It is not to be denied that the language in which she describes this new ardent devotion has a suspicious similarity to the language of a love which is not at all heavenly. Of God she writes: "It is impossible for me to tell what tenderness burns in my heart, how many tears I shed, what words tremble through my whole being when I feel myself loved thus—I, poor worm of the earth! I said to God the other day: 'What can I say to Thee, O my Beloved! (O mon bien-aimé!) Would that I could shout over the whole earth, and through all the heavens, how much I love Thee! Would that I could lead not only all men, but all the rebel spirits back to Thee!"
In the Vatican hangs a picture by a modern Italian painter which represents a nun kneeling at the feet of Christ, who returns her tearful gaze with the tenderest of glances. One involuntarily thinks of this picture when reading Madame de Krüdener's outbursts during her period of divine intoxication. She writes on another occasion: "All we have to do is to love, and to persuade others to love, the kindest, the best, the tenderest of all fathers." During her pious wanderings about the country, preaching and converting, she was joined by a young missionary. He was one of the many in whom she was afterwards disappointed, but shortly after he came to her she describes their feelings when worshipping together in such words as these: "What emotion! Can you imagine the bliss of our communions? No language can express it. We could not even hear the words spoken." It is impossible in reading this not to think of a passage in the writings of one of Madame de Krüdener's early admirers: "Lezay prétend (dit Chênedollé) que Madame de Krüdener dans les moments les plus décisifs avec son amant fait une prière à Dieu, en disant: Mon Dieu, que je suis heureuse! Je vous demande pardon de l'excès de mon bonheur?" He adds: "Elle reçoit ce sacrifice comme une personne qui va recevoir sa communion."[1] Similar pious emotionalism is, however, common to all the mystics of the day.
Madame de Krüdener did not know that both Fontaines and Marie Kummer had a past which was anything but confidence-inspiring.
At the outbreak of the Revolution Fontaines, then aged twenty, was a violent Jacobin; during the Reign of Terror he cast in his lot with Eulogius Schneider, and was one of the most eager of that man's followers in denouncing the clergy, closing churches, plundering Strasburg Cathedral, &c. He held orations in the temples of Reason, got himself appointed a Protestant pastor, married, and behaved in such a scandalous manner that he was compelled to give up his charge. Nevertheless, when the reaction against the Revolution set in, he received another call, as representative of the extremest Pietism, and soon gained a great reputation as an exorciser of evil spirits. When it came out that he had managed in three years (1801-4) to make away with almost all the means of his congregation, he had to retire into obscurity for a time. In 1805 he received a call to Markirch. There, two years later, he took Marie Kummer into his house. This woman, though she was a simple vagrant, and had changed her religion several times, was held in great reverence by the Pietists. A certain Pastor Hiller consecrated her to be the bride of Jesus. In the course of time she bore this same pastor a son, who was destined, they declared, to become the witness mentioned in the third verse of the eleventh chapter of the Book of Revelation. The worldly-minded civil authorities none the less condemned Marie to the pillory and a term of imprisonment. When she came out of prison she proclaimed the end of the world to be at hand, and advised a general emigration of believers to the Holy Land. She actually persuaded a number of foolish persons to set out with her for Jerusalem, and to entrust her with the travelling funds; but when they reached Vienna she was taken into custody. After a term of imprisonment there she went back to Alsace. The comet of 1807 furnished her with a pretext for sensational prophecies of plague, famine, and war, and on hearing the report of the arrival of the Russian baroness she had a vision, in which that lady's high destiny was revealed to her.
When Madame de Krüdener had lived in the edifying company of Fontaines and Marie Kummer for fully eight months, Fontaines began to feel that he was no longer safe in Markirch. Tales of his past life were being circulated. Marie Kummer consequently had a vision in which she received a divine command to go to Würtemberg and found a colony of true Christians there. The three at once set out. At their religious meetings in Würtemberg Fontaines was always dressed in black, Madame de Krüdener in blue, and Marie in grey. Besides prophesying the approaching end of the world they incautiously inveighed against the ungodly sovereign of the country, who had introduced a new liturgy. This led to Marie's imprisonment and the banishment of the other two. Marie joined Fontaines and Madame de Krüdener in Baden as soon as she was released, and there they again lived in intimate companionship, occupying themselves as before with devotional exercises and prophesying.
Madame de Krüdener, called to Riga by her mother's last illness, held meetings there too, at which she interpreted the Book of Revelation and dispensed the sacrament. At these meetings she was assisted by the pious shoemaker's pious mother, Frau Blau, in her character of prophetess. Towards the close of the year 1811 Madame de Krüdener returned to Karlsruhe. Fontaines had by this time been ordered off, but she continued to work in company with Marie Kummer, who was looked up to as a great prophetess because she had foretold the victory of the white over the black angel, and had announced that the people from the north of whom Jeremiah had written would presently make their appearance. The Russian war established her reputation, and after the news of the conflagration of Moscow came she was regarded as a positively sacred personage.
There is not the slightest doubt that Madame de Krüdener was entirely persuaded of the purity of her motives, and that she acted in all sincerity. She is not merely converted herself; she is possessed by a passion for converting. Again and again the idea of converting the very denizens of hell and the devil himself occurs to her. It was but natural that she had to bear much and painful misunderstanding on the part of those who were unable to believe in the change that had taken place in her. Even her own mother despised her and stopped writing to her. But no misunderstanding cooled her enthusiasm, which made an impression even upon rationalists. One of these, Sonntag, the chief dignitary of the Livonian church, who had carefully observed her behaviour at Riga in 1811, wrote many years afterwards that, though in his official capacity he had been obliged to sever his connection with her, he owed it to her to bear witness that she showed the deepest, purest, most active, most self-forgetful and self-sacrificing sympathy with every suffering and need of humanity.
Soon she, too, receives the gift of prophecy. It was not an uncommon gift at this time. Both De Maistre and Bonald prophesied the restoration of the royal family many years in advance, thereby winning considerable renown. But whenever their prophecies are of a more definite nature, it happens with them as with the prophecies of old—they do not come to pass. De Maistre, for instance, writing on the subject of the proposed seat of government in America, says: "I may safely wager ten to one that the town will not be built, or that it will not be called Washington, or that the Congress will not meet there;" which three things all happened. In 1807 he wrote (Opuscules, p. 98): "Nothing can restore the power of Prussia. This famous edifice, built of blood, filth, false coin, and pamphlets, has collapsed in one moment and is gone for ever." He also prophesied that the restoration of the Bourbons would take place quite peacefully, without foreign interference, and that autocratic rule and the power of the aristocracy would in the end be strengthened by the Revolution, &c., &c. Some of Bonald's prophecies (in his Théorie du Pouvoir) were rather more successful, for the simple reason that he who prophesies the end of the transient, prophesies what is certain to come true some day; there are things concerning the future to which Horatio's words apply: "There needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this."
But Madame de Krüdener's prophecies attracted more attention than those of any of her contemporaries. In October 1814 she wrote from Strasburg to a lady at the Russian court: "We shall soon witness the punishment of guilty France, a punishment which Providence would have spared it if it had continued to bow beneath the cross." How was it possible, after Napoleon's return from Elba, to interpret this otherwise than as a mysterious prevision of this return?
She also wrote: "The storm is approaching; the lilies which the Eternal had preserved—the pure, delicate, symbolic flowers which had been crushed by a sceptre of iron, because such was the will of the Eternal—those lilies, which ought to have pled their cause before the tribunal of the purity and love of God, have only shown themselves to disappear." What could this be but a prophecy of the flight of Louis XVIII?