March 19, 1869.
Communion at St. Paterne, where there was a multitude. Beautiful singing. The organ, and a little exhortation by the Père de Chazournes for the closing of the Paschal retreat. On returning, great joy; a little child is born to us, and to us a son is given. Johanna is doing well. Paul is in transports. The house is upside down.
Jeanne is asking to see the angel who brought her brother. At eleven o’clock, to do honor to Saint Joseph, I took the young ones to Sainte-Croix, then to the Calvaire and Recouvrance. There was in the two latter churches exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. A profusion of flowers and lights, and an unwonted splendor, which delighted me, I had so much to ask, so much to pray for. Pray with us, dear Kate, for this pretty innocent who is just arrived, that he too may become a saint!
Gertrude’s forgetfulness of self is admirable. Berthe and Johanna wonder unceasingly at her disinterestedness and detachment from this world. Little by little she despoils herself of all worldly superfluities; sells her jewels one after another, her collections also, of which, some time ago, she was fanatically fond. Kate, in her place I think I should be dead. I should never console myself, if I were a mother without children. And what a mother she is! If you could only see her by the cradle of the little new-born babe, or when she is teaching anything to the other children! What sweetness of language! What tenderness of expression! Ah! poor broken heart which has twice given
up its universe. God is with her!
My cross man has consented to change his lodging; and now they are installed, eight in number, in a healthy and airy street, where I have furnished three small rooms. The new abode is bright in its cleanliness; the mother wept for joy on entering it. The poor man, who still shows some repugnance to my attentions, was carried thither. His wound is frightful. I have found work for the young daughters, and the little ones go to the Christian Brothers. The mother, worn down by grief and privations, with her sight weakened by weeping, is incapable of any employment. Thérèse helped me to install them, and we shall go and see them frequently. That which I am most anxious about is to draw them nearer to God.
Picciola is no better; Anna is very well. Let us continue to pray! All that I do, thoughts, prayers, actions, go to one end—these two cures. Shall I be heard?
Found in the Annals a good article on “Eugénie de Guérin.” The flower of it is this: “There is an interior and private literature; this is as superior to the other as the soul is to the body; it is that of Eugénie de Guérin. This literature of the heart has pages which no other can ever equal. It [the Journal] is an attractive book, and one of the best which could be offered to the human soul. It bears a double character of mystery and of intimacy which centuples its value. What pleasure the reader finds in believing himself also regarded in the light of a confidant!
To have this intimate secret is to live alone with the writer; it is to have a species of love which is charmed with what is whispered into the ear, and with what it confidentially answers itself. The soul of Eugénie de Guérin truly resembled the first created by God, a living soul, taking from and giving to all things around her that life whose divine fire she possessed in the highest degree. It was a soul open to heaven, a winged soul, which rested a moment upon all things in succession, but always to rise again towards heaven, singing like the lark, or else moaning like the dove.”
“The faith which penetrated all the faculties of Eugénie de Guérin,” says M. Nicolas, “had in it nothing romantic, nothing dreamy, nor even ideal; it was a clearly defined and positive faith, the faith of a good woman in a nature of the highest distinction; it was the nature of a child and of a bird, springing and warbling, gathering all the happiness it met with, and carrying it home to be enjoyed in its nest. The sorrow in which she was plunged by the death of Maurice was extreme. This sorrow arose, as it were, from its bed and beat upon her faith as the sea beats upon its shores. But her Journal was eminently secret; she there freely poured out, in the bosom of God alone, the grief which she restrained within herself before men. This Journal was to her a Garden of Olives, where she went apart to faint.”