It began to be commonly believed that the Maréchale could work certain kinds of miracles. A woman who had attended the meetings, and been blessed in her soul, became convinced that the English lady had power to cast out devils, and one day she brought a neighbour to the physician of souls, introducing her with the remark, "She has not only one but seven devils." The new-comer had a frightful face. She was so drunken, immoral and violent that nobody could live with her. Yet she, too, had a soul. The Maréchale made her get down on her knees, put both her hands on her head, and prayed that the devils might all be cast out. "She's now another woman," was the testimony soon after borne by all her neighbours.
One of the surest indications of the success of the work in Paris is found in the fact that, before the end of the first year there was a general demand for a newspaper corresponding in some degree to the English War Cry. That was a memorable day on which the Maréchale and her officers sat in their Avenue Parmentier flat, like a coterie of Fleet Street journalists, gravely discussing their new venture. It was indicative of the holy simplicity of the editor-in-chief that she thought at first of changing The War Cry into Amour. She did not realise the sensation which the cry "Amour, un sou!" would have created in the Boulevards. Her proposal was overruled, but her second suggestion, to call the paper En Avant, was received with acclamation. This was a real inspiration. The paper duly appeared in the beginning of 1882, and has gone on successfully ever since. The shouting of its name in the streets set all the world and his wife a-thinking and a-talking. What if the Man of Nazareth is after all far ahead of our modern philosophers and statesmen, and if this handful of English girls is come to lead us all forward to true liberty, equality and fraternity?
The reports of the work in France were received with feelings of gratitude at home. To "My dear Kittens"—a family pet-name—her brother Bramwell wrote: "We are more than satisfied with your progress. The General says that so far as he can judge your rate of advance in making people is greater than his own was at the beginning. I am sure you ought to feel only the liveliest confidence and greatest encouragement all the time." And to "My darling Blücher" the General himself wrote, "I appreciate and admire and daily thank God for your courage and love and endurance. God will and must bless you. We pray for you. I feel I live over again in you. We all send you our heartiest greetings and our most tender affection. Look up. Don't forget my sympathy. Don't trouble to answer my scrawls. I never like to see your handwriting because I know it means your poor back. Remember me to all your comrades."
"I feel I live over again in you." The thought was evidently habitual in the General's mind. "He bids me tell you," wrote Emma, "that you are his second self." The resemblance was physical as well as spiritual. With her tall figure, her chiselled face, her aquiline nose, her penetrating blue eyes, Catherine became, as time went on, more and more strikingly like her father. One of her sons, who saw her stooping over the General the day before he died, said that the two pallid faces were like facsimiles in marble.
CHAPTER V
FREEDOM TO WORSHIP GOD
In the autumn of 1883 the Maréchale suddenly leapt into fame as a latter-day Portia, brilliantly and successfully pleading in a Swiss law-court, before the eyes of Europe, the sacred cause of civil and religious liberty. The land of Tell, the oldest of modern republics, has always been regarded as a shrine of freedom. It has shown itself hospitable to all kinds of ideas, even the newest, the strangest, the most anti-Christian, the most anti-social. There is a natural affinity between free England and free Switzerland.
"Two Voices are there; one is of the sea,
One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice:
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice;
They were thy chosen music, Liberty."
In the "Treaty of Friendship" between Great Britain and Switzerland, drawn up in 1855, it was agreed that "the subjects and citizens of either of the two contracting parties shall, provided they conform to the laws of the country, be at liberty, with their families, to enter, establish themselves, reside and remain in any part of the territories of the other." Yet the presence of a few English evangelists in Switzerland evoked a storm of persecution in which the first principles of religious liberty were as much violated as ever they had been in the days of the Huguenots.
When the Maréchale and some comrades accepted an urgent invitation to Switzerland, she little thought that she would be the heroine of an historical trial. She went to preach the gospel. She observed the laws of the land, and respected the religious susceptibilities of its people. When she entered Geneva, she published only one poster, and that after it had been duly visé; she allowed no processions, banners or brass bands in the streets. Her only crime was that she sought to gain the ears of those who never entered a place of worship, and that she marvellously succeeded.