[2] This hymn was composed by one of her officers, M. Grandjean. The tune was one of the sweetest operatic airs of the day.
The clear, sweet notes went vibrating through the great hall, and Italy knows the power of song. The ringleader stood staring as if he had been petrified, and his followers did not advance another step. While the Maréchale sang on, she was heard in breathless silence. Then she spoke for an hour. The after-meeting lasted till midnight, and the leader of the students, completely broken down and sobbing like a child, said, "Oh, stay with us, you will make angels of us all!"
In Holland, where the Maréchale laboured six years, she was heavily handicapped by the fact that most of her speaking had to be done through an interpreter. She had not that Open Sesame to the heart of a people—the mastery of its language. She learned, however, to sing beautifully in Dutch, and the translation of her addresses was admirably done by her secretary. If she could not deny that her heart was still in the Rue Auber of Paris, she repressed her tears and took her new task—a very tangled one—resolutely in hand, doing some deep and lasting spiritual work in Amsterdam and other towns, where she sometimes had as many as forty or fifty penitents in one night.
She was lacking in what a statesman called "Batavian grace," being cast in a very different mould, yet she came ere long to feel quite at home among the warm-hearted Dutch people. She had taught Paris to sing her hymn, "Aimez toujours, et malgrez tout aimez toujours," and now she put the lesson into practice in Holland. Preaching and living the gospel of love, she had many tokens of success among all classes. Best of all, she awoke in others the wistful desire to imitate her example. One of Queen Wilhelmina's cabinet ministers brought his daughter, a thoughtful young girl, to a meeting conducted by the Maréchale, and when those who were willing to give themselves to Christ and His service were invited to show it in some way, up went the hand of this eager girl. Her father at once whisked her out of the meeting. But the deed was done, and now there is no one who is doing a nobler work among the poor and sunken classes of Holland than Miss Rose Pierson. Of that happy day in her life she wrote long afterwards: "When I first heard the Maréchale speak I was a girl of seventeen. I remember still every word she spoke. I know it was a revelation to me what a reality Christ could be to a soul. I believe that was what impressed me—her perfect assurance of Christ's presence and her own ardent love of souls."
Holland gave the Maréchale two of her most efficient secretaries, Miss Van der Werken and Miss de Zwaan, who ideally fulfilled all the requirements of the office—ability and willingness to nurse a babe, make a cup of tea, write a letter, cook a decent dinner, talk in two or three languages, keep the door of a hall, preach a sermon, and generally make the best of everything!
It is possible that the Maréchale's exile from France deepened and enriched her nature, drawing out stops not so often used before, especially the vox humana—the voice of sympathy with all human pain and sorrow. At the same time she began to have a more tragic sense of the world's sin, which prompted one of her strangest and yet most characteristic impulses, and issued in what was in some ways the most remarkable of all her campaigns.
One midnight, while she lay awake in Amsterdam, she heard a clear inner voice saying to her, "Go to Brussels; go in sackcloth and ashes; go and tell of sin; let everything in your person speak of sin and awaken conscience; then proclaim, Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world."
Without waiting to take counsel with flesh and blood, she went with her nurse-secretary Swaan and her babe Frida, the child of peace, to Brussels, and hired for three weeks the most beautiful hall in the city, the Salle de la Grande Harmonic—the same in which fair women and brave men danced on the eve of Waterloo.
When she at length divulged to one of her comrades the fact that she was to appear in sackcloth and ashes, he answered—
"You cannot! never!"