[Footnote 46: Circular of M. Thouvenel, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 18th October, 1860. The "National Opinion," a worthy "Moniteur" of Piedmont, adds in its number for Sept. 14, 1860: "Victor Emmanuel proposes precisely to protect the Holy Father and his temporal authority against the enthusiasm of the volunteers.">[
From that moment all was accomplished or marching toward the end foreseen and determined. The darkest forebodings, the saddest predictions, are verified. Christian France is resigned, and Europe has habituated herself to what five years ago appeared to be the nec plus ultra of impossible iniquity. People have even come to regard confining the spoliation within its present limits as a benefit which, if assured, would make a Te Deum break forth from the whole Catholic world, asleep or deceived.
La Moricière had seen and suffered all this, and it was only the last phase of a disgrace which lasted fifteen years without relaxation and without revenge. As his life, rent asunder, drew toward its end, by an insolent freak of fortune, by a contrast and a coincidence the strange mystery of which will astonish the future, Abd-el-Kader arrives in France to be received there as a sovereign!
The conqueror and the conquered, it is said, met in the street: La Moricière on foot, confounded with the [{298}] multitude; Abd-el-Kader with all the pomp of his official train, and the grand cordon of the Legion of Honor on his breast. They exchanged a single look. After which, the prisoner of 1847 is found sufficiently avenged on the prisoner of the 2d of December; pursuing his course with loud din, caressed, feasted, toasted by courtiers, functionaries, and freemasons, presented to the universitarian youth as the type of modern civilization and the religion of large souls, Abd-el-Kader quitted triumphantly the soil of France, to return with his wives, who accompanied him, to his palace in the East; La Moricière entered his house to die there, and he did die there, all alone, forgotten by the multitude, unknown by the rising generation, and buried in the silence of the flatterers and satellites of fortune. The death of this great servant of France is announced by the official journal among the "Miscellaneous Facts," after an article on conducting water into Paris! At the decline of day his coffin, in being directed toward a village cemetery, traverses obscurely the streets of that Babylon which he had saved, really saved, from barbarism—those very streets lately ploughed by the pompous cortège of a marshal of France, named grand master of freemasonry by an imperial decree.
Whilst the Cialdinis, the Fantis, and so many authors and fomentors of the guet-apens of Castelfidardo, so many other violators of the law of nations and of their sworn faith, survive and triumph, rolling in opulence and prosperity. La Moricière, for having been faithful to law, to honor, and to religion, is extinguished and disappears, vanquished, ignored, forgotten.
I have said that I suspect the judgments of history, because history is almost always the servant or the priestess of Success; but its recitals are always instructive, and I consent that it be questioned to ascertain if it furnish many instances of a destiny more tragic.
III.
But after having touched the bottom of the abyss, the soul rises to contemplate and adore the grandeur and glory of adversity. La Moricière, we know and confess it, triumphant and satisfied, marshal of France, conqueror at Alma or Magenta, hailed by the curiosity of the eager multitude, fat and heavy by prosperity, had not risen above the throng of successful generals, had attained no other glory than military glory, with which France in all times has been smitten, and in all times been saturated. His image, placed in its rank in the galleries of Versailles, in the midst of so many others, would have awakened in the souls of the visitors only a transient and commonplace emotion; but La Moricière, betrayed by fortune, disgraced, proscribed, insulted; La Moricière, conqueror of anarchy and victim of the dictatorship; La Moricière, condemned by his sense of honor to the punishment of an obscure idleness; La Moricière, beaten at Castelfidardo and a captive at Ancona; La Moricière, submitting to the wrongs of fate with a modesty and a gravity wholly Christian, then dying all alone, but standing with the crucifix in his hand—is a personage of another stamp, and rises at once from the ranks of the herd to the loftiest height of human admiration. This is a glory apart, which re-youths the soul, which stimulates and purifies it, and which it would not exchange for any other. This is a spectacle such as history too rarely offers, such as we Frenchmen, we Catholics, too docile worshippers of force and fortune, have special need of. Yes, this glory is enviable, and in reality the most enviable of all glories. In vain nature rebels, reason and faith unite to proclaim it. We are all moved by the recollection of Catinat, old, retired, and resigned in his retreat, and recalling there, as says Saint-Simon, "by his simplicity, his frugality, his contempt of the world, his peace of mind, and the uniformity of [{299}] his conduct, the memory of those great men who, after triumphs the best merited, returned tranquilly to their plough, always loving their country, and little affected by the ingratitude of Rome, which they had so well served." But Catinat, really unfortunate; Catinat, a prisoner, exiled, disgraced; Catinat, removed at the flower of his age from the command of armies, had been much greater still, and, as our La Moricière have recalled St. Louis in chains. The ancients said that the good man struggling with adversity is the most worthy, if not alone worthy, of the favor of God. Christianity adds, that it is a sight the most necessary and salutary to the heart of man.
La Moricière was chosen among us to give this high lesson in all its majesty and in all its beauty. He has shown that double character of docility under trial, and of empire over misfortune, which makes great men and great saints. It was because there was in him the stuff of a great Christian.
Trials and exile rapidly developed in his soul the germs of faith which early domestic education had planted, and which pure and noble examples near him led him to admire and cherish. By his marriage with the granddaughter of the Marchioness of Montagu, he entered a family in which calamities the most atrocious and the most unexpected, borne with superhuman energy, had left in the soul only a sublime serenity, and compassion greater still for the executioners than for the martyrs. Inflamed by the recitals of a mother-in-law who continued to the last his most devoted and enthusiastic friend, he had the first thought of a publication destined to count among the treasures of our history, and of which he himself dictated the first draft. [Footnote 47] In learning to appreciate the action of Christian virtue on the most touching victims of the Reign of Terror as on the obscure duties of domestic life, he was conducted further and higher still. A study, an active study, ardent and profound, of the doctrines and results of religion, became henceforth his principal occupation, and he continued it with unwearied perseverance to his last moments. Once a Christian in practice as well as in belief, he would be so openly, and no more recoil before human respect and the disdains of infidelity than before the Arabs or the barricades. He was seen at the foot of the Christian pulpit, following the words of the preacher with deep attention, and the lively gesticulation habitual to him, marking on his nobly chiselled features an expressive assent and sometimes an impatient contradiction, as if he felt that he must in his turn mount the tribune and reply. One day, at Brussels, a former colleague and friend, who had known him quite different from what he was now, found him bending over his maps, tracing the progress of our army in the Crimea. To hold them unrolled he took the books which he now generally, and which were the Catechism, his mass-book, the Imitation of Jesus Christ, and a volume of Père Gratry. At sight of these four witnesses of a preoccupation so novel, the visitor could not dissemble his surprise. "Yes, indeed," said the general, "I use these, I occupy myself with that. I do not wish, like you, to remain with my feet dangling in the air, between heaven and earth, between light and darkness. I wish to know whither I go, and by what I am to hold. I make no mystery of it."