Next Sunday evening she marshalled her little group of officers. She filed them in, men on one side, women on the other. She stood in the midst of them and spoke. At the end of the meeting the Baron came forward.
"Maréchale," he said, "you have no need of pictures. Those figures! those faces! they are your pictures."
Her friend Frank Crossley was greatly struck by this incident. He wrote: "I was specially interested in the remark upon inspired faces. I once heard Rendel Harris say of the biblical critics, that they might tear the volume into shreds, but never could rub off the light of God from the faces of His people."
One of the cadets of the École Militaire was Constance Monod, daughter of the great Protestant preacher whose hymn, "Oh, the bitter shame and sorrow," is known everywhere. Having received salvation and rich spiritual blessings from attending the Maréchale's meetings, she became one of her most devoted officers and warmest friends. She was one day put up to speak to a very rough audience of lewd, low men, and one of the roughest and lewdest of them said, with tears in his eyes:
"Oh, what extraordinary purity in that face!"
That was the expression which gave so many of the cadets their power in the cafés and in the slums. It was what they were, far more than what they said, that did the work.
Among the new cadets there was always a great heart-searching. Were they sure of their vocation? Had they a due sense of the seriousness, the sacredness, the responsibility, the opportunity of the call to work and fight for God? If they were not right there, everything was wrong. But if they had really left the world, and come to learn to know GOD, He revealed Himself to them, and it was marvellous how rapidly they grew in that heart-knowledge which is always so much deeper than head-knowledge.
Whenever troubles and difficulties arose, the Maréchale's method was not to evade them, but to grip things at the bottom. An invitation to "come and have a cup of tea" would lead to earnest talk and prayer, by which she nipped many an evil in the bud. These "personals," as such interviews were called, were remembered ever afterwards with gratitude.
The conquest of self, the triumph of the spirit of love, was illustrated in small matters as well as in great. One day a Frenchman, François, refused to clean the boots of another cadet, who was a German.
"I clean a German's boots? Never! never!" The Maréchale quietly said: