A visit from Sarah on her wedding journey. Who would have thought of my seeing her here?
We prayed much for France on the ill-omened date of the 21st. O dearest! if you were but to read
M. de Beauchêne’s Louis XVII. It is heartrending! Poor kings! It is the nature of mountain-tops to attract the lightning. René has given to Marcella Marie Antoinette, by M. de Lescure. Adrien has been reading it to us in the evenings. The grand and mournful epic is related with a magical charm of style which I find most attractive. Marie Antoinette, the calumniated queen, there appears in all the purity and splendor of her beauty. This reading left on my mind a deep impression of sadness. Poor queen! so great, so sanctified. “The martyrology of the Temple cannot be written.” The life of Marie Antoinette is full of contrasts; nothing could be fairer than its dawn, nothing more enchanting than the picture of her childhood, youth, and marriage—this latter the dream of the courts of Austria and France, which made her at fifteen years old the triumphant and almost worshipped Dauphiness. And yet what shadows darkened here and there the radiant poem of her happy days! She went on increasing in beauty; she became a mother; and beneath the delightful shades of Trianon, “the Versailles of flowers which she preferred to the Versailles of marble,” she came to luxuriate in the newly-found joys which filled her heart. Then came a terrible grief, the sinister precursor of the horrible tempests which were to burst upon the head of this queen, so French, but whom her misguided people persisted in calling the foreigner—the death of Maria Theresa the Great. What a cruel destiny is that of queens! Marie Antoinette, whose heart was
so nobly formed for holy family joys, quitted her own at the age of fifteen, going to live far from her mother, whom she was never to see again, even at the moment when that heroic woman rendered up to God the soul which had struggled so valiantly. The Revolution was there, dreadful and menacing. Marie Antoinette began her militant and glorious life, and the day came when “the monster” said with truth: “The king has but one man near him, and that man is the queen.” O dear Kate! the end of this history makes me afraid. What expiation will God require of France for these martyrdoms?
And we are going away.… Shall we return?
We are to visit Fourvières, Ars, Paray-le-Monial, and first of all the Grande Chartreuse—what a journey!—and you afterwards. I am fond of travelling—fond of the unknown, of beautiful views, movement, the pretty, wondering eyes of the little ones, the halts, for one or two days, in hotels, all the moving of the household which reminds me of the pleasant time when I used to travel with my Kate. Dearest sister, I long, I long to embrace you! Your kind, rare, and delightful letters, which I learn by heart the first day, the feeling of that nearness of our hearts to each other which nothing on earth can separate—this is also you; but to see you is sweeter than all the rest.
Marcella wishes to be named in this letter. You know whether or not the whole family loves Mme. Kate.
Send us your good angel during our wanderings, and believe in the fondest affection of your Georgina.
TO BE CONTINUED.
[21] “Behold the sapless leaves, which fall upon the turf.”