[Footnote 47: "Anne Dominique de Noailles, Marquise de Montagu." Rouen, 1859. It May be well to remind the American reader that the Marquise de Montagu, grandmother of General La Moricière's wife, was a sister of Madame Lafayette, who so heroically shared the prison of Olmntz with her husband, and whoso faith and purity gave a superhuman strength and energy to her noble character.—THE TRANSLATOR. ]
This public courage against the enemies of the faith availed him from God the unhoped for and incomparable gift of magnanimous patience, which he needed to enable him to accept and bear his trials, and to offer to God all the goods of his glorious life, which he had sacrificed. The progress of [{300}] that great soul, becoming every day more obvious, was manifested especially by his resignation in presence of the heavy cross which was inflicted on him.
"We welcome the cross at a distance," says Fénelon, "but shrink from it when close by." It was not so with La Moricière. He had seldom welcomed the cross when afar, but when it came home to him, he embraced it, raised it up, and bore it even to the tomb, with a supernatural generosity, serenity, and simplicity. The crucifying experience which, according to Fénelon, is always needed to detach us from ourselves and the world, found in him no revolt, no fainting, no feebleness. He entered this new career and walked in it to the end with the vehement and obstinate resolution of a man of war determined to become a man of God.
A great genius has said it concerns the honor of the human species that souls born to suffer should know how to suffer well. La Moricière was not born to suffer; he was born to combat, to command, to conquer, and to dazzle; nevertheless, when life became to him only one long suffering, he learned how to suffer well, to suffer as a Christian, as a soldier of Christ, as the conqueror of evil—to suffer not during fifteen days or fifteen months, but through fifteen years, till death came to relieve him from his post.
All of us who have known and visited him in this second and sorrowful phase of his existence, owe to him great and valuable lessons, which his memory and the stern example of his death must render for ever sacred to us. Doubtless, the acts of the saints, the examples of the heroes of the Christian life, their trials and their triumphs, transmitted by historians or commentators to their spiritual posterity, are much; but they are nothing, or next to nothing, in the real presence, if I may so speak, of a man marked with the seal of election, of a confessor, not merely of the faith, but of virtue, patience, resignation, and Christian abnegation. What history, what preaching, could avail so much as a clasp of that valiant hand, an accent of that vibrating voice, a look of that lion's eye, coming to the support of a truth recognized, asserted, and practised by a soul of that temper?
No; the flame of that beautiful eye, so limpid and so proud, will never be forgotten by any who have once seen it, whether touched with the surprise of generous indignation or softened by sympathy and the desire to persuade; and that flame, always living in our memory, will continue to illumine for us the mysteries of life and suffering.
Besides, no exterior metamorphosis accompanied the deep and salutary change in his interior. Such as he was seen on the field of battle, or in the assemblies of which he was a member, in the most brilliant and the most agitated portion of his career, such he was in the solitude and obscurity of his new life. He was as vehement and as dazzling as ever, with all his fire and all his charm, with his exuberance of life, youth, originality, enthusiasm, which seemed always anxious to overflow on all and on everything around him. Only sourness, wrath, irritation even the most legitimate, seemed swallowed up in one master passion, the passion for good—seeking and accepting the will of God, in the love of souls.
Nothing in him was worn-out or enfeebled, but all was pacified, reduced to order, animated with a higher and purer inspiration. The touching forgetfulness of his human glory, humanly buried, rendered him only the more dear and the more sacred to his friends. These friends were still numerous; and friends, relations, old comrades, old colleagues, we were all proud of him, all under his charm as soon as he reappeared, for too brief moments, amongst us. Nothing, indeed, could be more natural, for I cannot too often repeat that he preserved in his private relations all his old fascination, and all his old [{301}] attractiveness. Essentially French, with all the good and generous instincts of our country; essentially modern, also, in the turn of his mind, his ideas, and his convictions, having nothing stern, morose, or superannuated in his religion, and willing to place at the service of the old law, and the old faith, all the resources of modern civilization, which none better knew or more justly appreciated; in fine, he remained a liberal in spite of so many disappointments, so many defections, and so many mad crimes committed in the name of liberty—a liberal certainly more moderate and more practical than in the days of his youth, but liberal altogether a soldier, as affirms to us one of those valiant knights who fought with him at Castelfidardo. He thought with the new generation, and held liberty a thing so beautiful and so good that he was willing to accept it frankly and cordially whatever the hand that offered it.
As the price of his suffering, God granted him the conversion of his soul. As the price of his conversion, it was given him to fix for a last time the eyes of Europe and of posterity on himself, by a struggle as unequal as generous, in the service of a cause as legitimate as abandoned. All has been said both before and since his death on the epic grandeur and the Christian heroism of the sacrifice he made for the Papacy, so basely betrayed. It was, as repeated over and over again, not the sacrifice of his life, which he had a hundred times exposed with joy on the field of battle, but the sacrifice of his name, his reputation, his military glory, the victories he had won. Se et ante actos triumphos devovit, according to the truly Roman device of the medal offered him by the magistracy of Rome. "He marched," says General Trochu, "with weakness against force, a signal and rare honor which remains attached to his name in the judgment of all honest men of all creeds and of all countries."
Let us endeavor to define clearly what it was, aside from the justice of the sovereign and the sanctity of the right he went to defend, that marks his devotion with a character of exceptional grandeur and purity, which places him—dare I say it?—almost above Lescure and Larochejaquelein. He was not young, obscure, and inexperienced, as were those heroes so pure; he was not attracted by novelty, the irresistible charm of the unknown, the chances of the struggle, or the fortune of battle; he was vanquished in advance, and he knew it; he marched in cool blood to an inevitable defeat, and a defeat not simply material. To yield to that sublime seduction of a duty which can end only in a catastrophe, he was obliged to break with most of his political friends. He knew perfectly to what he exposed himself; he knew thoroughly the cosmopolitan power and implacable fury of the party which he was sure to stir up against him. He knew that clerical unpopularity is that which is the hardest to efface, and the last that is pardoned. He knew it, and as formerly before the breach of Constantine, he threw himself, head lowered, against it. He had the noble courage to be unpopular, and so became unpopular even to heroism. Taking the man such as we have known him, with his character, his age, and his antecedents, I fear not to affirm that in no epoch has Christian chivalry ever conceived anything more difficult, more meritorious, more worthy of eternal memory.