She went to Paris, and Valérie was published in December 1803. All Madame de Krüdener's guns were primed, ready to salute the book. Not one missed fire. All the bells of criticism tolled. Like a good general, she was on the field of battle herself. She drove incognito from one fashionable shop to another, asking for hats, or scarfs, or feathers, or wreaths, or ribbons à la Valérie. When this elegant and still beautiful lady drove up in her carriage and asked with such assurance for these articles of her own invention, the shopkeepers did their utmost to come to an understanding of what she wanted and to provide it. And when astonished shop-girls denied the existence of such wares, Madame de Krüdener smiled so kindly and pitied them so much because they did not know Valérie that she quickly transformed them into eager canvassers of readers for her book. She drove on with her purchases to other shops, and in a few days had produced amongst the shopkeepers such a furious competition in articles à la Valérie that her friends, when they went at her instigation to ask for these wares, became innocent accomplices in her stratagem, and were constrained to bear witness to her triumph.
Now Madame de Krüdener writes to her friend: "The success of Valérie is complete and unprecedented. An acquaintance said to me the other day: 'There is something supernatural about such success.' Yes, my friend, it is the will of Heaven that this purer morality should be diffused throughout France, where as yet it is not so well understood."
Hardly had this feverish craving for celebrity been satisfied, this refinement of hypocrisy been brought to perfection, when Madame de Krüdener's genuine conversion took place. It came about in this wise. Sitting at the window of her house in Riga one day in 1805, she was in the act of bowing to one of the most favoured of her numerous admirers when the unfortunate man was seized with a fit of apoplexy and fell down dead. This incident preyed on her mind. Her melancholy, however, did not render her independent of earthly requirements, and she sent one day for a shoemaker to measure her for a pair of shoes. The man came. At first she hardly noticed him, but while he was kneeling in front of her she was struck by his happy expression. "Are you happy?" she asked him. "I am the happiest man in the world," was the reply. This shoemaker was one of the "awakened," a member of the community of Moravian Brethren. He had an aversion to work, and lived at home with his mother, Frau Blau, one of the worst religious hypocrites in Riga, who gained her livelihood by imposing upon the rich members of her sect. The sight of the shoemaker's happiness made such an impression on Madame de Krüdener's susceptible soul that she again and again visited his mother and him. At their house she made acquaintance with many more of the Moravian Brethren, and was soon as enthusiastic a Christian believer as any one of them. A gradual, slow training in Christianity would not have been possible in her case, but the doctrine of sudden conversion and entire change of life was one well calculated to have a strong effect upon her, now that she was over forty.
The same ardour which she had exhibited in the passions of her youth she now expended on the passion of her maturer years. Both her words and actions are henceforth inspired by religious enthusiasm. She divides her time between devotional exercises and charitable deeds. Her whole previous life seems to her to have been nothing but error and foolishness. Her whole life now is but one feeling, love to her Saviour. "I have not a thought except to please, to serve, to sacrifice everything to Him through whose grace I desire nothing except to be allowed to love all my fellow-men, and who shows me nothing in the future but glimpses of bliss. Oh, if men but knew the happiness of religion, how they would shun every care except care for their souls!"
Such was Madame de Krüdener's state of mind when, travelling once more in the autumn of 1806, she met and became intimate with Queen Louisa of Prussia. It was not long after the battle of Jena. The Queen, in her deep dejection, was peculiarly open to the persuasion of Madame de Krüdener's glowing religious eloquence, and Madame de Krüdener gained great influence over her, and through her over the King. We have proof of this in a letter from the Queen written some time afterwards. "I owe to your kind heart a confession which I am certain will cause you to shed tears of joy. It is that you have made me better than I was. Your straightforward words when we talked together on the subject of religion and Christianity have made the deepest impression upon me."
Madame de Krüdener went to Karlsruhe on purpose to see Jung-Stilling. Jung-Stilling had made a literary reputation for himself by the book in which he gave an account of his early life as a pious journeyman tailor. As a medical student at Strasburg he had associated with Goethe and won his favour. After practising successfully as an oculist, and holding a professorship of political economy, he had become a kind of prophet among the Pietists of South Germany, and was honoured as a saint by the pious court-circle and nobility of Baden. His character was not strong enough to stand such adulation, and he had degenerated into a vain and unreliable old twaddler, who boasted of his knowledge of the other world and revealed the hidden mysteries and designs of God by means of interpretations of the Revelation of St. John. To Jung-Stilling Madame de Krüdener now did homage as her master and guide. He had a weakness for the admiration of great ladies, and a close friendship sprang up between them. The venerable ghost-seer was at this time writing his Theorie der Geisterkunde (Theory of Spirits). Madame de Krüdener was firmly persuaded of the truth of one of his wise predictions, namely, that the millennium was to begin in the year 1816, or 1819 at latest.
Not long after this visit to Karlsruhe she met Queen Hortense, who was so fascinated by her that she gave her a private audience every morning. But it would seem that Madame de Krüdener ingratiated herself in this case chiefly by reading to the Queen the manuscript of a novel she was writing, Othilde by name, the pious moral of which did not prevent its being a "truly delicious" love-story.
She was now a pattern of every kind of Christian humility. When at Karlsruhe she climbed up to the dirtiest garrets to do deeds of charity. One day when she found a servant-girl crying in the street because she had been sent out to sweep, the great lady took the broom and swept the pavement herself.
The spiritual condition of Alsace at this time was somewhat remarkable. To some of its most intellectually advanced inhabitants the irreligion of the Revolution had communicated itself, but the great mass of the Protestant population had been terrified into a kind of religious mysticism, the distinctive feature of which was the belief in the near approach of the millennium. The most eminent clergyman in Alsace was the universally respected Pastor Oberlin of Waldbach, a man of the most sincere piety, who was, however, crazy enough to draw maps of the kingdom of heaven and publish a plan of the heavenly Jerusalem. He knew the exact order of precedence of the blessed dead, and was in regular communication with departed friends. Madame de Krüdener, provided with letters of introduction to this gentleman and others of the same persuasion, made her appearance in Alsace.
She had heard that a German pastor at Markirch, named Fontaines, had the power of working miracles, and that in his house lived a famous prophetess, Marie Kummer (generally known as "die Kummerin"), a hysterical Würtemberg peasant woman, who held constant communication with angels, and in her trances revealed the will of God. And she had also been told that Fontaines had expressed a wish to make the acquaintance of the divinely inspired lady from the North whom Marie Kummer had seen in a vision. In June 1808 Madame de Krüdener arrived at his house. He welcomed her solemnly on the threshold with the words of John to Jesus: "Art thou that one that should come, or do we look for another?" Flattered and delighted, Madame de Krüdener remained under the roof of this man, who was now generally supposed to be her lover. They spent their time in the study of the Revelation of St. John, and every day the lady listened to Marie Kummer's prophecies of the high mission and the great future awaiting her, and also Fontaines, who was to be her apostle. She wrote to a friend: "I am the happiest creature in the world.... The fulness of time is at hand; great calamities are about to happen, but you need not be afraid. The kingdom of the Lord is near, and He Himself will reign upon the earth for a thousand years." She goes on to say: "Imagine that I have literally experienced miracles. You have no conception of the happiness felt by those who give themselves entirely to Jesus Christ. He in His goodness and mercy has given me the distinct promise that He will answer the prayers I offer for my relations and friends."