Thus in what must be his check, God granted him here below a glory as rare as refined and imperishable. He counts in the first ranks of those who are the seconds for God in the great duel between good and evil—men predestined to be sponsors for the good, for honor and justice. [Footnote 48]
[Footnote 48: Mgr. Dupanloup "Oraison funébre du morts de Castelfidardo."]
A handful of young men, miserably scanty in numbers, alone responded to an appeal of so magnificent, so seductive an example; and of all the symptoms [{302}] of the decadence or transformation of European society, there is none more alarming, more humiliating, than that very paucity of their numbers. Their small number honors them, but accuses us, said, with too much truth, a brave man, who died at the very moment he was going to join them. But this small number sufficed for what La Moricière sought, and for all that he regarded as possible. It sufficed to represent the honor of Catholic France in the midst of the cowardly abandonment of Europe. Above all, it sufficed to strip the lying mask from Piedmontese usurpation, and to spot with blood the hypocritical hands about to be placed on the shoulder and the white tunic of the Vicar of Jesus Christ.
This done, nothing remained for La Moricière but to die as he has died. Death came suddenly, but it did not take him unprepared. It found him on foot, vigilant, decided, invincible, as when, in the times of his youth, he looked it every day in its face. It found him armed with a force and a faith it found not in him then. In seeing it approach he "unhooked his crucifix as he formerly unhooked his sword." The word is from a bishop and it will remain: "She was sweet toward death, as she had been sweet toward life," said Bossuet of his Henrietta of England. He would have said of our hero, that he was strong against death, as he had been strong against life. He would have greeted with his immortal accents that death of the soldier which was also, and above all, the death of a saint. What more admirable or more complete! That last night after a day divided between private and public prayer, and the study of the history of the Church in which he will have a page—a page how resplendent! [Footnote 49] That word only to call a priest—that only cry to procure the grace of absolution—those rapid moments passed while standing in solitude, the crucifix in his hand—and, in fine, the supreme moment which finds him in full adoration on his knees before his God!—can there be conceived a life more generously, more Christianly finished, a death more happy in its suddenness? Behold him saved from tasting, drop by drop, the bitterness of separation from his family—his noble wife, always so worthy of him, and whom God had given for his companion and his light, and his daughters, whom he adored with the tenderness and passionate anxiety of an old soldier. Behold him transported at once from his obscure and wearisome idleness into eternal activity, into a splendor and a glory which no one can henceforth take from him! What a triumphant exit from his exile here below! What a triumphant entry into the heavenly country, the army of the elect, of the confessors of the faith, the chevaliers of Christ! Te martyrum candidatus laudat exercitus.
[Footnote 49: It is well known that on Sunday, the eve of his death, he assisted for the last time at the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, in the village church of Plouzel. He remained there kneeling through the whole office. On his return he read "l'Histoire de l'Eglise," by the Abbé Darras. It was his last reading. The volume was open, near his bed, when he rose to call a domestic to go for the parish priest, who barely arrived in time to receive his last sigh.]
How he now loves and esteems those fifteen years of human disgrace, during which divine grace invaded his soul, and led him through thorns and the cross, scoffs, jeers, disasters, bitterness, anguish, to the Christian coronation of his career!
"I will go," said the Bishop of Orleans, in speaking of the graves of the young soldiers of La Moricière, immolated under his eyes in his last battle,—"I will go there, to cast a look toward heaven and demand the triumph of justice and eternal honor on the earth; I will go there to relieve my heart from its sadness and to strengthen my soul in its faintings. I will learn from them to keep burning within me zeal for the Church and zeal for souls,—to devote myself to the struggle of truth and justice, even to the last whisper of my voice and my last sigh."
And we will go, and the great and dear bishop will come with us;—we [{303}] will go and ask, and learn all that we lack, near that grave opened on the barren heath in Bretagne, at the foot of an unrecognized cross, where lie the remains of the immortal chief of those victims—of him who, as Duguesclin, Duguesclin his countryman, had well deserved to sleep among the kings at Saint-Denis. So long as there shall be a Christian France, that distant and solitary tomb will appear to the soul clothed with a solemn grandeur and a touching majesty. Far from the intoxications of the battle-field, far from the theatre of his struggles and his successes, under that mound of earth which will cover to the day of judgment that brave heart and that victorious arm,—there, there with love it will go to invoke that great soul, betrayed by fortune and magnified by sacrifice. It is there that it will admire without reserve the warrior, the statesman, who preserved unstained his honor—the honor of the soldier, of the citizen, and of the Christian. It is there that it will be needful to go to learn the emptiness of human hopes, and at the same time that there is even in this world true greatness and real virtue. That grave will tell us how necessary it is to despise iniquitous victories, and to serve in the army of justice against the army of fortune; to protest against enervating indolence, against servile compliances, against the idolatry of Success; to place above the poor tinsel of a false greatness fidelity to convictions deserted, to the torn flag of liberty denied, to friends persecuted, to the proscribed, and to the vanquished. That tomb will teach us, in the confusion and instability of the present, to preserve before all things integrity of character, which makes all the power and all the value of the man here below. But from that tomb will come forth at the same time a harder and a more necessary lesson still. It will teach us how to be gentle and strong in adversity; to find calm and joy in suffering; to bear it without depression and without sourness; to consent, where need is, to be only a useless servant, and to gain thus eternal life. Yes, all this will be revealed by the grave of him who will not be forgotten, because he united in his life things too often separated; because he was not only a great captain, a great servant of his country, a faithful soldier of liberty, an honest man, a great citizen, but also a great Christian, an humble and brave Christian, who loved his soul, and has saved it.
CH. DE MONTALEMBERT.