To a thousand men of the élite of Brussels she delivered an address—which was afterwards published—on "The Greatest Injustice of the Century." It was a woman's mournful, tender, passionate protest against man's sins in a city which had its twelve thousand so-called filles de joie, many of them of the tenderest years. One of her audience, a typical Brussels man of the world, covering his face with a hand on which flashed a diamond ring, and shaking with great sobs of anguish, cried, "I am a leper—damned already!" "Madame," said an editor, "they would hiss anybody else who said these things to them. They bear them from you, because they feel you love them."
One day she received an invitation to dine with a dozen anarchists. Her comrades told her of the danger of bombs, etc., but she went, and, many years after when asked by an English Divine, "How did you get into such society?" she answered, "Extremes meet."
"So you are come to talk to us," said Elisée Recluse[3] with a smile, "of justification by faith and sanctification by faith," etc.
[3] Exiled from France as an anarchist, he had become a Professor in Brussels. He had been trained as a Protestant Pastor. He was the greatest geographer of modern times, the writer of Une nouvelle géographie universelle (19 vols.).
"Oh, no, no! I do not talk of doctrines. They never troubled me in my life. I care only for realities. You have suffered; I too have suffered. Let us begin there, and compare notes. Some of you have been in prison; I have been in prison. You have been exiled; so have I. You have wept over the injustice and cruelties of the world; so have I wept, so do I weep."
And thus they found common ground, agreeing in their diagnosis of the diseases of society; differing only as to the remedy. "You believe in anarchy," said the Maréchale. "One of your number said at one of my meetings that anarchy is the most beautiful of all religions. I know a more excellent way—a shorter cut to making the world better. You fling your bombs to destroy life; how can people be converted when their heads are gone? Christ said 'Follow me to Calvary!' He shed His own blood. No one else's. He bids us save the world by denying ourselves and taking up the Cross."
That evening Elisée Recluse drove her in his carriage to her meeting at the Salle Harmonie, and in her little ante-room they prayed together.
A Brussels sculptor begged the Maréchale to pose for him in her robe de bure, but she declined. Renée Gange, the heroine of the Belgian socialists, after passionately embracing her before a thousand eyes, published a charming pen-and-ink portrait of "this enigmatic woman," comparing her to a serene, calm statue that almost smiles. "The fine and slender figure of the Maréchale will long remain one of the most curious, the most strange apparitions in the midst of our society of money-makers and machine-constructors."
The prophet, the mystic, the saint will always be a mystery to the art and science, not to speak of the sin and selfishness, of the world. This truth was finely expressed by a writer in L'Art moderne of Brussels. "The Maréchale does not seek to 'demonstrate' anything. I have seen her shrug her shoulders a little and smile when some one wished to reason or discuss with her. She could do it, for she is intelligent and merveilleusement intuitive. But her faith does not 'demonstrate' itself. It lives and expands itself. It affirms itself. And those who, now numerous, have some psychological tact have felt that this woman obeyed something more powerful than herself. Perhaps she is the happy and unconscious instrument of an expansive force too much ignored, too little recognised and obeyed, as necessary for our preservation as the law of self-preservation itself.... Her addresses are neither weighed nor balanced. But they have the colour, the life, the strong suggestiveness, the moving sincerity of an inspiration come from one knows not where, from above us, from outside us—mysterious impulses of things eternal."
CHAPTER XIV