Our limits will not permit even a succinct narrative of the events which filled up the half-century during which Madame Barat governed the Society of the Sacred Heart, from the memorable council of 1815 until 1865. We cannot omit, however, some brief notice of the foundation of the American mission and the ladies who were sent over to establish it. The first American colony was composed of three ladies and two lay sisters: Madame Duchesne, Madame Audé, Madame Berthold, Sister Catharine Lamarre, and Sister Marguérite Manteau. Madame Philippine Duchesne was a native of Grenoble, where she received an accomplished education, first at the Visitation convent of Sainte-Marie-d’en-Haut, and afterwards under private tutors in the same class with her cousins, Augustin and Casimir Périer. At the age of eighteen she entered the Visitation convent as a novice, but was prevented by the suppression of the religious orders in France from making her vows. During the dark days of the Revolution her conduct was that of a heroine. After the end of the Reign of Terror she rented the ancient convent above mentioned, and for several years maintained there an asylum for religious
women with a small boarding-school for girls, waiting for an opportunity to establish a regular religious house. Her desire was accomplished when Madame Barat accepted the offer which was made to her to receive Madame Duchesne and her companions into the Society of the Sacred Heart, and to found the second house of her society in the old monastery of Ste.-Marie-d’en-Haut. Madame Duchesne had felt an impulse for the arduous vocation of a missionary since the time when she was eight years old, and this desire had continually increased, notwithstanding the apparent improbability of its ever finding scope within the limits of her vocation. She was about forty-eight years of age when she was entrusted with the American mission, and lived for thirty-four years in this country, leaving after her the reputation of exalted and really apostolic sanctity. Madame Eugénie Audé had been much fascinated by the gay world in her early youth, and her conversion was remarkable. Returning one evening from a soirée, as she went before a mirror in her boudoir, she saw there, instead of her own graceful and richly-attired figure, the face of Jesus Christ as represented in the Ecce Homo. From that moment she renounced her worldly life, and soon entered the novitiate at Grenoble as a postulant. Even there, her historian relates, “on souriait de ses manières mondaines, de ses belles salutations, de ses trois toilettes par jour! Même sous le voile de novice qu’elle portait maintenant, elle laissait voir encore, pas sans complaisance, l’élégance de sa taille et les avantages de sa personne. On ne tardera pas à voir ce que cette âme de jeune fille changée en âme d’apôtre était capable d’entreprendre pour Dieu et le
prochain.” This great change was wrought in her soul during a retreat given by Père Roger on the opening of the general novitiate at Paris during November, 1816. When called to join Madame Duchesne two years later, she was twenty-four years of age, and, after a long period of service in the United States, was finally elected an assistant general and recalled to France. Madame Octavie Berthold was the daughter of an infidel philosopher who had been Voltaire’s secretary. She was herself educated as a Protestant, was converted to the faith when about twenty years of age, and soon after entered the novitiate at Grenoble. She volunteered for the American mission, animated by a desire to prove her gratitude to our Lord for the grace of conversion, and was at this time about thirty years of age. “Caractère sympathique, cœur profondément devouée, intelligence ornée, spécialement versée dans la connaissance des langues étrangères, Mme Octavie était fort aimée au pensionnat de Paris.”
Mgr. Dubourg, Bishop of New Orleans, was the prelate who introduced the Ladies of the Sacred Heart into the United States. It was during the year 1817 that the arrangements were completed at Paris. On the 21st of March, 1818, the five religious above mentioned embarked at Bordeaux on the Rebecca, and on the 29th of May, which was that year the Feast of the Sacred Heart, they landed at New Orleans, where they were received as the guests of the Ursulines in their magnificent convent. Their own first residence at St. Charles, in the present diocese of St. Louis, was as different as possible from this noble religious house, and from those which have since that time been founded by the
successors of these first colonists. Madame Duchesne, in her visions of missionary and apostolic life, never dreamed of those religious houses, novitiates, and pensionates, rivalling the splendid establishments of Europe, which we now see at St. Louis, Manhattanville, Kenwood, and Eden Hall. Her aspirations were entirely for labor among the Indians and negroes, and, to a considerable extent, they were satisfied. She began with the most arduous and self-sacrificing labors upon the roughest and most untilled soil of Bishop Dubourg’s diocese, and one of her last acts was to go on a mission among the Pottawattomies, from which she was only taken by the force of Archbishop Kenrick’s authority a little before her death. The present flourishing condition of the two vicariates of New Orleans and St. Louis is well known to all our readers. The foundation at New York was due to the enlightened zeal of the late illustrious Archbishop Hughes, although the first idea originated in the mind of Madame Barat many years before. In the year 1840 the celebrated Russian convert, Madame Elizabeth Gallitzin, a cousin of Prince Gallitzin the priest of Loretto, and assistant general for America to Madame Barat, was sent over to establish this foundation and to make a general visitation, in the course of which she died suddenly of yellow fever at St. Michel, on the 14th of November, 1842.
The first residence in New York was the present convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Houston Street, from which it was removed, first to Astoria, and afterwards to the Lorillard estate in Manhattanville, where is now the centre of an extensive vicariate comprising eight
houses in the States of New York, Rhode Island, Ohio, and Michigan, about five hundred religious, a novitiate containing at this moment forty-eight novices exclusive of postulants, and flourishing schools both for the education of young ladies and the instruction of the children of those parishes which are adjacent to the several convents. It is not necessary to describe for the benefit of our American readers with more detail the history and present condition of the Society of the Sacred Heart in this country. Our European readers would no doubt be interested by such a history; but, besides the imperative reason of a want of space in the present article, there is another which imposes on us the obligation of reserve in respect to works accomplished by the living, to whom has been transmitted the humility as well as the other virtues of their holy foundress. There is one venerable lady especially, now withdrawn from the sphere of her long and active administration to a higher position in the society, who is remembered with too much gratitude by her children, and honor by all classes of Catholics in her native land, to require from our pen more than the expression of a wish and prayer, on the part of thousands whose hearts will echo our words as they read them, that she may resemble the holy mother who loved her and all her American children so tenderly, as “sa plus chère famille,” in length of days, and in the peace which closed her last evening.
We have already alluded briefly to the blessed departure of Madame Barat from the scene of labor to the glory which awaits the saints, in the eighty-sixth year of her age and the sixty-sixth of her religious life, on
the Feast of the Ascension, 1865. The narrative of a few salient events in her life, and of the principal facts in the history of the foundation of the Sacred Heart, which we have thought best to present, meagre as it is, in lieu of more general observations on her character and that of her great works, for the benefit of those who cannot, at least for the present, peruse the history of M. Baunard, leaves us but little room for any such remarks. The character of this saintly woman must be studied in the details of her private and public life, and in the expression she has given to her interior spirit in the extracts from her vast correspondence published by her biographer. No one could ever take her portrait; and we are assured by one who knew her long and intimately that the one placed in front of the second volume of her life is not at all satisfactory. How can we describe, then, such a delicate, hidden, retiring, subtile essence as the soul of Sophie Barat in a few words, or give name to that which fascinated every one, from the little nephew Louis Dusaussoy to Frayssinous, Montalembert, and Gregory XVI..? Extreme gentleness and modesty, which, with the continual increase of grace, become the most perfect and admirable humility, were the basis of her natural character and of her acquired sanctity. In the beginning her modesty was attended by an excessive timidity, so that Father Varin gave her the name of “trembleuse perpetuelle.” This was supplanted by that generous, affectionate confidence in God which shone out so luminously in the great trials of her career. In all things, and always, Madame Barat was exquisitely feminine. She conquered and ruled by love, and this sway extended over all, from
the smallest children to the most energetic, commanding, impetuous, and able of the highly-born, accomplished, and in every sense remarkable women who were under her government in the society, to women of the world, to old men and young men, to servants, the poor, fierce soldiers and revolutionists, and even to irrational creatures. With this feminine delicacy and gentleness there was a virile force and administrative ability, a firmness and intrepidity, which made her capable of everything and afraid of nothing. Her writings display a fire of eloquence which may be truly called apostolic, and would be admired in the mouth of an apostolic preacher. Besides the great labors that she accomplished in the foundation and visitation of her numerous houses, and in the government of her vast society, Madame Barat went through several most severe and dangerous illnesses, beginning with one which threatened her life in the first years at Amiens; and was frequently brought, to all appearance, to the very gates of death. Besides these sufferings, and the great privations which were often endured during the first period of new foundations, she practised austerities and penances of great severity, to the utmost limit permitted by obedience to her directors. With her wonderful activity she united the spirit of a contemplative; and there are not wanting many evidences of supernatural gifts of an extraordinary kind, or proofs of her power with God after her death. Mgr. Parisis has publicly declared that her life was one of the great events of this century, and comparable to those of St. Dominic, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catharine of Siena, and St. Teresa. There is but one, universal