Perhaps the most intimate and truly devoted of all the friends of Madame Swetchine was that accomplished member of the French Academy whose biographic and editorial labors have erected such an attractive and perdurable monument to her memory, the Count Alfred de Falloux. The soul of reverence, gratitude, and love exhales in his sentences when he writes of her. After describing what "she was to all who had the inexpressible happiness of knowing her," he acids, "and this she will now be to all who shall read her; and death will but give to her words one consecration more." But the modesty of M. de Falloux has not given the public her letters to him, and has kept his personal relations with her much in the background. We are left to guess the measure and the activity of their friendship, from indirect indications.
On the whole, possibly because of the editor's reticence as to himself, we are left to believe, that the friend who held the pre-eminent place in the heart of Madame Swetchine, during the last twenty-five years of her life, was Father Lacordaire, the illustrious Catholic preacher. A complete picture of this ardent and unfaltering friendship is shown in the letters of the two parties, gathered in an octavo volume of nearly six hundred pages. We know not where, in the annals of human affection, to find the account of a friendship more spotless or more morally satisfying than this. The volume which preserves and exhibits it will be found by all who are duly interested in the psychology and experience of persons so extraordinary, both for their genius in society, and for the quantity and quality of their private experience full of solid instruction and romantic interest. The inner life of Madame Swetchine was a sacred epic: the outer career of Lacordaire, an electrifying drama. This double interest of a private, spiritual ascent, and of a chivalrous gallantry in the thick of battle, is clearly unfolded in the book before us.
The chivalrous young Count de Montalembert was one of the dearest friends of Madame Swetchine. She said that his soul seemed formed under the inspiration of the fine thought of Plato: "The beautiful as a means of reaching the true." Behold, in the following extract from one of the many letters in which she strove to pacify his perturbed spirit, by recalling him from the war of politics, and reconciling his passionate reformatory sentiments with the ruling principles and authorities of the Catholic Church, the tender wisdom and affection with which she speaks: "You seize only on the disinterested and poetic side of these questions, but all the same you are in the battle, giving and taking blows. And thus, with a mind perfectly high-toned and honorable, a crystal which is almost a diamond, with faultless habits, and all the believing and pious sentiments they involve, you have neither the heart's sweet joy nor its sweet peace. The reason why you are so ill at ease, is, that your conscience lies so near your heart that their voices and their troubles are confounded. My dear Charles, will you not reward me by being all that my wishes and my prayers would fain make you? I will not say whether you have the power to rejoice or afflict my heart; but, when you woke in me a mother's emotions, I cannot believe that you condemned me to the sorrow of Rachel."
One day this beloved young man led to the drawing-room of his maternal friend his heart's brother, the eloquent Lacordaire, then in the early renown of his wonderful career of ecclesiastical oratory. Madame Swetchine had already been deeply moved by his preaching, and was desirous of knowing him. She quickly won his confidence, and became, what she ever continued to be, a ministering angel to his spirit. She was much older than he, much more profoundly versed in human nature, much more soberly balanced and calm in soul. With a vigilance, a wisdom, and a tenderness that were unwearied and inexhaustible, she watched his course, studied the wants of his mind and heart, and labored, as need was, alternately to confirm his sinking courage and to soothe his excited imagination. Without being ostensibly such, she was really his spiritual director. "Her subtile and tender spirit," as Dora Greenwell has remarked, "seems to move across his heart, to woo and to caress it to peace and goodness, to call out its deepest concords, as the hand of the skilled musician moves across his instrument, knowing well each fret and chord of the sweet viol he doth love."
It was the greatness, not the weakness, of Lacordaire, that, before loving God, he had loved glory. Few men have spirit enough truly to seek fame: it is notice which they wish. The heart of Lacordaire was a pure fire, encased in a cold intellect. It reminds us of an intense flame clothed in transparent ice. Sometimes, he said, he hardly knew whether his voice was moved from within by the spirit, or from without by renown. In regard to every such scruple Madame Swetchine was an infallible counsellor. Her advice was as the speech of incarnate reason and love in their most purified and exalted form. The heavy perfume that drenched his oratoric atmosphere would have intoxicated most men with self-adulation; but he offset every such allurement by constantly withdrawing from trifles, excitements, and seductions, and spending long hours in the unbroken solitude of thought and the awful neighborhood of God. If both these extremes brilliant public triumphs, and severe seclusion and asceticism had their special dangers, Madame Swetchine was his resistless guardian against them both. No one who has not read their correspondence, reaching richly through a whole generation, can easily imagine the services rendered by this gifted and saintly woman to this holy and powerful man. Community of faith, of loyalty, of nobleness, joined them. It was in looking to heaven together that their souls grew united. Drawn by the same attractions, and held by one sovereign allegiance, such souls need no vows, nor lean on any foreign support. The divinity of truth and good is their bond.
No prayer persuades, no flattery fawns,
Their noble meanings are their pawns:
And so thoroughly is known
Each other's counsel by his own,
They can parley without meeting.
At first Madame Swetchine shrank from the excessive agitation she underwent in listening to the great sermons of Lacordaire in Notre Dame. "I go through all his perils," she said: "I tremble at every rock; I feel every stroke. His way of speaking acts upon the human soul in the same way as sanctity: it wounds; but it enraptures." At length her attendance on his sermons became so constant, and her pleasure and admiration so obvious, that many of the congregation supposed her to be literally, as she was morally, his mother. One day, as she was leaning against a pillar in the crowded church, her face upturned towards the pulpit, two persons were heard whispering to each other: "Would you like to see the preacher's mother?" "Why, she died ten years ago." "No, there she is: look at her."
The genius of Madame Swetchine was sweeter, serener, more tolerant, than that of her friend. Her influence on him in these respects was benignant. He thought more of the strict doctrine: she, more of the broad and charitable spirit. She once said, concerning dogmas, that she could consent to see the ocean filtered to a thread of water, if it but remained pure. He wrote to her, "My dear friend, you have proved yourself deficient in holy anger; otherwise you would not have been able to tolerate M." His electric, vehement soul needed exactly the check her reflective subtilty and prudent consideration gave. So she tells him once, "I acted as your ballast, or rather I held you by the skirts of your garment, to retard your too impetuous movements. Perhaps these are the very attributes with which you would have done well to invest some one at Rome, who might have united the two conditions which I fulfilled so perfectly: first, that of not being you, either in natural disposition, antecedents, or age; second, and more essential, that of loving you better than you could possibly love yourself."
With the lapse of years, their attachment grew closer and deeper. Lacordaire writes from Rome, "I have been bitterly disappointed in not hearing from you. You know what a need one has of friendly words when one is alone and so far away." And when the epistle comes, he writes to her, "I had no sooner opened your letter than my soul was inundated with joy." Again he says, "I found in your last letter the expression of an affection so tender, and a watchfullness so fixed, that I was melted by it, even to tears." "Your letters are always to me a balm and a force." In excuse of his own reserve, he strikingly writes, "Women have this admirable quality, that they can talk as much as they wish, as they wish, with what expression they wish: their heart is a fountain that flows naturally. The heart of man, especially mine, is like those volcanoes whose lava leaps forth only at intervals after a convulsion." We find Madame Swetchine saying, in one of her letters to Lacordaire, "I protest against long silences: they are to me that vacuum of which nature has a horror." The exceeding care which this discreet woman took always to administer her advice, her praise, or rebuke, in such a way as not to offend or injure the most sensitive recipient of it, is a rare lesson for others. Lacordaire once wrote to her, although he knew very well how guileless was the motive of her managements, "You say, dear friend, that you fear to displease me in speaking your thought about me. I assure you my sole reproach is, that you are too circumspect and delicate in your style of expression. I appreciate all the more that flattery which is the guardian escort of truth, because it is wholly wanting to me. I speak things out too bluntly; and it is true that almost always men need an extreme sweetness in the language of those who would benefit them. The heart is like the eyes: it cannot bear too glaring a light. However, I find you excessive in the art of shades." Soon afterwards he says, "Excuse my franknesses; with you, as with God. I can say every thing." Scarcely ever did a man owe more to a woman than this eloquent and heroic priest to the heavenly- minded friend who said she loved him as father, brother, and son, all at once. He deeply felt his debt, and faithfully paid it. He paid it in loving words and attentions, while she lived, and in a tribute of immortal eloquence when she was dead. "You appeared to me," he tells her, "between two distinct parts of my life, as the angel of the Lord might appear to a soul wavering between life and death, between earth and heaven." To a common friend he wrote of her, "Her soul was to mine what the shore is to the plank shattered by the waves; and I still remember, after the lapse of twenty-five years, all the light and strength she afforded to me when I was young and unknown." He dedicated to her his "Life of Saint Dominic," saying, "I wish that some one of your descendants may one day know that his ancestress was a woman whom Saint Jerome would have loved as he loved Paula and Marcella, one who needed only a pen illustrious and saintly enough to do her justice." Hearing of her last illness, he made a journey of six hundred miles, to be with her, and lavished on her every winning word and act that filial love and reverence could suggest; and, after all was over, he pronounced on her a funeral address, which will always rank with the highest trophies of his genius. No other words can be so fitting as his own to close this sketch:
"She belongs to the nation of the great minds of our age. In a time of intellectual dependence, when parties bore every thing in their train, she made no engagement, and submitted to no attraction: she isolated every question from the noise around her, and placed it in the silence of eternity. A constant simplicity and an equal elevation gave to her ideas a personal influence. This double charm might be resisted; but she could not fail to be loved herself, and to inspire the desire to become better. Happy mouth, which for forty years made not an enemy to God, but which poured into a multitude of wounded or languishing hearts the germ of the resurrection and the rapture of life! Alas! dear and illustrious lady. I cannot attach to your name the glory of those Roman women whom Saint Jerome has immortalized; and yet you were of their race. Conquered for God through the language of France, you wished to live under the French speech; and, quitting a country you alwaysloved, you came among us with the modesty of a disciple and of an exile. But you brought us more than we gave you. The light of your soul illumined the land which received you, and for forty years you were for us the sweetest echo of the gospel and the surest road to honor."