There are some special matters of absorbing interest to most women. Eugénie de Guérin was a woman. Did she take no interest in these matters? Beauty, for instance? It does not appear that she had any special charm of feature or carriage. Was she aware of this? Did it trouble her? If so, she seldom shows it. Yet there are words here and there that set one thinking. When she was young, she says, she desired passionately to be beautiful, because she was told that if she were so, her mother would love her more. But as she grows older, she thinks only of beauty of the soul. Nevertheless, coming age seems to affect her with suggestions of ugliness, not of the soul only.
Dress again. Fair women employ it to enhance beauty, others to create it. Did Eugénie give no thought to what she should put on? Not much, I confess, beyond an exquisite sense of neatness and good order. Yet, here, too, if you watch closely, you get a gleam of human vanity, like the flash of a spangle on a sombre floor. She looks back and reviews the preoccupations of her youth, long since laid aside and forgotten, she says. “Dolls, toys, birds, butterflies I cherished, pretty and innocent fancies of childhood. Then books, talk, jewels and ornaments a little, dreams, fair dreams—but I am not writing a confession.”
If she had written one, would there have been men in it, fairy lovers such as girls dream, an ideal blend of manly beauty and mad tenderness? We do not know, but here again little things make us suspect. She tells us she does not like novels, because the passions are let loose in them—but she reads them. She pities the souls in purgatory because of the terrible impatience with which they await release. What expectation on earth can compare with it? she says. Not that of fortune, or of glory, or of anything else that makes the human heart pant, unless perhaps it be the longing of the beloved waiting for the lover. And elsewhere she draws a domestic picture of quiet happiness, a little house in the fields, with vines and poultry, and some one, whom? Not a peasant, she says, like ours who beat their wives. “Do you remember—?” But she stops short and does not give the name.
In such a picture the crowning object would be children and though she does not mention them here, she does elsewhere, often, with all a born mother’s tenderness. How charming is her dream of the way she would rear them and teach them. “If I had a child to bring up, how gently I would do it, how merrily, with all the care one gives a delicate flower. I would speak to them of God with words of love. I would tell them that He loves them even more than I do, that He gives them everything I give them, and besides, the air, the sun, and the flowers, that He made the sky and the beautiful stars.” When Maurice’s child is about to be born, after the father’s death, she cries out in ecstasy. “How I long to have a baby in the house, to play mother, and nurse it, and caress it.” Surely the real woman is speaking to us here.
Other feminine affairs were of less interest to her, as we have seen with things purely domestic. General society she shunned, and no doubt lost by doing so. Occasionally she is tricked out and led to a party, where she thinks every one remarks her ill, unaccustomed manner of dancing, the truth probably being that no one noticed her at all. She might, no doubt, have been successful in conversation, for she had wit, refinement, distinction, and was capable of vivacity. But she avoided what she calls the world, with a suggestion of inexpressible disdain, alleging to herself that it was futile, frivolous, and unprofitable. Perhaps a good part of the reason was that she herself was proud and shy and essentially a spiritual aristocrat. “Books are my intellectual passion; but how few there are that I like. It is just so with people. I rarely meet any one that pleases me.” When you frequent the world in that spirit, it is unprofitable indeed.
One phase of human weakness did take hold of this celestial wanderer and even threaten to disturb her saintly peace, and that was the ambition of literature. She restrains it, subdues it, disclaims it. But no one could take such nice care of expression as she does, could turn sentences so daintily, so vigorously, and not take pride in them. She is like Saint François de Sales, who announces the loftiest contempt for poor words, but uses the most cunning skill to get all he can out of them.
Writing is almost a necessity to her, she says. She turns to her pen as an outlet for all the struggles and trials and passions of her inner life. “Writing is the sign that I am alive, as that of a brook is running.” She looks to publication, too, makes delicate verses and sends them to a review, which she thinks will print them, if it prints women’s verses at all. Not that she cares for the public, oh, no! She writes only to please a friend or two who can appreciate her. And her name must not be used in print, oh, never! Still, there is a subtle charm about this newspaper notoriety, you can hardly call it glory, which does appeal, even to the saints.
Then she thinks it appeals too much. All earthly glory is vanity, even that of the poet’s corner of a magazine. Can it be right for her to spend time and thought which should belong to God on the mere tinkle of human rhyming? She consults her confessor, who assures her that no great harm is done. She consults Maurice, who is very round with her, tells her not to worry about her conscience in the matter, but to write, tells her to think a little more about the subject of her verses and less about herself, and above all suggests that she should omit devotion and mysticism and be human, advice by which he lays himself open to gentle admonition and reproof.
But she sticks to her pen just the same. Who ever failed to, that was born for it? Why, I may do good by writing, she urges. No doubt her confessor persuaded her she might, with perfect justice as regarded doing good to one person, at any rate.
But we must not emphasize too much all these petty and indifferent preoccupations. None of them really counted, none of them was more than a trifle beside the paramount, absorbing interest of Mademoiselle de Guérin’s life. Not a page, hardly a paragraph, of her Journal but has some allusion to God, to her desire for God, her thirst for God, her complete, entire reference of all things earthly to what was, for her, at any rate, their origin, their purpose, and their end. She has words of marvellous mystical subtlety and grace, though the constant impression is more powerful than any single words. “When a brook runs, it starts full of foam and turmoil and grows clearer as it travels. The road I wander in is God, or a friend, but above all, God. In Him I run my course and find repose.” “In this vast silence, when God only speaks to me, my soul is ravished and dead to everything else, above, below, within, without; but the rapture does not last.”