“Do not write. I am sad and would my life were o'er.
A summer without thee?—Oh! night of starless gloom!—
I fold the idle arms that cannot clasp thee more—
To knock at my heart's door, were like knocking at a tomb.
Do not write.”
Mme. Valmore's nature was eminently feminine. Her heart was her guide. She was a being of impulse and sympathy. But her instincts were so delicate and true that they were to her what reason and philosophy are to colder natures. Her imagination was thoroughly Catholic. It is only Catholicity that develops souls of such tender grace and beauty, and she was brought up under its influences. A cheerful piety, Catholic in tone, seems to have pervaded her life, and consoled and sustained her in its many dark hours. She loved to pray in the deserted aisle of some shadowy church full of mystery and peace. “She had her Christ—the Christ of the poor and forsaken, the prisoner and the slave, the Christ of the Magdalen and the good Samaritan, a Christ of the future of whom she herself has sung in one of her sweetest strains:
‘He whose pierced hands have broken so many chains,’ ”
—a line that appeals to all who have sinned and been forgiven!
In her last years she thus writes: “I see at an immense distance the Christ who shall come again. His breath is moving over the crowd. He opens his arms wide, but there are no more nails—no more for ever!”
Her devotion to Mary is constantly peeping out in her letters. After visiting a church at Brussels, she writes thus to her daughter: “To-day we saw the black Virgin with the Child Jesus also black like his mother. These Madonnas wring my heart with a thousand reminiscences. They are nothing in the way of art, but they are so associated with my earliest and sweetest faiths that I positively adore those stiff pink-lined veils and wreaths of perennial flowers made of cambric so stout that all the winds of heaven could never cause a leaf to flutter.”