‘Oh, Mary,’ said Madame de Frontignac, ‘there are some cases where we find it too easy to love our enemies.’
‘More than that,’ said Mary; ‘I believe that if you were to go on patiently in the way of duty, and pray daily to God, that at last He will take out of your heart this painful love, and give you a true and healthy one. As you say, such feelings are very sweet and noble; but they are not the only ones we have to live by. We can find happiness in duty, in self-sacrifice, in calm, sincere, honest friendship. That is what you can feel for your husband.’
‘Your words cool me,’ said Madame de Frontignac. ‘Thou art a sweet snow-maiden, and my heart is hot and tired. I like to feel thee in my arms,’ she said, putting her arms around Mary, and resting her head upon her shoulder. ‘Talk to me so every day, and read me good, cool verses out of that beautiful book, and perhaps by-and-by I shall grow still and quiet like you.’
Thus Mary soothed her friend; but every few days this soothing had to be done over, as long as Burr remained in Newport. When he was finally gone, she grew more calm. The simple, homely ways of the cottage, the healthful routine of daily domestic toils, into which she delighted to enter, brought refreshment to her spirits. That fine tact and exquisite social sympathy which distinguishes the French above other nations, caused her at once to enter into the spirit of the life in which she moved; so that she no longer shocked any one’s religious feelings by acts forbidden to the Puritan idea of the sabbath, or failed in any of the exterior proprieties of religious life.
She also read and studied with avidity the English Bible, which came to her with the novelty of a wholly new book, and in a new language; nor was she without a certain artistic valuation of the austere precision and gravity of the religious life by which she was surrounded.
‘It is sublime, but a little “glaciale,” like the Alps,’ she sometimes said to Mary and Mrs. Marvyn, when speaking of it; ‘but then,’ she added, playfully, ‘there are the flowers—les roses des Alpes; and the air is very strengthening, and it is near to heaven—il faut avouer.’
We have shown how she appeared to the eye of New England life; it may not be uninteresting to give a letter to one of her friends, which showed how the same appeared to her.
It was not a friend with whom she felt on such terms that her intimacy with Burr would furnish any allusions to her correspondence.
‘You behold me, my charming Gabrielle, quite pastoral; recruiting from the dissipations of my Philadelphia life in a lovely, quiet cottage, with most worthy, excellent people, whom I have learnt to love very much. They are good and true, as pious as the saints themselves, although they do not belong to the true Church, a thing which I am sorry for; but then let us hope that if the world is wide, heaven is wider, and that all worthy and religious people will find room at last. This is Verginie’s own little pet private heresy, and when I tell it to the Abbé, he only smiles; and so I think, somehow, that it is not so very bad as it might be.
‘We have had a very gay life in Philadelphia, and now I am growing tired of the world, and think I shall retire to my cheese, like La Fontaine’s rat. These people in the country here in America have a character quite their own; very different from the life of cities, where one sees, for the most part, only a continuation of the forms of good society which exist in the old world.