Monseigneur is about to leave for Rome. I shall be presented to him before his departure. Au revoir, dear Kate! May God protect us! When shall I see Ireland again? When shall I return to the land from whence my ancestors, those sons of a royal race, were banished? The faith is worth more than a throne.
April 29.
René has undertaken to give you an account of my presentation, dearest Kate, so I need not say anything about it. Nothing is spoken of here but the dead and dying. Mme. de St. M—— has lost her two little girls in two days; it makes one tremble. I have sent Fanny your letter of Wednesday; it seemed as if I should profane your holy pages by transcribing them. Our friends wrote to me yesterday; you ought to have read their letters before I did. Lady W—— tells me that she shall treasure like a relic the consolations of Kate. Dearest, you say well that this world could not be fit for our sweet Mary; but your aspirations after eternity alarm your earthly Georgina. Live to love me, to be my guardian angel!
You will not read Le Récit d’une Sœur, dear, busy one? This book contains beauties of the highest order; it is like the expression of the splendor of the beautiful. How those hearts loved, and how much they suffered! But love like theirs must give strength to bear such sufferings. How can I describe to you these incomparable volumes? Your faithful memory has well recalled to you all the personages; imagine, then, the mutual outpourings of those great souls, the marriage of Albert and Alexandrine, so closely followed by so much heart-rending
anguish; that family, so numerous and so united, and which appeared to have so many titles to happiness, seeing death descend upon their happy home, gradually destroying and pitilessly mowing down those fair lives. Albert first of all—the gentle, tender, pious, poetic Albert—dying on the 29th of June, 1836, after two years of married life and four years of the most pure and sanctified love; then the Count de la Ferronays, that noble figure, that grand character, a soul of antiquity moulded in a Christian heart, who died at Rome on the 17th of January, 1842, and obtained immediately a miraculous conversion—an endless consolation for those who wept for him; Eugénie, so saintly, so detached from the world, the most loving and devoted of sisters, died next, far from all her own people, at Palermo, whose mild climate had failed to restore strength to that fading flower; a year after, at Brussels, on the 10th of February, the pure and beautiful Olga; in 1848, on the 9th of February, Alexandrine, the most attractive heroine of this narrative, the inconsolable widow, mounting to such heights in the love of God that she would have refused to live over again the happiness of her union with Albert—an exceptionally saintly soul, full of heroic devotion, since she offered her life to God—who accepted the offering—for that of the Père de Ravignan; and, lastly, Mme. de la Ferronays, the mother, the wife who had been, as it were, on the cross for so many years, and always serene, always generous, dying in the arms of her Pauline on the 14th of November, 1848, the same year as her daughter-in-law. By the side of these souls who have passed away figure several personages of the time: M. de
Montalembert, the intimate friend of Albert, and the ever-faithful friend of Alexandrine, whom he called his “sister”; M. Gerbet, the author of L’Esquisse de Rome Chrétienne;[174] Père Lacordaire, Mme. Swetchine, Père de Ravignan, Confalonieri, the learned M. Rio—all this related by a sister, Mrs. Craven, of whom Mme. —— spoke to us so much. Remark these two thoughts from St. Augustine: one, the motto, is, “We never lose those whom we love in him whom we can never lose”; the other, written by Albert in his journal and several times underlined: “All which ends is not long.” There is also this other, of Alexandrine’s: “I do not believe that affections are injurious to affections. Our soul is made in the image of God, and in her power of loving she possesses something of the infinite.” What a family!—an assembly of chosen souls, all of them winning and sympathetic, all knowing how to love as those souls only know who love God above all things. I should like to know Mrs. Craven. I pity and admire her: I pity her for having seen all those die whom she so loved, for having witnessed the departure of souls so intimately united that they were as if melted into one alone; I admire her for having had the power of retracing so many memories at the same time sweet and distressing, and which at every page must have renewed her grief. Is not Albert’s offering of his life for the conversion of Alexandrine the most admirable type of Christian love?
We are going to eternize ourselves at Orleans, dear Kate. My mother-in-law finds the Rue Jeanne d’Arc very agreeable; the children attend some of the cours.[175] We are not
too far from the capital; all say in chorus, It is good to be here! When I say all, I except the gentlemen, who, in their hearts, prefer the country, but do not say a word to that effect.
A letter from Margaret, charmed to be at Rome, “that fatherland of sorrow.” Amid the ruins of the queen of cities she walks with her immense disappointment. Oh! what trial. No woman better deserves to be loved. Do you remember Mère Athanase saying of Margaret: “Beautiful as Eve in Paradise, attractive as Rachel, a musician like Miriam the sister of Moses, she is also learned as Anna Comnena, and a poetess like Marie de France”? I answered: “May I be the good Samaritan to this wounded soul!”
Duchesse is much afflicted; a new frock quite untakable, as she says, is the cause. On Marguerite’s gravely asking, “Is not Thérèse going out again? what misfortune has happened to her?” Arthur replied: “Lady Sensible, look well at Thérèse; there is a wrinkle on her forehead. She has lost … her toilette.” And the giddy boy twirled Marguerite round and round, who cannot understand, serious little thing that she is, how any one should be in trouble for so small a matter. This reminds me of the following verses, copied by Hélène in her journal: