Yet, perhaps I deceive those who read me. They may persuade themselves that the friend of the Count de Maistre and of so many eminent Christians won their friendship only by the merit of a superior intelligence. That would be much, but in Madame de Swetchine it was not all. Intellect, when it comes from God, is inseparable from charity. Madame de Swetchine loved the poor. Like Frederic Ozanam, another blessing of Providence that we have lost, she knew how to forget science in presence of misfortune, and her lips, accustomed to things profound, had only divine things in the face of suffering and death. In entering her dwelling this might not be believed. Pictures by the great masters, dazzling candelabras, precious vases, books enclosed under crystals richly encased, flowers and drapery, all suggested the idea of costly magnificence hardly compatible with the secret love of the unfortunate. But, as I have said, Madame de Swetchine had in all things, even in duty, a point of view which was her own. Persuaded that she owed it to her family and to her country, to represent them worthily in the capital of a great people, she had the art of being simple in the midst of a splendor which she considered necessary, and to find economy in unseen privations. Long before her death, for example, she had no carriage. She walked with scrupulous exactness to the offices of St. Thomas of Aquina, her parish church, although she had a private chapel, and though her age as well as her infirmities would permit her to remain at home or go out only in a carriage.
One day her secret escaped her, Troubled, I imagine by something she had read, or some discourse which I had made her, she asked me with a kind of anxiety if I believed that in giving a sixth part of her income to the poor, she accomplished the precept of almsgiving. Another time, when some early vegetables were served at her table, at which I appeared surprised: "What would you?" she said to me; "there are people who raise these for us; would it not be ungrateful for those who can, not to recompense them for their labor?" This remark opened to me a new order of ideas. I understood that riches should not be [{746}] used simply to support those who cannot gain their own living whether from want of strength or want of work, but that they should also, according to their amount, be used to protect all the honest developments of human toil. It is thus that in the beautiful days of Venice, Genoa, Florence, and of Pisa, so many Christian merchants raised immortal monuments to their country, and that at Rome so many cardinals have built palaces. Magnificence is a virtue, says St. Thomas Aquinas, when it is regulated by reason, and very different from luxury, which is vanity and ruin.
At Madame de Swetchine's house was seen a mute, whom she had adopted as if in return for the gift of speech, which she had received in so eminent a degree. It was her custom to associate the care of the poor with the happy events of her life. Each of them recalled a happiness which he represented. She visited them on fixed days; she herself carried them assistance, and above fill the light of her presence. This intercourse kept alive in her the memory of the man, so quick to be effaced from those who have not the memory of God. She continued it even to the last days of her life; and when already the breath was uncertain and trembling on her lips, she asked for accounts of her poor. I saw, when we were seated around the sad couch of this beautiful light, her dear mute watching from an adjoining chamber, a vigilant sentinel of a life which had given her so much of itself, and which was fading away between friendship remaining faithful, and poverty remaining grateful.
Shall I speak, after the poor, of that beloved chapel, where the former unbeliever of St. Petersburg opened her heart before the God of her maturity? It was there, above all, that she lived, and there that she had gathered into a narrow space all that taste and riches could do to express and satisfy her love. Charming and pious sanctuary! you could not contain many souls, but there was one which sufficed to fill you, and which you filled also. Now you are no more. Death has despoiled the seats where so many friends came to pray; where prayer was so sweet, and peace so profound. We shall see you no more, nor your images, nor your precious stones, nor the tabernacle where at the side of the Lord reposed the virtue all entire of our friend. You had her last thought; it was of you she murmured at the moment eternity seized and carried her before God. Can I, then, better end than with you? For whom should I still ask a remembrance, a tear, an admiration?
For several years Madame de Swetchine had had preludes of her end. The consequences of a fall had left on her face a serious hurt which at intervals and without warning, rendered speaking very painful. This pain did not arrest the rapture of her communications. She remained what she had ever been, the mistress of herself, and occupied with all, winning hearts as in the days of her youth, when the Count de Maistre sent her his portrait with these words, written by his own hand:
"Docile à l'appel plein de grâce
De l'amitié qui vous attend,
Volez, image, et prenez place
Où l'original se plait tant."
Happier than this great man who saw only the first dawning of Sophie de Soymonoff, we have enjoyed her perfect day; he formed her for us, and happier herself than her master, she could, by the clearness of a tempered reason, bring to her age a judgment in which hope surpassed fear, and which best indicated the true route to minds desirous of knowing and serving it. But at last we had to lose her. Every star below fades, every treasure vanishes, every soul is recalled. God did not spare his servant the agonies of death, but he left her to surmount them the influence which she had acquired over all things by seventy-five years of combat. Seated in her parlor to the last hour, she continued to receive those whom she loved, to speak [{747}] to them of themselves, and of the future, to foresee all, and to animate all. Her reclining figure raised itself to smile, she kept the accent and the thread of her thought, and her eyes with their serenity still brightened the touching scene in which we disputed for her with God. A last shock took her from us on the 10th September, 1857, at six o'clock in the morning, having a few days before received the viaticum and the unction of eternal life.
Alas! dear and illustrious lady. I cannot attach to your name the glory of those Roman women whom St. Jerome has immortalized, and yet you were of their race: you were of the race of those women who followed Christ through all the stations of his pilgrimage, who watched him as he died, who embalmed him in his tomb, and who were the first to salute him on the morning of his resurrection. You believed all and saw all. Born in schism, brought up in unbelief, God sent you to open your eyes, one of the rarest minds of this century; his hand touched your eyelids, and the sight which your country refused you, came to you from foreign skies. A Christian, you aspired to the liberty of Christ; conquered for, God through the language of France, you wished to live under the French speech, and quitting a country you always loved, you came among us with the modesty of a disciple and of an exile. But you brought us more than we gave you. The light of your soul illumined the land which received you, and for forty years you were for us the sweetest echo of the gospel, and the surest road to honor. No failure annoyed you, no success ensnared you; you were ever the same, because truth and justice do not change. Ah! doubtless your mission was to do us good in our pale West, but you had another mission, I believe; you were near us as an advance guard of the conversion of the East. Daughter of Greece! God wished to show us in your person, as he already had in several of your compatriots, what will, one day, be that old church of our first fathers in the faith, when, brought back from a fatal separation, she shall receive from the might of St. Peter that emission of unity which she formerly sent us from Jerusalem and Antioch, and of which we guard for her with fidelity the precious deposit. Yes, we trust the love which you preserved for your country; trust the presentiments of your Evangelist, the great Count de Maistre; trust in the long hopes of the Latin Church, and its constant respect for Christian Greece. Yes, sooner or later, the East will bend before the West, as a brother before a brother. St. Sophia will hear resound again in the two languages the symbol which has not ceased to unite us. Liberty of conscience, acquired by the human race, will no longer permit error to guard itself by persecution. Veils will fall; the obscure victims of political fear shake off their chains; all minds from one end of Europe to the other will follow the inclination of nature and grace; and if there remain, as there must, unbelievers and Protestants, at least there will remain no longer a nation crucified for error. In those days, dear and noble friend whom we have lost, and live here to weep—in those days, you will raise a little your cold stone at Montmartre, you will breathe an instant the air in which you lived, and recognizing at once the balm of your first and of your second country, you will bless God who called you before others, and to whom you responded with that faith without stain which enlightened us ourselves, and by that unconquerable hope which sustained us against all the failures of a century so fruitful in lapses and abortions.