The reading has stopped and their talk turns upon private matters, something about Caroline, and hopes and fears for the future. We will leave them to their conversation, and pass out through yonder door, pausing for an instant to admire that picture of the Madonna and child, presented to the family by the Queen, and to look through the glass doors and arched window at the terrace, all green and blossoming with roses and acacias.
Here we are in an M. de Guérin's room, with its table and chairs loaded with books and with dust! That priè-Dieu was embroidered by Mme. de Guérin and whose pensive look face looks out from the pictures, hanging between the fireplace and the bed. There is the cross presented by Christine Rognier, and the holy water vase, and the picture of Calvary before which Eugénie used to kneel and pour out her childish woes. One day she prayed that some spots might disappear from her frock, and a disappeared--and again she begged that her doll might have a soul, but that never came to pass. No doubt it was in this great state bed that Madame de Guérin died at midnight on the second of April, 1819. Eugénie had fallen asleep at her mother's feet, and as the spirit passed away from the long suffering body, M. de Guérin waked the little girl. "My God! I hear the priest, I see the lighted candles and a pale face the in tears," she wrote sixteen years afterwards. Poor little soul! She awoke to the double responsibility of child and parent, for the little eight-year-old Maurice was her mother's legacy to her.
Now a dark spiral staircase in the turret leads to a large hall on the first story, and then winds on with several landing-places to the upper part of the house where the servants sleep.
This hall is the grand reception-room for guests of distinction, and has more and air of grandeur then the rest of the château. This ornamented ceiling and deep wainscoting of carved wood, these paintings set in the panels, and that huge chimney-piece supported on stone caryatides, call up to our fancy the days when stately dames and gentle couriers visited Le Cayla for the hunting season. But there is a golden renown in store for this shattered, time-worn house, more precious than that shed upon it by any Guérin of the seventeenth century.
Suites of small rooms lead from the hall--here is the room that Eugénie shares with her younger sister Marie, and near by is the chambrette where Maurice sleeps when he is at home. In his absence it is her nest where she reads, writes, prays, or leans on the window-sill to listen to the brook rippling below the terrace, two doves, and nightingales and all the lovely [{413}] out-door sounds; or to look over the corn-fields, groves, chestnut trees, and vineyards in the valley, far away to the mountains where the friend, Louis de Bayne, lives in a white château with a linden tree walk, in a country of ravines and waterfalls;--but we have indulged long enough in this summer dream of Le Cayla, and must turn to a picture full of sober tints and shadows.
LA CHENAIE
In Brittany, within a few hours drive from Rennes, was the old family place of the Lamennais, where about the year 1830 Hughes Filicité de Lamennais drew about him several of the most promising intellects of France, [Footnote 64] with the view of establishing a new religious order, that should meet all the demands of that most grasping of centuries, the nineteenth. Montalembert, Gerbert, Sainte-Beuve, Lacordaire, Rohrbacher, Combalot, and many others of more or less distinction, were inmates or frequent visitors in the old white house with its peaked French roof, surrounded on every side by thick woods that were full of beauty and song in summer, but in winter pressed about it in dusky--brown monotony, while overhead on the grey, heavy Breton sky.
[Footnote 64: The precise period at which La Chênaie became the resort of the celebrated men we have been unable to ascertain.
The Lamennais were a commercial family in Bordeaux, ennobled during the reign of Louis XVI. L'Abbé de Lamennais, the second son, refusing to become a merchant, retired to La Chênaie, and prepared himself for the priesthood.]
Here Lamennais passed through many of the struggles of his giant nature, slow in its action, but never pausing until it had reached the extreme result of any course of thought or feeling. Here, at fifteen years of age, he took refuge with his brother, Jean de Lamennais, to think out the perplexities that clouded his faith so persistently as to prevent him from receiving his first communion until he was twenty-two years old; and hither he came to labor over the task he had proposed to himself, of procuring the banishment of tyranny and suffering from the earth.