And yet I owe her much. I feel deeply that I am the son of woman. Every instant in my ideas and words (not to mention my features and gestures), I find again my mother in myself. It is my mother's blood which gives me the sympathy I feel for by-gone ages, and the tender remembrance of all those who are now no more.
What return then could I, who am myself advancing towards old age, make her for the many things I owe her? One, for which she would have thanked me—this protest in favour of women and mothers: and I place it at the head of a book believed by some to be a work of controversy. They are wrong.
The longer it lives, if it should live, the plainer will it be seen, that, in spite of polemical emotion, it was a work of history, a work of faith, of truth, and of sincerity:—on what, then, could I have set my heart more?
[[1]] This will not appear exaggerated to those who have read the furious libel of the Bishop of Chartres. A newspaper asks me why I did not prosecute him for defamation. This mad violence is much less guilty than the treacherous insinuations they make in their books and newspapers, in the saloons, &c. Now they attribute to me whatever has been done by other Michelets, to whom I am not even related (for instance, Michelet of Languedoc, a poet and soldier under the Restoration); now they pretend to believe, though I had told them the contrary at the end of my preface, that this book is my lecture of 1844. Then, again, they get up a little petition from Marseilles, to pray for the dismissal of the professor. So far from wishing to stifle the voice of my adversaries, I have claimed for their writings the same liberty I asked for my own. Lesson of the 27th of February, 1845:—"I see among you the greater part of those who had aided me to maintain in this chair the liberty of discussion. We will respect this liberty in our adversaries. This is not chivalry, it is simply our duty. It is, moreover, essential to the cause of truth, that no objection be suppressed; but that each party may be at liberty to state their reasons. You may be sure that truth will prevail and conquer. We pass away; but truth lasts and triumphs. Yet, as long as her adversaries may have any thing to say, her triumph is mingled with doubt."
[[2]] For the fifteenth century, see my History of France, A.D. 1413.
[[3]] Mabillon on Monastic Imprisonment, posthumous works, vol. ii. p. 327.
[[4]] We should, perhaps, have reserved these facts for some future occasion, if they had not been already divulged by the newspapers and reviews. Besides, several magistrates have expressed their opinions on many analogous facts in the same locality. A solicitor-general writes to the underprefect:—"I have reason to be as convinced as you, that Madame * * * was in full possession of her senses. A longer imprisonment would most certainly have made her really mad," &c. A letter from the Solicitor-General Sorbier, quoted by Mr. Tilliard, in favour of Marie Lemonnier, p. 65.
MEMOIR.
The following brief Memoir of the Author of "Priests, Women, and Families" was written for, and embodied in, the "Dictionary of Universal Biography," published by Mackenzie about 1862.