How she misjudges my feelings if she thinks that my happiness could make me forgetful of Ireland!
21st.—Sermon on the love of our neighbor. I have no trouble in loving this dear neighbor of mine. Duchesse allows herself to rally her aunt on what she calls her love of everybody! Happily for this lofty little person, Berthe (Mme. Raoul) wages unflinching war against the slightest tendency to pride, and the uncles surpass one another in teasing her out of it. My room is all perfumed with the sweet fragrance of violets. René has brought me home splendid ones from his morning’s ramble. I delight in my bouquets like a child with a plaything; it is long since I have had any flowers, and I love these balmy things, which the poetic Margaret calls the “beauties of nature, queens of solitude, and daughters of the sun.”
25th.—The weather was fine; René had the horses put in, and we set out together, delighted to be alone. As we were coming down the Rue Royale I caught sight of Hélène and her father, lost in admiration before some fine engravings. “Shall we
take them with us?” I said to René; and a minute afterwards the future Carmelite was giving us her impressions of the day. How charming she is! And all this beauty is going to conceal itself under the austere bandeau and thick veil.… We went to the Chapelle Saint-Mesmin, where Monseigneur has his college and his summer residence. The pure air, the perfumes of the spring, the evening calm, gave me an inexpressible feeling of enjoyment. For a moment I forgot this earth, and in the isolation of thought went back to my childhood; saw our beloved home, and our so lamented mother watching us at play. Why is she not with us still? She would have been so proud of René. “What are you thinking of,” asked Hélène, “looking in this way up to heaven like the picture of the Mignon of Ary Scheffer?” “She is dreaming of Ireland,” replied my brother, who had understood me.
31st.—Sermon on the intellectual life: “Lord, give me understanding and I shall live.” My mother-in-law was rather unwell; I passed the day in her room. The whole flight of doves, profiting by this fine Sunday, went out to flutter in the bright sunshine. Hélène presented her grandmother with a bunch of double violets; she took them with a smile, and then delicately placed them in my hair, saying as she did so: “Darling Violet, receive your sisters.” I kissed her hand—that soft, white hand which reminds me of my mother’s.
April 2.—“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” The days succeed each other, but are not much alike, it is said, immutability not belonging to this earth. That which always resembles itself is my union with René. He is no
sooner absent than something within me suffers; as soon as he returns my heart overflows with joy. Lucy asked me, “Are you never sad?” “Never!” “Happy sister!” she rejoined; “as for me, I weep sometimes when baby suffers; then I feel as if all was lost—as if I must die. Edward calls this exaggeration.” “Dear Lucy, the Holy Ghost has said, ‘If you are glad of heart, sing: if sorrowful, pray.’ Pray, then, so that you may never be sad. God is so good that we ought to serve him with a joyful heart.”
7th.—Played some splendid duets with Hélène, who has remarkable power. Sermon on the supernatural life: “If you eat not the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” The Père Perraud was the intimate friend of the gentle Abbé Perreyve—“this delightful apparition,” said M. de Montalembert, “which, after an interval of thirty years, has made me seem to see again Lacordaire as he appeared before the court of the peers of France, young, eloquent, intrepid, gentle and frank, austere and charming, but above all ardent and tender, endowed with that spring of fascination, that key of hearts, which is found so rarely here below. In him one saw again that noble and sympathetic look which no one who had once received it could ever forget—that eye, questioning and candid as that of a child.”
I am reading again, with René, Quentin Durward and Charles the Bold. I am translating into English Les Enfants d’Édouard for Lucy, who says she likes English better than anything, and wishes to teach it to her son. Edward (ours) pretends that I possess all the qualifications for a good professor. They will spoil me, these kind brothers.
12th.—Way of the Cross, of the Friday. I love this devotion. Even the dauphin, Arthur, begs to go to it; he has a taste for music, and the pretty voices of the children of the choir fascinate him.