Eugénie did not give herself up to vain despair after Maurice's death. Thinking perpetually of him whom she had loved so deeply, she busied herself with the writings which he had left behind him, and prayed for his soul, recommending him also to the prayers of her friends. She still addressed herself to him, and oppressed with sadness unto death, communed with his absent soul, imploring him to come to her. "Maurice, my friend, what is heaven, that home of friends? Will you never give me any sign of life? Shall I never hear you, as the dead are sometimes said to make themselves heard? Oh! if it be possible, if there exist any communication between this world and the other, return to me!"
But one day she grew weary of this unanswered correspondence, and a moral exhaustion took possession of her. "Let us cast our hearts into eternity," she cried. These were her last words, and she died, glad to see her life accomplished, confiding in the mercy of God, in his goodness who reunites the soul which he has severed here below, but never has forgotten in their bereavement.
II.
Charlotte Brontë, (Currer Bell,) whom M. Camille Selden offers to us as a type of energy and virtue, was the daughter of a country clergyman. Sad was the childhood and sad the youth of the poor English girl. Her mother was an invalid, her father a man of gloomy and almost fierce disposition, their means were so limited as to border upon poverty, and as if to complete the dreary picture, the scenery about the parsonage was "austere and lugubrious to contemplate, like the sea beneath an impending tempest."
In England the clerical profession is totally unlike the holy mission of a Catholic clergyman. The ecclesiastical life there is a career, not a vocation. "Mr. Brontë never left home unarmed," a singular method of preaching peace to the world and reconciliation among brethren. He was a good father, no doubt--almost all Englishmen are so. But he kept his family at a distance, and spoke to them seldom, and then in a curt and supercilious manner. His morose spirit did not relish the society of children, and if he became the preceptor of his little family, it was rather in order to fulfil a duty and conform himself to custom, than from a feeling of tenderness or even solicitude for their future welfare. Thus the minister's children lived amid influences which were cold and serious, but upright, and in a certain sense strengthening. There are so many children in every English family that parents of the middle class are obliged to treat them less as subordinates than as auxiliaries. The children are less familiar with their parents but more respectful than among us; life is not so easy and gentle, education more masculine.
Independence is the goal toward which all young English people tend, and both girls and boys are early taught that labor alone can lead them to it. In France we long impatiently for the time to shut up our children in the high-walled barracks which we dignify with the name of boarding-schools; for it is extremely necessary, we say, to be rid of idle, noisy boys. Girls are generally educated at home, but either through weakness or indifference, they are treated with far too much indulgence. "Poor little things!" we say pathetically; "who can tell what fate awaits them in married life?" for in this country we so far forget Christian duty as to make marriage a necessity, an obligation, a matter of business, instead of seeking therein, as the English do, a basis of true happiness.
Children, educated as they are in England, early acquire habits of observation and reflection; sitting around the tea-table in the evening, they listen to the conversation of their grandparents, and are often questioned upon the most serious subjects. This is Protestantism, you say. Not at all: it is the remains of the Christian spirit anterior to the Reformation. This spirit is exhibited in habits as in laws. If family life among us were truly catholic, we should possess all this and in greater perfection.
There is another practice in England which is often beneficial, and which we do not dare to adopt openly in France. I mean the habit of writing out one's impressions. This seems to be as natural in England as thought; and mothers, young girls, and men consider it a duty to keep an account of the good ideas that occur to them or of the interesting facts they may observe.
In France, on the contrary, true literary culture is closed to women, and there is a general outcry whenever any woman takes the liberty of publishing a work under her own name. It is thought quite natural that a young girl, with a dress outrageously decolletée and her head covered with flowers, should appear upon a stage and sing a bravura; but let her venture to write, and the world accuses her of want of reserve.