Quand gronde l’orage, un ange gardien,
Une mère tendre arrête nos larmes,
Et pour nous guider nous donne la main![129]
What memories, dear sister! I had lost my way with Lizzy and Isa. My mother was living then! How pale and trembling she was when I fell into her arms! And you—you, my Kate!
August 12, 1868.
You have comforted me, dear sister. This place pleases me: everybody likes it. Saw yesterday Karl’s family, as well as that of Ellen; the day before yesterday, the W——’s. Fanny is going to marry a German with a great name, a fervent Catholic, in love with England, where he intends to remain.
Our evenings are delightful. I had promised Margaret not to read Père Lacordaire, by the Père Chocarne, without her. It is admirably fine. The introduction is the definition of the priest such as is given by the great orator of Notre Dame himself: “Strong as the diamond, tenderer than a mother.” There are a thousand things in this book which make my heart beat: “O paternal home! where, from our earliest years, we breathed in with the light the love of all holy things, in vain we grow old: we return to you with a heart ever young; and were it not Eternity which calls us, in separating us far from you, we should be inconsolable at seeing your shadow daily lengthen and your sun grow pale!” “There are wants for which this earth is sterile.” What a spring there is of faith and love in words like these: “Riches are neither gold nor silver, nor ships which bring back from the ends of the earth all precious things, nor steam, nor railways, nor all that the genius of men can extract from the bosom of nature; one thing alone is riches—that is love. From God to man, from earth to heaven, love alone unites and fills all things. It is
their beginning, their middle, and their end. He who loves knows; he who loves lives; he who loves sacrifices himself; he who loves is content; and one drop of love, put in the balance with the universe, would carry it away as the tempest would carry away a straw.” The Père Lacordaire speaks admirably of cloisters: “August palaces have been built, and magnificent tombs raised on the earth; dwelling-places well-nigh divine have been made for God: but the wisdom and the heart of man have never gone further than in the creation of the monastery.” The first disciple and brother of Père Lacordaire, the saintly young Hippolyte Réquédat (whose soul was so pure that when, at twenty years of age, he threw himself at the feet of a priest, owning that he had never, since his First Communion, been to confession, having nothing of which to accuse himself, unless that he wished much evil to all the enemies of France) used every day to say to the Blessed Virgin: “Obtain for me the grace to ascertain my vocation—to learn the way in which I could do the greatest possible amount of good, lead back the greatest number of souls to the church, and be most chaste, humble, charitable, active, and patient.”
He died of consumption at the age of twenty-two, and his death made a deep wound in the heart of the Père Lacordaire. “Réquédat was a soul as impassioned in its self-devotion as others are in selfishness. To love was his life, but to love to give rather than to receive; to give himself always, and to the greatest number possible—this was his dream, his longing, his martyrdom. Devoted to an ardent pursuit of that which is good, tyrannized over by this noble love, he had not
time to see any evil.” A friend of his was Piel, an eminent architect, who joined him to become also a son of St. Dominic—“A lofty soul, an heroic heart, incapable of a divided affection, and from the first moment aspiring after the highest perfection, admirably formed to be a great orator as well as a saint, of whom his friends used to say that his language reminded them of the style of Pascal.” With the Père Lacordaire was also Hernsheim, a converted Jew, a frank, intelligent, and profound mind, from whence issued from time to time thoughts which had a peculiar charm about them, mingled with a sweet and penetrating unction. The Père Besson, an artist like Piel, and the Fra Angelico of France, was also of the number; and, lastly, the Père Jandel, now general of the order. Mme. Swetchine was like the good genius of Père Lacordaire: “Who does not know this, now?” asks the Père Chocarne. “Who has not read the life and works of this woman, whom death has crowned with a glory all the more pure and radiant because she had so carefully concealed it during her life? Who does not know this Russian with a heart so French, this convert to the Catholic faith, so gentle towards beliefs and opinions differing from hers, the masculine understanding in the woman’s heart, the spirit of Joseph de Maistre in the soul of Fénelon, the charity, so delicate and tender, of this woman who said of herself: ‘I would no more be made known to the children of men but by these words: She who believes; she who prays; she who loves’!”