She writes her brother: “Lift up your hat when you pass the Church of Notre Dame, and lay upon its threshold the first spring flowers you find.”
One of the most touching features of her life is her devotedness to this brother, an old soldier and pensioner in the hospital at Douai, whom she aided out of her own scanty purse, and still more by the moral support she was continually giving him in the most delicate manner; trying to ennoble his unfortunate past so as to give him dignity in his own eyes—a thing so often forgotten in our intercourse with those who are in danger of losing their self-respect.
Mme. Valmore's charity and sympathies were not confined to her own kindred. They responded to every appeal. The condemned criminal and prisoners [pg 716] of every degree excited the compassion of her heart. At a time of great distress at Lyons, she says she is “ashamed to have food and fire and two garments when so many poor creatures have none.” And yet she seems not to have had too many of the comforts of life herself. One Christmas eve she speaks of kneeling on her humble hearth—“a hearth where there is not much fire save that of her own loving, anxious heart—” to pray.
It is sad to see a woman with such a refined, poetical nature, and a heart sensitive to the last degree, condemned to a fate so chilling and unkind. But she never lost courage. Living in narrow lodgings, and on limited means, she contrived to give a certain artistic air to everything around her, and received her visitors with polished ease and self-possession, hiding her griefs under the grace of her manner and the vivacity of her conversation. Her courage and fortitude were admirable under adverse circumstances and such afflictions as the loss of her daughters. No book not strictly religious could teach a more forcible lesson of patient, cheerful endurance—how “to suffer and be strong.” The work is elegantly translated, and is a welcome addition to the lives of celebrated French ladies already issued by the same publishers.
The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century. By James Anthony Froude, M.A. In 2 vols. Vol. I. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1873.
We have here the first volume of a new and very elaborate work by the adventurous historian of England, and chivalrous champion of Henry VIII. and his daughter Elizabeth. It might perhaps have been hoped that enough had been said of Mr. Froude in these columns, and that our readers had done with him. His reputation as a faithful historian had been sorely damaged, and indeed irretrievably ruined, by several indignant critics in England, in Scotland, and in Ireland, as well as in the United States (by the short, sharp and decisive onslaught of Mr. Meline); so that it has been an actual surprise to the literary world to find him once more tempting Providence in a new book, heralded and advertised by a course of lectures in New York. But this is the nature of the man: he must surprise and startle, or he dies; he must provoke the most wondering and angry contradiction and comment, and gratify the small feminine spite that possesses him, provided he can sting and wound like a hornet. For him, to scold is to live.
The present volume, although entitled The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, is in fact occupied, for more than two hundred pages, with an account of the dealings of his country with Ireland during the XVIIth century, and presents his views of Irish history at the notable periods of the insurrection—or alleged “massacre”—in 1641, as well as the short reign of James II. The narrative ends at the time of the small French invasion under Thurot, shortly after the middle of the XVIIIth century; leaving Still to be treated the whole era of the Volunteering, the Insurrection of '98, and the Union, so-called. Indeed, if the author carry forward his subject into the present century, as he has carried it backward into the one before the last, he will have the great famines to deal with, and the multitudinous emigration; so that we may expect a vast picture, covering the whole canvas, portraying from the strictly English point of view that ghastly history in its full perspective. The Froude theory is, on the whole, quite simple; nothing can be more easily understood. It is, in few words, that the English nation having been “forced by situation and circumstances” to take charge of Ireland and its people, when it suited the English to change their religion, or to come back to it, or to change it again, they were bound in duty to compel the Irish to change along with them each time, by means of pains and penalties, from heavy fines to transportation and death on the gallows; also that the English having a strong wish to possess themselves of all the lands of Ireland, everything was lawful and right to effect that object. The reader will remark, with surprise (and the more surprise, the better for Froude), that in his lectures lately delivered in New York, which were a kind of abstract of the work then in press, he did not venture to say before an intelligent audience of freemen some of the things which he has dared to print in the book then just ready to burst upon the world. For example, he did not say, even before the “Christian young men,” such words as these which are found in the book (p. 609):
“The consent of man was not asked when he was born into the world: his consent will not be asked when his time comes to die. As little has his consent to do with the laws which, while he lives, he is bound to obey.”
This sentiment he perhaps thought it unnecessary to enunciate here; because, in fact, he intended it solely for the Irish, not by any means for the Americans, although it reads like a universal maxim for the human race. Again, he did not think it necessary to say in so plain words what he has laid down clearly enough in this passage (p. 213):
“No government need keep terms with such a creed [meaning the Catholic Church] when there is power to abolish it. To call the repression of opinions which had issued so many times in blood and revolt by the name of religions persecution is mere abuse of words.”