Madame Sophie Jeanne de Swetchine was born in Russia, on the 4th December, 1782. Her family name was Soymonoff. She had a sister who married the Prince de Gagarin, a former Russian ambassador at Rome; she herself was united at the age of seventeen to General de Swetchine, Military Governor of St. Petersburg. She belonged by birth to the Greek religion, but her education had abandoned her to the scepticism of the eighteenth century, and [{737}] according to the natural course of things, she would have died an unbeliever or a schismatic in the depth of some half-oriental estate. God willed it otherwise, and hence arises from the first the lively interest attached to her life. For a Christian, a soul's predestination, and the mysterious ways by which God conducts it to its end without infringing its liberty, are a spectacle that has above all others an inexhaustible charm. The secrets of grace and free will, so intimate in our own hearts, are less enlightened in a history which is not our own; and the communion of saints which makes us all, believing and loving, one in a single light and a single goodness, gives us, in the account of a difficult conversion, the feeling of a conquest in which we ourselves have shared.
The young Sophie de Soymonoff was then a Greek and an unbeliever. She had been beguiled from her birth by the illusions of rationalism, and the snares of the most singular fortune which error ever had; for the Greek religion has this trait solely its own, that it presents a much restricted and very firm negation to the true faith, under an authority cut loose from its base; yet which, however, preserves all the rest with a profound respect for antiquity. In seeing this exact episcopal succession, this unaltered symbol, this inviolable discipline, these sacraments which Rome herself recognizes, we ask if an error, respecting so long and so well the limits which it traced when it first arose, does not seem like those rocks which an irruption has thrown from their foundations and which remain immovable under the eye and the action of ages? Whilst in the West, Protestantism is unable to create either dogmas or discipline or hierarchy, and floats as a wandering cloud from mind to mind, the East, on the contrary, sees produced the fixity of error. Here dissolution, there petrifaction; and between the two the truth which is immutable without being inert, progressive without being subject to change. However surprising may be this contrast, it is not difficult to account for it, if we consider, on the one hand, the difference of nature between the eastern man and the western; and on the other, the diversity of the political destiny assigned them. The eastern man contemplates and adores, while his rival, less happy in contemplation, is more so in acting. Thus the one has created generous institutions, under which he has from age to age extended his empire, while the other has passed from servitude to servitude, incapable of seating himself in the shade of a regular authority, and of developing in a free atmosphere either the evil or the good which, he has conceived. Hence in Europe error takes a character of life which conducts it to its most extreme logical consequences, at the same time that it wears at Constantinople a character of death, which leaves it what it was, by impotence, not by virtue.
Nevertheless, it is easy for a vulgar intelligence to be deceived, especially where family and national traditions give to error the reflex of patriotism, and when an absolute government, the jealous guardian of a religion of which it is the head, suffers no emanations of the truth to reach the soul. Sophie de Soymonoff was born a prisoner in an empire of seventy millions of souls. She was six hundred leagues from St. Peter's, and a thousand years from the true faith. But, however vigilant despotism may be, however thick its dungeon walls, God remains ever near, and he draws therefrom, when he wills, the instruments which his Providence uses to preserve for man the share which he assigns him in all his works. At an age when Madame de Swetchine could not yet sound either the poverty of the Greek schism or the abyss of unbelief, a man of God came to her. He was not a priest, but an ambassador of a king despoiled of the greater part of his possessions, shut up in an island of the Mediterranean, and who, in sending to St. Petersburg a [{738}] representative of his misfortunes, thought not that he sent there a chargé d'affaires of divine grace, marked with the seal of the elect. Count Joseph de Maistre, tor he it was, detested with all his soul the two Colossuses of his day, the French revolution and the French empire, because in the one he saw the oppression of European nationalities; and the other, because he thought he saw it imprinted forever with an anti-Christian spirit. But he loved France, because, though it was the seat of the revolution and of the empire, he discerned there an indestructible faith, the faith of Clovis, of Charlemagne, and of St. Louis, and I know not what predestination that ravished his judgment, and rendered him the prophet of that very country which he esteemed so culpable and yet so great. Born in Savoy, in the country of St. Francis de Sales, and of Jean Jacques Rousseau, he was French like them in his genius, but even more so by his faith and his heart, which had but two pulsations, one for the church, the other for France; generous mortal who silenced his antipathies by his convictions, in whom blindness did not extinguish the light, and who, like Philoctetes, wounded by the arrows of Hercules, could be separated from Greece, neither in his accusations nor in his affections. Madame de Swetchine soon met this extraordinary man in the saloons of St. Petersburg, and it was the first great event of her life. A positive spirit, but amiable, as his posthumous correspondence proves, M. de Maistre loved conversation. He did not love it as a throne from which his genius could display its brilliancy, but as a free and delicate interchange of thoughts, in which grace unites with intelligence, taste with boldness, freedom with reserve, bringing together in an hour all times and all gifts; and forming a bond of union between men who are pleased with sentiments of kindness and esteem. Generous focus of cultivated minds of all countries, conversation is the last asylum of human liberty. It speaks when the tribune is silent; it supplies the place of books when books are not to be had; it gives currency to thoughts which despotism persecutes; finally, it warms, and agitates; it moves, and is, where it can live, the principle and the all-powerful echo of public opinion. It is not astonishing then that great men find in it a pleasure which is for them like the accomplishment of a duty. So long as society converses it is safe.
It did not look much as if the Count de Maistre could find at St. Petersburg an aliment for this noble want of his heart. The Russian is endowed with facility of expression, a quickness of apprehension, and it is no flattery disrobed of justice which has named him the Frenchman of the North. But he is closed up as soon as he comes into the world; deprived of all political liberty, he has not even in his religion room for his breast to expand, and the Christ he adores appears to him only under the sceptre of his masters and behind their implacable majesty. A fortress encloses at St. Petersburg the temple where sleep the Czars, and, once dead, their people cannot even freely visit their ashes. Fear, suspicion, doubt, all the shades of inquietude dwell in the Russian, and are translated on his brow by a calm which nothing destroys, on his lips by a reserve which nothing dissipates. To converse it is necessary to be open; and to open one's self, one must possess his life, his goods, his honor, his liberty. When therefore the Count de Maistre entered St. Petersburg, he might say that he entered the capital of silence, and that his genius would be there only a monologue.
He was deceived. I knew Madame de Swetchine only during the last twenty-five years of her life; and she was fifty when I first rested my eyes on her benevolent countenance. Doubtless age had ripened her art of thinking and speaking, but it is impossible that she should not have had something of it in that young outburst which early announced to others, and to herself, the treasure which was carried in her bosom. Certain it is that M. de Maistre had soon discovered it. In [{739}] the midst of that society of great lords and diplomatists, he discovered a young woman who bore in her language the marks of superiority, and whose conversation, springing from a source still purer than the mind, touched with remarkable tact the frontiers of liberty, without ever passing beyond them. Confidence is an irrepressible want of our poor heart; it cannot live alone; it opens itself unconsciously, and when life's experience has revealed the peril of abandoning it to itself, it becomes wiser but no fonder of reserve, and counts it a supreme happiness to meet with security in the intercourse of society. Less happy, however, than the greater part of men, the man of genius has need also of a certain elevation in the minds that come in contact with his own; and, though the crowd has its charm and its power, were it only in hearing him who rules, yet it is in the shock of two intelligences, each worthy of the other, that conversation has its highest flight, and reaches the last fibres of our being, and reveals to it the eternal pleasure of minds speaking with minds. Demosthenes discoursing before the Athenians, Cicero pleading in the Forum or the Senate of Rome, did not make, as perhaps some may think, a monologue: the multitude responded, and their eloquence was the fruit of a great soul heard by a great people. There is no solitary eloquence, and every orator has a double genius, his own and that of the age that hears him.
Madame de Staël, who was the first conversationalist of her time, said she was unhappy because of the universal mediocrity, and yet she conversed at Paris among the people the most prompt in the world to speak, and the most confiding: what would she have said at St. Petersburg? M. de Maistre was there, but he was there with a Frenchwoman, born in Russia, who would one day, recognizing the mistake of her birth, live and die in her true country, the country of an incorruptible faith, and of a liberty which had only an eclipse, because conversation has always sustained it. Louis XIV. conversed at Marseilles without suspecting that conversation would kill his despotism. In the East, the destined seat of absolute power, the prince does not converse; he gives his order, and is silent.
It is impossible for two souls to meet each other in a conversation which mutually pleases them, without having religion, sooner or later, enter into their discourse. Religion is the interior vestment of the soul. There are some who tear this vestment to tatters; there are others who soil it; but there are a few who despoil themselves of it all save some shred, and this shred, such as it is, is sufficient to prevent them from appearing absolutely destitute of divinity. Madame de Swetchine was an unbeliever, and, she had behind her, and beyond her unbelief, the Greek schism. The Count de Maistre was a Catholic, not only by faith, but by direct mental intuition. He was at that point where a man can say, so obvious was the truth to him: I believe not, I see. What were the talks of these two souls on a subject in regard to which they had nothing in common, except their genius? What did they say from 1803 to 1810, from the day when they met for the first time, to that on which one of them bent before the other, owned herself vanquished, and, on the bosom of friendship, sighed the last sigh of error? Doubtless God alone knows. God alone knows the stratagems which suspended for seven years the efficacy of an eloquence sustained by divine grace, and disputed with it, step by step, the victim and the victory. However, two immortal books of the Count de Maistre: Soirées de Saint Petersbourg, and the book Du Pape, may give us the secret of that controversy lost to the memory of man, but which we shall one day find in that of God.
It is manifest that the wife of the Governor of St. Petersburg opposed from the first to the ambassador of Sardinia all the negations of the eighteenth century, those shadows which Voltaire had invested with all [{740}] the transparency of his mocking spirit, and around which Jean Jacques Rousseau had thrown the poetry of his melancholy imagination. Doubt, which in all men is a profound abyss, is still more so in the heart of woman. Nature cannot be denied with impunity, and the nature of woman is to believe, for it is her vocation to love. Happily Madame de Swetchine was strong and sincere; she could follow with her mind's eye her friend's thought, and penetrate, little by little, as she became accustomed to it, into those regions of truth where mockery had not left even a trace, and where imagination raised not a single cloud. Laughter ceases as we ascend nearer to God, and so also do tears without cause; the intellect becomes serious, and the heart contented.
When the Count de Maistre had dispelled the phantoms, did Madame de Swetchine see at a glance the whole reality of Christianity, or did the Greek Church interpose itself, as a half-light between a doubt which was no more, and a faith which was not yet? In considering the slowness of her progress it is natural to believe, and the Count de Maistre's correspondence confirms it, that the neophyte took the longest route, and that she did not give herself up to any sudden illumination. It was then the book Du Pape which succeeded to the Soirées de Saint Petersbourg. M. de Maistre had dictated it with one eye on Russia and the other on France. Not that there was any relation between the two countries in the point of view of religion. France, since God had made her the eldest daughter of the church, had not been for a single day a traitor to the sacred unity of her mother; and from the battle-fields of Tolbiac to the scaffolds of the Reign of Terror, she held herself faithful on the only and immovable rock where God had sealed in this world the mystery of truth. But if is true that she was withdrawn from the public law of Europe, which during several centuries had accorded a political supremacy to the Roman pontiff and that she had derived from this sort of resistance, I know not what of personal independence, which without detracting from her theological submission, had given her in certain matters a more apparent reserve. Yet if Louis XIV. had not taken it into his head to establish as a maxim what was only a national instinct, regulated by a profound faith, the sentiments of France would never have assumed in the eyes of Christendom the doubtful coloring which after the ruins of the revolution struck the genius of the Count de Maistre and inspired him with the book, Du Pape. He saw in Russia the immense fall of the Greek Church, caused by this single point of infidelity to St. Peter, and without fearing for France what no one feared for her, he erected to the papacy that beautiful and proud, statue, which posterity will ever regard with honor, even though they should accuse the artist of having known the past less well than the future.
Thou art Peter, and on this rock I build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. These simple words, regarded in the gospel and in history, taught Madame de Swetchine that the Greek Church, although preserving the traditions of episcopal authority, was detached from the centre of unity, and consequently from the throne itself of life. After this it was easy to recognize its effects in the spiritual miseries she had under her eyes. The clergy are not the whole church; they are only a portion of it. The church is the assemblage of all souls who know God, and do not consciously reject either the words he has given the world, or the authority which he has founded to preserve and propagate his words and his grace. Though a visible body in the faithful exteriorly marked with his seal, she yet embraces under the eyes of God, who penetrates and judges all consciences, a multitude unknown to herself, in whom invincible ignorance [{741}] creates good faith, and who live unknowingly the truth of which she is the depositary. This is the church. As to the clergy, all is said in these words of our Lord ascending to heaven: Go and teach all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to keep my commandments. The clergy are the apostolate of the church; they are the venerated summit of faith, the army of souls called by God to spread the only law which is infallible, the only force which conquers the flesh, the only unction which gives humility. "Who hears you hears me," our Lord has said: "who despises you despises me." All may and must befall the clergy, hate, exile, torture, death; there is but one thing which they cannot and should not merit, contempt. When Christ suffered in the judgment hall under the blows of the vilest executioners, when he bore his cross from Jerusalem to Calvary, when he was raised on it in the face of the whole world, there was against him from heaven to earth, from Satan to man, a hate deeper and broader than the ocean. But respect survived; and Pilate in washing his hands, the centurion in beholding the cross, the virgins in weeping, the sun in hiding its light, were the revelations of a conscience greater than the punishment, and which held the astonished universe in expectation and awe. Now, by a judgment of God, which is the chastisement of a fault of centuries, the Greek clergy are despised. They are despised not only by the unbeliever but by the believer; they are despised by the penitent whose confessions they hear, by the purified Christians to whom they give the body and blood of their God. This contempt is striking and universal; the pope or Greek priest bears it on his forehead as an avenging sign, and even the kiss of the Czar confirms and enlarges it.