"Pull out your watch," she said. "I believe in your watch, I believe that it keeps time, but I do not believe in its maker! ... I am naturally just as great a lover of ease and comfort as you are. The motive power—la force motrice—of my life, the spring upon which everything turns, is the love of Christ. You believe in me; believe in Him who has made me what I am."
The Maréchale's third new departure was perhaps the most important of all—the founding of an École Militaire, or school for cadets, somewhat similar to the Military School at Clapton, over which her sister Emma at that time presided. When Catherine first went to France, a very noted Protestant pastor said to her, "You will never get three Frenchwomen to live together in peace." But at the Training Home, Avenue Lumière 3, in the Villette, where the Maréchale lived all the year round with her officers, there were as many as forty or fifty young women—among whom, at one time, a Princess's daughters were side by side with scullery maids—and the harmony, the love, the spirit of "never mind me," which prevailed was one of the miracles of the work in France.
To the training of company after company of young cadets—French, Swiss, English, Belgian, German, Italian and Russian—the Maréchale gave a great deal of her time and strength, her pattern being ever our Lord's own training of the Twelve. All obeyed her joyfully and without question. She realised intuitively that the highest thing in training is not discipline, but something which discipline follows as light follows the sun. That something is the spirit, the atmosphere, which men and women are brought into and which transforms them. In the École Militaire it was the selflessness of people who did not care what became of them. Where that spirit takes possession of any one, there is no need to say to him, "You shall do this or that." The law of the spirit of life makes him obedient without constraint.
The spirit of the Maréchale's leadership is somewhat expressed in Garibaldi's call to arms often quoted by her. His followers understood his motives, realised his disinterestedness, saw that rewards and honours were nothing to the man who was seeking the Liberty of Italy. Therefore they loved him so much that they would have died for him. There was no marked difference between the Staff and the Field, and yet there was discipline, obedience, devotion such as the world has scarcely ever seen equalled.
That was the spirit which the Maréchale sought to impart to the École Militaire. Everything else—how to study the Bible, how to conduct meetings, how to use the voice, how to deal with souls—was subordinated by her to the one thing needful—the spirit of sacrifice. "We are sometimes told," she once wrote, "that our uniforms, our young women speaking in public, our tambourines and our processions bring contempt upon religion. It is a mistake. That which is the laughing-stock of the world and of hell is a religion without sacrifice. People will never believe in Christians who, while professing to be disciples of Him who had not where to lay His head, live in luxury, seek first the comfort of their family, the health and position of their children, and let their souls perish for lack of that Gospel which they profess to believe. There is the secret of the unbelief of France; that is what makes the young who are in search of the truth cry 'Comedy!' On the other hand, those faces which radiate the light from on high, those young people who rise up to give themselves to God instead of the world, those men and women who declare, with a sincerity which leaves no room for doubt, that they consecrate their life to God for the saving of souls, are more eloquent than the most beautiful discourses."
The faces of officers and cadets who surrounded the Maréchale on her platform undoubtedly constituted a large element of her power. Renée Gange, the Socialist, wrote a fine appreciation of her and her comrades, in which she confesses that what she finds "remarkable among these young girls, pretty as well as plain, is the complete absence of the ordinary feminine expression.... In looking with searching, scrutinising eye at the faces enveloped in this ugly bonnet, we have not deciphered the least vestige of this expression, neither timidity, nor awkwardness, nor restlessness, nor the consciousness that people are thinking of them. Nothing. These faces are the free faces of free creatures."
One day a French Baron, who had received a great blessing at the Maréchale's Conférences, said to her in the great hall at the Rue Auber, "What you lack here is pictures; for instance, the saints. Those beautiful faces, with their sweet celestial expressions, diffuse a sentiment of reverence and quietness, and they would form such a beautiful background to you. You should have the Virgin, and Saint Francis, and many others. That is what you lack in all your halls: could we not do something?"
"Baron," said the Maréchale, "will you come here next Sunday evening?"
"Yes, certainly. Are you going to speak?" He never lost a chance of hearing her.
"Yes; be sure you do not miss it."