“Seven Roman cities strove for Homer dead
Through which the living Homer begged his bread.”
The Condition of the Catholics under James I. Father Gerard's Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot. Edited, with his Life, by John Morris, Priest of the Society of Jesus. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1871. New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.
Her Majesty's Tower. By William Hepworth Dixon. Second series. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1869. Reprinted.
In the work, published in 1865, which procured me the honor of being made the subject of a parliamentary debate, I had dwelt upon the two-fold danger to be feared, whether from an alliance which might reopen the Belgian question, or from a war on our frontiers, it might be, on our invaded territory. I advised appeasing our political discords, the better to resist this double peril. This sums up in a few words the purport of my pamphlet.
My adversaries in the tribune and in the press denied the existence of these dangers which they asserted were merely imaginary; they charged me with having got up a sham Belgian question, and with having, in that way, spread the knowledge of it abroad.
“With what have I charged the Honorable M. de Champs?” said M. Dolez. “It is with having pretended that our nationality was environed by perils, and that a Belgian question was on foot in which our independence might be taken away from us.”
M. Frère-Orban ridiculed in a pleasant way my forebodings. He said that I was “a lookout man who, in his tower, descries that which no one else can possibly see, ... who imagines that he has discovered that which nobody had seen before. To-day,” he added, “when there is nothing, absolutely nothing, of a nature to cause uneasiness to the country, we are told, in consequence of a party scheme: Let us hold our tongues and appease our discords. The liberal party must, in order to save Belgium from a danger which does not exist, cease resisting the pretensions of the clerical party.”
Well, what does M. Frère-Orban think now? While he, as minister, was uttering in the tribune the above quieting and optimist statements, M. Benedetti had entered with M. von Bismarck into a parley, the subject of which was the Belgian question. This was the diplomatic peril. The other peril has been clearly revealed to us after Sedan. General de Wimpfen has stated to General Chazal that the question of invading or not the territory of Belgium had been earnestly discussed at Sedan. This would have been bringing the war on our violated soil.
“I, the undersigned, parish priest of the most holy Constantinian Basilica of the Twelve Apostles of Rome, certify that in Register XII. of the dead, letter N, page 283, is to be found the deed of which the following is the copy, word for word.
“The twenty-second of December, eighteen hundred and sixty-six, Mademoiselle Claire-Françoise-Amélie Lautard, of Marseilles, daughter of M. Jean Baptiste Lautard, a most pious virgin, while offering last Sunday her life to God for the Holy Father, Rome, and the church, was seized on the spot by illness, and having received most piously the sacraments of the church, in the full possession of her faculties, in prayer, and surrounded by several priests and virgins, gave up her soul to Jesus Christ, her spouse, with the greatest serenity, Wednesday the 19th, at half-past nine in the morning, in the house Rue Ripresa-dei-Barberi 175, at the age of fifty-nine years. The following day, the 20th, her body was carried, after the completuum, accompanied by a great number of religious, to this basilica, and was here exposed during the morning after the manner of nobles, the office of the dead and a solemn Mass being performed; in the afternoon it was conveyed to the Church of Santa Maria in Ara Cœli, and there interred in the tomb of the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Apparition.