“You will call on Marshal ——,” said his majesty; “he is the person to do it.”
“Sire!” exclaimed Amélie, throwing up her hands in dismay, “anything but that; your majesty must really manage it without sending me again to Marshal ——.”
“Ah! you have been to him already,” said the emperor, with a quiet smile; “well, try him again, and this time I warrant you a better reception; he is bon enfant au fond, but you must not let him think that you're afraid of him.”
Thus warned and encouraged, Amélie promised to take her courage in both hands, as the emperor said, and beard the lion once more in his den. Before letting her go, his majesty questioned her minutely about the condition of the hospitals and other charitable institutions at Marseilles, concerning all of which he appeared to be singularly well informed.
The next day, she presented herself at the ministère, and was ushered into the marshal's presence. He had his coat on this time; whether the fact was due to accident, or to a desire to propitiate the lady who had complained of him to his master, history does not say; but, as soon as Amélie entered, his excellency accosted her with: “Well, so you were affronted with me, it seems! What did you say about me to the emperor?”
“Excellency,” replied Amélie, “I told his majesty that I had expected to find a minister of France, but I found instead a man in a passion.”
The marshal grunted a laugh, and [pg 823] told her to sit down and explain her business. She did so, this time with perfect satisfaction to both parties, and they parted the best friends in the world.
This closed her career of usefulness in France; she waited to make the needful arrangements for the departure of the nuns, their reception at Marseilles, etc., and then she started for Rome.
On setting out for the Eternal City, Amélie seemed to have had the presentiment that she had entered on the last stage of her pilgrimage. The sense of her approaching end, which betrayed itself, perhaps unconsciously, in conversing both by word and letter with her most intimate friends, was accompanied by an increase of fervor and a serenity which struck every one who approached her as something almost divine. The project which she had formed of founding and entering a community of Sœurs Réparatrices was still unrealized, but she hoped now to carry it into effect, to make the remainder of her life a perpetual Deo Gratias! and to die in the outward livery of the religious state whose spirit her whole life had so faithfully embodied. But God had other designs upon her. Meantime, in the twilight interval of comparative leisure that she had looked forward to so long and enjoyed so thankfully, Amélie did not give up all active work; she prayed more, and lived in greater retirement; but she still gave a fair proportion of each day to her accustomed service of the poor and the sick.
These were troubled days that she had fallen upon in Rome. The sacrilegious hand of parricides had robbed the church of her possessions, and reduced Pius IX. to the nominal sovereignty of the capital of Christendom, as a prelude to making it, what it is now, his prison. Catholic hearts were sad; but, amongst all his children, the Vicar of Christ had no more faithfully sorrowing heart than Amélie's, none who entered more keenly into his griefs or responded with more filial alacrity to their claim on her sympathy and participation and righteous anger. She beheld the persecutions of God's church, the hatred and malice of its enemies, the cowardice of those who called themselves its friends, but stood by passive and cold while the crime perpetrated outside Jerusalem eighteen hundred years ago was renewed before their eyes on the body of that church which Christ had died to found; she saw pride and materialism everywhere at work striving to undo his work, to prevent the coming of his kingdom, and to establish the kingdom of sin upon earth; and the sight of all this filled her heart with grief, but not with despair. It was indeed an hour of unexampled grief for Christendom, but it was also an hour for activity, and zeal, and renewed courage; it was a time for each individual member to prove himself, for all to put their hand to the plough that was furrowing the bosom of the church, and to water the travailed soil with fertilizing tears, and, if need be, blood, thus preparing it for the future harvest that was inevitable. For even as God's enemies of old had stood at the foot of Calvary, and shook their heads at the bleeding victim of their own hate and envy, and bade him come down from the cross, knowing not the dawn of the Resurrection was nigh, when the victim would arise triumphant over death, and compel his murderers to acknowledge that this man must indeed have been the Son of God—so now the enemies of his church had their hour of triumph, and clapped their hands for joy to see the church that he had built upon the Rock, and promised [pg 824] that the gates of hell should not prevail against, tottering and crumbling under the blows of progress and an enlightened civilization and the force of arms. But their triumph was but the hour of the powers of darkness that was not to endure, but would perish at the appointed time before the manifestation of the Sun of Justice.