Oui, c’est un de ces lieux, où notre cœur sent vivre
Quelque chose des cieux qui flotte et qui l’enivre;
Un de ces lieux qu’enfant j’aimais et je rêvais,
Dont la beauté sereine, inépuisable, intime,
Verse à l’âme un oubli sérieux et sublime
De tout ce que la terre et l’homme ont de mauvais![127]
16th.—Prayed much for France. “Since this morning,” my mother said to me, “I have continually before my eyes the scaffold and the pale and noble countenance of Marie Antoinette.” Poor saintly queen! what a life and what a martyr’s death. After the first days of enchantment which followed her arrival in France, what a long succession of troubles! This Dauphine of fifteen years old was so exquisitely beautiful that the Maréchal de Brissac could say to her, in his chivalrous language: “Madame, you have there before your eyes two hundred thousand men enamored of your person”; and a few years later the people cried, “Death to the Austrian!” Never had woman such a destiny. The Greeks could not imagine a great soul in a body that had no beauty, nor beauty of person without a noble soul. Marie Antoinette would have been their idol, their goddess. O holy martyrs of the Temple! pray for France.
The magazine contains a story still more interesting than Fabiola, if that is possible: Virginia; or, Rome under Nero.
19th.—Feast of St. Vincent de Paul, this man of miracles, this humble and great saint, whose memory will live as long as the world, who founded admirable works, who created the Sister of Charity—this marvel, whom even the impious admire, whom the poor
and needy, the aged, the infirm, the wounded, call “sister”; whom one finds tending abandoned children; at the asylum, the hospital, on the field of battle, and in the prison. O charity!