped Horace Walpole instead of God, a frail and singular substitute, it will certainly be admitted. With Mademoiselle de Guérin there was never any question of conflict. Her two loves were absolutely united, and one simply enhanced the other. To one object she addressed herself almost as freely as to the other, and it was matter of regret to her that she did not quite: “I speak as I please to this little book [her Journal, addressed to Maurice]. I tell it everything, thoughts, griefs, pleasures, feelings, everything but what can be told only to God, and even then I am sorry to leave anything at the bottom of the box.”
After her brother’s death, she recognizes, in a passage of wonderful self-analysis, the huge, the over-mastering power of earthly affection, yet at once her permanent instinct blends God with it all in a complete, supreme effort of submission to his will. “Shall we never be rid of our affections? Neither grief, nor anguish, nor death has power to change us. To love, always to love, to love right down into the grave, to love the earthly remnants, to love the body that has borne the soul, even though the soul has fled to heaven!... All happiness is dead for me on earth. I have buried my heart’s life. I have lost the charm of my existence. I cannot tell all that my brother was to me or how profoundly I had hidden in him all my happiness. My future, my hopes, my old age, all were one with his, and then he was a soul that understood me. He and I were two eyes in one forehead. Now we are torn apart and God has come between us. His will be done!”
In emphasizing this divine possession of Mademoiselle de Guérin, we must not, however, imply that she was actually unbalanced, or not alive to the common needs and duties of daily life. Her religion was active as well as passive. Even in the more ecstatic rites of spiritual devotion she recognizes a wholesome practical efficacy, as in her striking remark about confession. “What ease, what light, what strength come to me every time I say right out, ‘I was at fault.’” Such a normal attitude makes one regret more than ever that, in our day, at any rate, those make most use of confession who have very little to confess.
In the wide practice of charity it does not appear that Mademoiselle de Guérin was especially active. Yet here too it is evident that she gave not only money but the comfort and the sage, kindly counsel which are worth much more than money, whenever occasion called for them.
So with domestic pursuits. Though her family were of old, high standing, they were poor, lived simply, kept few attendants, and the daughters of the house were wont to turn their prudent hands to every sort of service. Eugénie had evidently been trained in the methods of careful French housekeeping. She dusts, she mends, she lays the table, she cooks, in emergency she takes the linen to the brook and washes it after the picturesque, muscular European fashion. She often finds pleasure in all these doings, also, has a true domestic sense of order and finish and propriety. Nay, she does her washing with real lightness of heart, seeing charms in it which perhaps escape the average laundress. “It is a real joy to wash, to see the fish swim by, to watch the little wavelets, the twigs, the leaves, the blossoms floating in the stream. The brook brings so much that is pretty to the toiler who knows how to see.”
But even here we note that the toiler’s thoughts were not wholly on her toil, however well she might perform it. She was not born to labor with contented indifference. Her heart was too restless, too eager, too bent on vast reveries beyond the limits of this world’s cleanliness. Therefore she willingly lets her sister be housekeeper and only stands ready to help when needed. If little tasks absorb too much of her time, she complains, almost petulantly. “I have hardly opened a book to-day. My time has been passed with things quite different from reading, things nothing in themselves, not even worth mentioning, yet which fill up every moment.” And always, through the humblest of such tasks, runs the glowing current of those thoughts which to her were the only reality in a world of tawdry, trivial, incoherent phantoms. Even when the phantoms burn her fingers, she thinks only of Saint Catherine of Sienna, who had a taste for cooking. “It gave her so many subjects for meditation. I can well believe it, if for nothing but the sight of the fire and the little burns one gets, which make one think of purgatory.”
For she was thinking of hell, and purgatory, and heaven all the time, or as I said in beginning, more justly, she was thinking of God, which included them all three, and far more. God entered into every step she took, and every breath she breathed.
We may trace Him in all her earthly affections. They were deep and strong. We have seen this in regard to Maurice. It was just as true in regard to all others. Her father she cherished tenderly. She knew that he depended on her for everything and she was ready to give him everything at any moment. The deepest workings of her soul she kept from him, because she knew that he would not wholly understand them, and in covering them even with a certain duplicity she only practiced the precept of one who had penetrated the spiritual life as deeply as she, though from a different angle, “the law of love is higher than the law of truth.” Her friendships for other women, also, were profoundly sincere and lasting. She gives much and asks little, just tenderness shown in a brief letter, or a fleeting word. Who has analyzed the passing of friendship more delicately than she? “It is said that women never love each other. I do not know. There may be deep affections that last only a short time. But I have always mistrusted these, for myself and for those I love. Nothing is sadder than a bit of death in the heart. Therefore, when I see an affection dying, I set to work to rekindle it with all my power.” Hers also is this perfect expression of a heart inclined to tenderness: “Our affections are born one of another.”
Yet, as with Maurice, in all these relations God was first. The thought of Him sanctified them. The sense of his presence enhanced and beautified them. Except as they turned towards Him, they could not live and did not deserve to live. “The tenderest affections of the heart, what are they, if they are not bent towards heaven, if they are not offered up to God? They are as mortal as ourselves. We should love not for this world, but for another.”
As with human love, so is it for Eugénie with all other phases of the inner life. By nature she had keen intellectual instincts, liked to read, liked to think, would even have been inclined to think with broad audacity. She had eminently the habit of reflection and analysis which makes solitude fruitful and also makes it dangerous. What scholar could express the charm of lonely hours with more depth and delicacy than this slightly tutored girl? “I love to linger over my thoughts, to bend over each one and breathe its fragrance, to enjoy them fully before they fade away.” Books are a refuge, a resource, a consolation to her. She hates to leave them, even for the brief journeys she is called upon to make.