I wonder if there was no perfume left in the dried rose leaves in her heart causing it to faint ofttimes by the way. A person of so much sensibility must have had a wonderful capacity for suffering. That her memory was ever alive to the past is evident from the unrelenting austerity of her life, from her well-known reply when informed of the death of her son, and from her requesting Le Brun to paint her as Magdalen.
Remembering so many proofs of her conversion, we, too, say, Neither do I condemn thee. No stone will I cast on thy grave; no reproach on thy memory: for repentance effaced every earthly stain, and thou art now sharing the joy there is in heaven over one sinner that repenteth. Tears of penitent love mingled with those of virgin innocence at the foot of the cross. Let them still mingle there; we will not regard them with distrust or disdain. We too have need to cry:
"Drop, drop, slow tears
I And bathe those beauteous feet.
Which brought from heaven
The news and Prince of peace.
Cease not, wet eyes,
For mercy to entreat:
To cry for vengeance
Sin doth never cease.
In your deep floods
Drown all my faults and fears:
Nor let his eye
See sin but through my tears."
Every one who looks deeply into his own heart finds a motive of charity for the faults of others. A monk of Cluny hung up in his cell the picture of a famous debauchee under which he placed his own name. The surprised abbot asked the reason. It was to remind him what grace alone prevented him from becoming. We are all miracles of grace. It may be restraining or transforming. We are not the less in need of it than those who have apparently sunk to lower depths.
All these things passed through my mind while lingering in the chapel of the Carmelites. In that chapel had resounded the grand tones of the great Bossuet at the profession of Madame de la Vallière, with his usual refrain—the emptiness of all earthly things. "Away, earthly honors!" he said on that occasion, "all your splendor but ill conceals our weaknesses and our faults; conceals them from ourselves, but reveals them to others."—"There are two kinds of love," he added, "one is the love of ourselves, which leads to the contempt of God—that is the old life, the life of the world. The other is the love of God, which leads to the contempt of ourselves, and is the new life of Christianity, which, carried to perfection, constitutes the religious life. The soul, detached from the body by mortification, freed from the captivity of the senses, sees itself as it is—the source of all evil. It therefore turns then against itself. Having fallen through an ill use of liberty, it would be restrained on every side, by frightful grates, a profound solitude, an impenetrable cloister, perfect obedience, a rule for every action, a motive for every step, and a hundred observant eyes. Thus hemmed in on all sides, the soul can only fly heavenward. Elle ne peut plus respirer que du côté du ciel"—a beautiful expression, recalling the lines from an old manuscript poem in the Bibliothèque Royal:
"Li cuers doit estre
Semblans à l'encensoir
Tous clos envers la terre
Et overs vers le ciel."
The heart should be like a censer, closed toward earth and open toward heaven; and such is the heart of the real spouse of Christ.
When Bossuet had finished his discourse and the black veil was placed upon the head of La Vallière, the whole audience wept aloud. The Duchess de la Vallière was now Louise de la Miséricorde, vowed to the rigorous life of the Carmelites, to fasts and vigils, to sackcloth and ashes.
Philosophers say no motion is ever lost, and that every act is photographed somewhere in the universe. Think of swelling the choral song that will go on vibrating in the air for ever; of sighs of penitence that go on sighing through space for ever in the ears of a merciful God; of attitudes of adoring praise and love, which are somewhere imaged, to be revealed at the last day as a page in the great book that will decide our eternal fate. How much better to be thus perpetuated than idle words, vain songs, and all the graces of fashion only intended to please the eye of a fellow-mortal.
After all, there is something in such a life that appeals to the instincts of our nature. Even those who condemn it cannot but admire. At least, they find it poetical. Who does not feel an increased sentiment of respect for Dr. Johnson as he stands with bared head, in the rain, where his father's book-stall was, in the market place at Uttoxeter, to expiate an act of early disobedience to his father? "The picture of Samuel Johnson," says Carlyle, "standing bare-headed in the market-place is one of the grandest and saddest we can paint. The memory of old Michael Johnson rising from the far distance, sad, beckoning in the moonlight of memory. Repentance! repentance! he proclaims as with passionate sobs—but only to the ear of heaven, if heaven will give him audience."