Placed between this spectacle and the vision of the Count de Maistre, the whole light came to Madame de Swetchine, and then commenced for her the second struggle, the struggle of the truth against the holiest affections of the heart. Truth is, no doubt, the great country of the mind; it is father, mother, brother, sister, and native land; but man has on earth another family and another country, the better he is the more he loves them, and virtue; in so far as it is human, makes them the cherished centre of all that is good, amiable, and generous. To these ties already so strong, religion adds its divine influence, and from the same table to the same altar man leads his happiness, and there attaches by a single chain time and eternity. What a blow is that when some day, by an evidence which leaves no possible retreat, the daughter shall see God standing between her and her mother, between her and her husband, between her and her native country, and there shall be said to her in the same voice which Abraham heard: "Go out from, thy land and thy kindred, and from the house of thy father, and come to the land which I shall show thee." There are some, it is true, who think this voice should never be heard, but for three thousand years, since Abraham, it has commanded and been obeyed. God is stronger than man, and man is great enough to sacrifice to truth more than himself.
Madame de Swetchine had not only to fear the rending of her heart, she had before her an intolerance which the opposition of our century had only irritated. The Emperor Nicholas did not yet reign, but the conversion of a Russian soul to the Catholic Church was none the less an act of high treason, which exposed her to the severities of the morrow, if she escaped the inattention of the evening. After having endured this stormy situation for six or seven years, Madame de Swetchine turned her eyes toward France, and obtained from the Emperor Alexander, a generous prince, himself agitated by an unknown inspiration, the permission to live there. France received her in 1818 at the age of thirty-four, in the plenitude of her faculties ripened by a long intercourse with men and events.
It is not without a purpose that God draws to himself' a creature condemned to error by all the ties of family and country, and transports her far away to a foreign capital in the midst of a new people. Much less so is it when this grace falls on a choice intelligence, placed in the first ranks of society, and who unites in herself all the gifts of nature, and all those of the world. Paris since 1750 had been the centre of the European mind. It had by half a century's crusade against Christ, drawn the nations from those old certainties to which they owed their existence. An unheard of revolution had been the chastisement of this fault, a chastisement so much the more remarkable, as France had invoked just principles, conformed to its ancient traditions, and as it was the defect of a superior light to restrain herself, that she had traversed everything with a devastating impetuosity. She had remained faithful only to her sword, and still after twenty-five years of victory, worthy of her happiest days, she had just succumbed by excess in the battlefield, and twice the foreigner had soiled with his presence that superb city, the mistress, by the ascendency of her intelligence, of the modern world. It was there on the day after its reverses, that Providence conducted Madame de Swetchine. The question was to know if France, aware of the need she had of God to reconstruct her, would hear the voice of her misfortunes; if recalled to her ancient kings, and reconciled in her old temples, she would, consent to be again Christian in order to give her liberty the sanction of the faith which had always guided and always served her.
Few minds in either camp discerned this relation of Christianity with the institutions of a liberally governed people. The example of England, where the church had always supported the commons, said but little to the publicists who were the most charmed with her Parliament. Madame de Swetchine herself had had in the author of Considerations sur la France, a master who saw plainly the vices of the French revolution, but who without betraying civil and political liberty, did not well comprehend, perhaps, either all its necessity or all its future. Happily she had lived under absolute power; she had had under her eyes for nearly forty years a Christian Church in a servile land, and this lesson could not be lost on a mind as true as hers. The evils of liberty are great among a people who do not know how to measure it, who at every moment refuse it by jealousy, or go beyond it through inexperience. But these evils, great as they may be, belong to the apprenticeship of liberty and not to its essence; they still leave it daylight, space, and life, a resource for the feeble, a hope for the vanquished, and above all the sacred emulation of good against evil. Under despotism good and evil sleep on the same pillow; souls are invaded by a dull degeneracy because they have no longer a struggle to sustain, and Christianity itself, a protected victim, expiates in unspeakable humiliations the benefits of its peace. Madame de Swetchine saw this. Her great heart was full of this when she entered Paris, and amid the roar of tempests she knelt, for the first time in her life, at altars combated, but esteemed. It is necessary to have suffered for liberty of faith to know its price. It is necessary to have passed under the gibbets of schism, to be able fully to know what it is to breathe the atmosphere of truth. How often have I seen Madame de Swetchine's eyes fill with tears at the thought that she was in a Catholic country! How often has she been inwardly moved at seeing a good priest, a good religious, a good brother of the Christian Schools, in a word, our Lord's image on a sincere brow or in a virtuous life! Ah! this it is which here we never lose. We [{743}] can dishonor I know not how many human and even divine things; but in the shipwreck Christ remains visible to us in many who worthily love and serve him.
The life of Madame de Swetchine during the forty years she passed in our midst was one continual thanksgiving. More than once under a reign of persecution, like that of the Emperor Nicholas, she had fears for the security of her sojourn in France. Once, notwithstanding her great age, she believed it necessary not to leave it to the zeal even of her most tried friends, and rushed to St. Petersburg to implore the forgetfulness of the Czar. God still saved her. She had acquired such a prestige, that it might be said that she represented at Paris the honor and intelligence of Russia, and this, it is probable, was what, in the most difficult times, saved her from being recalled.
This dependence which she still had on her country, because her estates there might be held to answer for her personal conduct, imposed on her an extreme prudence in a saloon which was frequented by her compatriots and by men of all ranks and all opinions. But this reserve, which she had acquired as a habit in her own country, detracted nothing from the grace and sincerity of her discourse; whether she was silent or whether she expressed her thoughts, according to the degree of confidence inspired by those present, she never betrayed it; and in her silence even, she seized things on the side which remained accessible, and gave them clearness enough, to instruct without displeasing. An exquisite naturalness covered her speech, though tact and unexpectedness were its most usual characteristics. When she met Madame de Staël for the first time, each knew the other without being told; and happening to be placed at opposite corners of a large hall, they observed each other with curiosity. Madame de Staël, accustomed to homage, waited for Madame de Swetchine to come to her. Seeing she did not, she all at once crossed the long space which separated them, stopped before her, and said in a lively and caressing tone: "Do you know, Madame, that I am much hurt by your coldness toward me?" "Madame," was the reply, "it is for the king to salute first." This remark can give some idea of the ingenuous and submissive style of Madame de Swetchine's conversation. Different from Madame de Staël, who disserted rather than conversed, Madame de Swetchine raised her voice but slightly, and had no accent of domination; she waited her time without impatience, without caring for success, always more happy to please than ambitious to dazzle. An inexhaustible interest in those whom she had once loved, gave to her intimacy a sweet and maternal character. Her genius was approached as a focus of light, no doubt, but with a filial disposition which endeared its brilliancy, which was the fruit of a goodness as manifest as was her intellectual superiority. Introduced into the highest French society by the Duchesse de Duras and the Marquise de Montcalm, sisters of the Duc de Richelieu, she was not long in making felt around her that attraction which is produced in society by acknowledged eminence of character. What she had been when young at St. Petersburg in her husband's salons, she was in the heart of France; but what at St. Petersburg was only a conquest of suffrages and of admiration, became at Paris an apostolate.
When a soul passes to God's side, that is to say, to the side of Christianity, the only expression here below of the divine life, she can find nowhere else the principles and motives of her actions. All in her proceeds from the sacred height and returns to it, Madame de Swetchine lived in the world, but was not of it; she was held to it only by its good—only to make her protest for God, and to serve him; an admirable office in which the world assumes all its grandeur; in which fallen under the strokes of a mind that [{744}] knows what it is worth, it arises and occupies with him every instant of thought and every vibration of the heart. He who is disabused by the simple experience of life, despises the world, while he who is disabused by light from on High esteems it. Being then no longer in the world for the world, Madame de Swetchine was more than ever there for God; she followed his course with all-powerful interest, attentive to seize whatever might remove or approach her to the principle of all life. M. de Maistre was no more. A different school from his was forming; Madame de Swetchine saw unfold its first germs, and she surrounded with her counsels and her affection the young representatives of an idea which her recollections, perhaps, would have repulsed, but which the freedom of her mind rendered her capable of judging, for this was the character as the temper of her genius. In a time of intellectual dependence, in which parties bore away everything in their train, Madame de Swetchine made no engagement, and submitted to no attraction; she isolated every question from the noise around her, and placed it in the silence of eternity. Thus was one sure after having heard all that was said, to encounter on crossing her threshold something which had not been heard, an original view of the truth; and even when she was mistaken, a proof that her thought did not belong to herself alone, because she sought it in God.
It was after the failure of L' Avenir that I first saw her. I approached the borders of her soul as a seaweed broken by the waves, and I remember yet, after twenty-five years, how she placed her light and strength at the service of a young man unknown to her. Her counsels sustained me both against despondeney and exaltation. One day when she thought she noticed in my words a doubt or lassitude, she said to me with a singular accent, the simple words: "Take care." She was wonderful in discovering the point to which one inclined, and where it was necessary to bear assistance. The measure of her thought was so perfect, the freedom of her judgment so remarkable, that I was long in comprehending to whom and to what she was devoted. Where in others I should have known in advance what was to be said, here I was almost always ignorant, and nowhere did I feel myself more out of the world. This charm from above was not diffused over me alone. Other minds, my predecessors or my contemporaries, felt its action, and it is impossible to say for how many souls this single soul was a lamp. Not only the day, at fixed hours, not only the evening until midnight, but at almost every moment, confidence sought her with an importunity which was never complained of. Thus was formed around a foreigner I know not what country, which was of all times and of all lands, for it was the truth which was its ground, its atmosphere, its light, and its motion.
Nature, it is evident, could not suffice of itself to feed this inexhaustible conversation. It was nourished by an assiduous reading of all that was remarkable which appeared in Europe. No book, as no man, escaped her ardent curiosity. After the example of the Count de Maistre, who inspired the taste, Madame de Swetchine pencil-marked every page which struck her, and in her first leisure hour between two conversations she engraved on a light leaf of brass the thought which had illumined hers. She added her own reflections with the rapidity of a first glance, and this triple commerce with books, men, and herself, which was never interrupted, gave to her intelligence a spring which was never exhausted. What, however, in the midst of the contradictions of her century were the principles which guided her, and of which she shed around her the unfailing clearness? In recalling my recollections of her, I should say they were Our Lord the life of heaven and earth; the Catholic Church, the only society of the mind, because it alone possesses the foundation of faith and the [{745}] inspiration of charity; Rome, the centre of the world, because she is the centre of the church; the human family progressive on a basis that does not change; civil and political liberty, the daughter of Christianity; commerce, industry, science, all grand things, but under things grander still, honor and justice; all man's toil powerless to diminish poverty without virtue; France, a people loved by God—its revolution a vengeance and a mercy, a germ under ruins; philosophy, as old as man, the vestibule of Christianity when not as yet enlightened by faith, and its crown when faith has transformed it; reason, the inborn light whence philosophy proceeds, and which Christianity perfects; the future, an uncertain abyss, but in which God is ever found; error, a crime sometimes, a weakness oftener; tolerance, an homage to the truth, a proof of faith; force, which is next to impotency; authority, an ascendency which has its source in antiquity and in right; property, the union of man with the earth by labor, the first liberty of the world, without which no other subsists; liberty the guaranty of right against whatever is not right. These, if my memory is faithful, are the sound which at every hour and under every touch was given forth by that harmonious lyre which we now hear no more. A constant simplicity in an equal elevation, a goodness which came from Christ, gave to her doctrines, apart from their merit as truth, a personal influence. In hearing her this double charm might be resisted, but she could not be hated or despised; she could not but be loved, and inspire the desire to become better. Happy mouth, which for forty years made not an enemy to God, but which poured into a multitude of wounded or languishing hearts the germ of the resurrection and the rapture of life.