Who that had spoken of Maurice de Guérin could refrain from speaking of
his sister Eugénie, the most devoted of sisters, one of the rarest and
most beautiful of souls? “There is nothing fixed, no duration, no
vitality in the sentiments of women towards one another; their
attachments are mere pretty knots of ribbon, and no more. In all the
friendships of women I observe this slightness of the tie. I know no
instance to the contrary, even in history. Orestes and Pylades have no
sisters.” So she herself speaks of the friendships of her own sex. But
Electra can attach herself to Orestes, if not to Chrysothemis. And to
her brother Maurice, Eugénie de Guérin was Pylades and Electra in one.
The name of Maurice de Guérin,—that young man so gifted, so attractive,
so careless of fame, and so early snatched away; who died at
twenty-nine; who, says his sister, “let what he did be lost with a
carelessness so unjust to himself, set no value on any of his own
productions, and departed hence without reaping the rich harvest which
seemed his due;” who, in spite of his immaturity, in spite of his
fragility, exercised such a charm, “furnished to others so much of that
which all live by,” that some years after his death his sister found in
a country-house where he used to stay, in the journal of a young girl
who had not known him, but who heard her family speak of him, his name,
the date of his death, and these words, “_it était leur vie_” (he was
their life); whose talent, exquisite as that of Keats, with much less of
sunlight, abundance, inventiveness, and facility in it than that of
Keats, but with more of distinction and power, had “that winning,
delicate, and beautifully happy turn of expression” which is the stamp
of the master,—is beginning to be well known to all lovers of
literature. This establishment of Maurice’s name was an object for which
his sister Eugénie passionately labored. While he was alive, she placed
her whole joy in the flowering of this gifted nature; when he was dead,
she had no other thought than to make the world know him as she knew
him. She outlived him nine years, and her cherished task for those years
was to rescue the fragments of her brother’s composition, to collect
them, to get them published. In pursuing this task she had at first
cheering hopes of success; she had at last baffling and bitter
disappointment. Her earthly business was at an end; she died. Ten years
afterwards, it was permitted to the love of a friend, M. Trebutien, to
effect for Maurice’s memory what the love of a sister had failed to
accomplish. But those who read, with delight and admiration, the journal
and letters of Maurice de Guérin, could not but be attracted and touched
by this sister Eugénie, who met them at every page. She seemed hardly
less gifted, hardly less interesting, than Maurice himself. And
presently Mr. Trebutien did for the sister what he had done for the
brother. He published the journal of Mdlle. Eugénie de Guérin, and a few
(too few, alas!) of her letters.[15] The book has made a profound
impression in France; and the fame which she sought only for her brother
now crowns the sister also.
-----
Footnote 15:
A volume of these, also, has just been brought out by M. Trebutien.
One good book, at least, in the literature of the year 1865!
-----
Parts of Mdlle. de Guérin’s journal were several years ago printed for
private circulation, and a writer in the _National Review_ had the good
fortune to fall in with them. The bees of our English criticism do not
often roam so far afield for their honey, and this critic deserves
thanks for having flitted upon in his quest of blossom to foreign parts,
and for having settled upon a beautiful flower found there. He had the
discernment to see that Mdlle. de Guérin was well worth speaking of, and
he spoke of her with feeling and appreciation. But that, as I have said,
was several years ago; even a true and feeling homage needs to be from
time to time renewed, if the memory of its object is to endure; and
criticism must not lose the occasion offered by Mdlle. de Guérin’s
journal being for the first time published to the world, of directing
notice once more to this religious and beautiful character.
Eugénie de Guérin was born in 1805, at the château of Le Cayla, in
Languedoc. Her family, though reduced in circumstances, was noble; and
even when one is a saint one cannot quite forget that one comes of the
stock of the Guarini of Italy, or that one counts among one’s ancestors
a Bishop of Senlis, who had the marshaling of the French order of battle
on the day of Bouvines. Le Cayla was a solitary place, with its terrace
looking down upon a stream-bed and valley; “one may pass days there
without seeing any living thing but the sheep, without hearing any
living thing but the birds.” M. de Guérin, Eugénie’s father, lost his
wife when Eugénie was thirteen years old, and Maurice seven; he was left
with four children,—Eugénie, Marie, Erembert, and Maurice,—of whom
Eugénie was the eldest, and Maurice was the youngest. This youngest
child, whose beauty and delicacy had made him the object of his mother’s
most anxious fondness, was commended by her in dying to the care of his
sister Eugénie. Maurice at eleven years old went to school at Toulouse;
then he went to the Collège Stanislas at Paris; then he became a member
of the religious society which M. de Lamennais had formed at La Chênaie
in Brittany; afterwards he lived chiefly at Paris, returning to Le
Cayla, at the age of twenty-nine, to die. Distance, in those days, was a
great obstacle to frequent meetings of the separated members of a French
family of narrow means. Maurice de Guérin was seldom at Le Cayla after
he had once quitted it, though his few visits to his home were long
ones; but he passed five years,—the period of his sojourn in Brittany,
and of his first settlement in Paris,—without coming home at all. In
spite of the check from these absences, in spite of the more serious
check from a temporary alteration in Maurice’s religious feelings, the
union between the brother and sister was wonderfully close and firm. For
they were knit together, not only by the tie of blood and early
attachment, but also by the tie of a common genius. “We were,” says
Eugénie, “two eyes looking out of one head.” She, on her part, brought
to her love for her brother the devotedness of a woman, the intensity of
a recluse, almost the solicitude of a mother. Her home duties prevented
her from following the wish, which often arose in her, to join a
religious sisterhood. There is a trace,—just a trace,—of an early
attachment to a cousin; but he died when she was twenty-four. After
that, she lived for Maurice. It was for Maurice that, in addition to her
constant correspondence with him by letter, she began in 1834 her
journal, which was sent to him by portions as it was finished. After his
death she tried to continue it, addressing it to “Maurice in heaven.”
But the effort was beyond her strength; gradually the entries become
rarer and rarer; and on the last day of December 1840 the pen dropped
from her hand: the journal ends.
Other sisters have loved their brothers, and it is not her affection for
Maurice, admirable as this was, which alone could have made Eugénie de
Guérin celebrated. I have said that both brother and sister had genius:
M. Sainte-Beuve goes so far as to say that the sister’s genius was
equal, if not superior, to her brother’s. No one has a more profound
respect for M. Sainte-Beuve’s critical judgments than I have, but it
seems to me that this particular judgment needs to be a little explained
and guarded. In Maurice’s special talent, which was a talent for
interpreting nature, for finding words which incomparably render the
subtlest impressions which nature makes upon us, which bring the
intimate life of nature wonderfully near to us, it seems to me that his
sister was by no means his equal. She never, indeed, expresses herself
without grace and intelligence; but her words, when she speaks of the
life and appearances of nature, are in general but intellectual signs;
they are not like her brother’s—symbols equivalent with the thing
symbolized. They bring the notion of the thing described to the mind,
they do not bring the feeling of it to the imagination. Writing from the
Nivernais, that region of vast woodlands in the center of France: “It
does one good,” says Eugénie, “to be going about in the midst of this
enchanting nature, with flowers, birds, and verdure all round one, under
this large and blue sky of the Nivernais. How I love the gracious form
of it, and those little white clouds here and there, like cushions of
cotton, hung aloft to rest the eye in this immensity!” It is pretty and
graceful, but how different from the grave and pregnant strokes of
Maurice’s pencil! “I have been along the Loire, and seen on its banks
the plains where nature is puissant and gay; I have seen royal and
antique dwellings, all marked by memories which have their place in the
mournful legend of humanity,—Chambord, Blois, Amboise, Chenonceaux; then
the towns on the two banks of the river,—Orleans, Tours, Saumur, Nantes;
and at the end of it all, the Ocean rumbling. From these I passed back
into the interior of the country, as far as Bourges and Nevers, a region
of vast woodlands, in which murmurs of an immense range and fulness”
(_ce beau torrent de rumeurs_, as, with an expression worthy of
Wordsworth, he elsewhere calls them) “prevail and never cease.” Words
whose charm is like that of the sounds of the murmuring forest itself,
and whose reverberations, like theirs, die away in the infinite distance
of the soul.
Maurice’s life was in the life of nature, and the passion for it
consumed him; it would have been strange if his accent had not caught
more of the soul of nature than Eugénie’s accent, whose life was
elsewhere. “You will find in him,” Maurice says to his sister of a
friend whom he was recommending to her, “you will find in him that which
you love, and which suits you better than anything else,—_l’onction,
l’effusion, la mysticité_.” Unction, the pouring out of the soul, the
rapture of the mystic, were dear to Maurice also; but in him the bent of
his genius gave even to those a special direction of its own. In Eugénie
they took the direction most native and familiar to them; their object
was the religious life.
And yet, if one analyzes this beautiful and most interesting character
quite to the bottom, it is not exactly as a saint that Eugénie de Guérin
is remarkable. The ideal saint is a nature like Saint François de Sales
or Fénelon; a nature of ineffable sweetness and serenity, a nature in
which struggle and revolt is over, and the whole man (so far as is
possible to human infirmity) swallowed up in love. Saint Theresa (it is
Mdlle. de Guérin herself who reminds us of it) endured twenty years of
unacceptance and of repulse in her prayers; yes, but the Saint Theresa
whom Christendom knows is Saint Theresa repulsed no longer! it is Saint
Theresa accepted, rejoicing in love, radiant with ecstasy. Mdlle. de
Guérin is not one of these saints arrived at perfect sweetness and calm,
steeped in ecstasy; there is something primitive, indomitable in her,
which she governs, indeed, but which chafes, which revolts. Somewhere in
the depths of that strong nature there is a struggle, an impatience, an
inquietude, an ennui, which endures to the end, and which leaves one,
when one finally closes her journal, with an impression of profound
melancholy. “There are days,” she writes to her brother, “when one’s
nature rolls itself up, and becomes a hedgehog. If I had you here at
this moment, here close by me, how I should prick you! how sharp and
hard!” “Poor soul, poor soul,” she cries out to herself another day,
“what is the matter, what would you have? Where is that which will do
you good? Everything is green, everything is in bloom, all the air has a
breath of flowers. How beautiful it is! well, I will go out. No, I
should be alone, and all this beauty, when one is alone, is worth
nothing. What shall I do then? Read, write, pray, take a basket of sand
on my head like that hermit-saint, and walk with it? Yes, work, work!
keep busy the body which does mischief to the soul! I have been too
little occupied to-day, and that is bad for one, and it gives a certain
ennui which I have in me time to ferment.”
_A certain ennui which I have in me_: her wound is there. In vain she
follows the counsel of Fénelon: “If God tires you, _tell him that he
tires you_.” No doubt she obtained great and frequent solace and
restoration from prayer: “This morning I was suffering; well, at present
I am calm, and this I owe to faith simply to faith, to an act of faith.
I can think of death and eternity without trouble, without alarm. Over a
deep of sorrow there floats a divine calm, a suavity which is the work
of God only. In vain have I tried other things at a time like this:
nothing human comforts the soul, nothing human upholds it:—
‘A l’enfant il faut sa mère,
A mon âme il faut mon Dieu.’”
Still the ennui reappears, bringing with it hours of unutterable
forlornness, and making her cling to her one great earthly
happiness,—her affection for her brother,—with an intenseness, an
anxiety, a desperation in which there is something morbid, and by which
she is occasionally carried into an irritability, a jealousy which she
herself is the first, indeed, to censure, which she severely represses,
but which nevertheless leaves a sense of pain.
Mdlle. de Guérin’s admirers have compared her to Pascal, and in some
respects the comparison is just. But she cannot exactly be classed with
Pascal, any more than with Saint Francois de Sales. Pascal is a man, and
the inexhaustible power and activity of his mind leave him no leisure
for ennui. He has not the sweetness and serenity of the perfect saint;
he is, perhaps, “der strenge, kranke Pascal—_the severe, morbid
Pascal_,”—as Goethe (and, strange to say, Goethe at twenty-three, an age
which usually feels Pascal’s charm most profoundly) calls him. But the
stress and movement of the lifelong conflict waged in him between his
soul and his reason keep him full of fire, full of agitation, and keep
his reader, who witnesses this conflict, animated and excited; the sense
of forlornness and dejected weariness which clings to Eugénie de Guérin
does not belong to Pascal. Eugénie de Guérin is a woman, and longs for a
state of firm happiness, for an affection in which she may repose. The
inward bliss of Saint Theresa or Fénelon would have satisfied her;
denied this, she cannot rest satisfied with the triumphs of
self-abasement, with the somber joy of trampling the pride of life and
of reason underfoot, of reducing all human hope and joy to
insignificance; she repeats the magnificent words of Bossuet, words
which both Catholicism and Protestantism have uttered with indefatigable
iteration: “On trouve au fond de tout le vide et le néant—_at the bottom
of everything one finds emptiness and nothingness_,” but she feels, as
every one but the true mystic must ever feel, their incurable sterility.
She resembles Pascal, however, by the clearness and firmness of her
intelligence, going straight and instinctively to the bottom of any
matter she is dealing with, and expressing herself about it with
incomparable precision; never fumbling with what she has to say, never
imperfectly seizing or imperfectly presenting her thought. And to this
admirable precision she joins a lightness of touch, a feminine ease and
grace, a flowing facility which are her own. “I do not say,” writes her
brother Maurice, an excellent judge, “that I find in myself a dearth of
expression; but I have not this abundance of yours, this productiveness
of soul which streams forth, which courses along without ever failing,
and always with an infinite charm.” And writing to her of some
composition of hers, produced after her religious scruples had for a
long time kept her from the exercise of her talent: “You see, my dear
Tortoise,” he writes, “that your talent is no illusion, since after a
period, I know not how long, of poetical inaction,—a trial to which any
half-talent would have succumbed,—it rears its head again more vigorous
than ever. It is really heart-breaking to see you repress and bind down,
with I know not what scruples, your spirit, which tends with all the
force of its nature to develop itself in this direction. Others have
made it a case of conscience for you to resist this impulse, and I make
it one for you to follow it.” And she says of herself, on one of her
freer days: “It is the instinct of my life to write, as it is the
instinct of the fountain to flow.” The charm of her expression is not a
sensuous and imaginative charm like that of Maurice, but rather an
intellectual charm; it comes from the texture of the style rather than
from its elements; it is not so much in the words as in the turn of the
phrase, in the happy cast and flow of the sentence. Recluse as she was,
she had a great correspondence: every one wished to have letters from
her; and no wonder.
To this strength of intelligence and talent of expression she joined a
great force of character. Religion had early possessed itself of this
force of character, and reinforced it: in the shadow of the Cevennes, in
the sharp and tonic nature of this region of Southern France, which has
seen the Albigensians, which has seen the Camisards, Catholicism too is
fervent and intense. Eugénie de Guérin was brought up amidst strong
religious influences, and they found in her a nature on which they could
lay firm hold. I have said that she was not a saint of the order of
Saint François de Sales or Fénelon; perhaps she had too keen an
intelligence to suffer her to be this, too forcible and impetuous a
character. But I did not mean to imply the least doubt of the reality,
the profoundness, of her religious life. She was penetrated by the power
of religion; religion was the master-influence of her life; she derived
immense consolations from religion, she earnestly strove to conform her
whole nature to it; if there was an element in her which religion could
not perfectly reach, perfectly transmute, she groaned over this element
in her, she chid it, she made it bow. Almost every thought in her was
brought into harmony with religion; and what few thoughts were not thus
brought into harmony were brought into subjection.
Then she had her affection for her brother; and this, too, though
perhaps there might be in it something a little over-eager, a little too
absolute, a little too susceptible, was a pure, a devoted affection. It
was not only passionate, it was tender. It was tender, pliant, and
self-sacrificing to a degree that not in one nature out of a
thousand,—of natures with a mind and will like hers,—is found
attainable. She thus united extraordinary power of intelligence,
extraordinary force of character, and extraordinary strength of
affection; and all these under the control of a deep religious feeling.
This is what makes her so remarkable, so interesting. I shall try and
make her speak for herself, that she may show us the characteristic
sides of her rare nature with her own inimitable touch.
It must be remembered that her journal is written for Maurice only; in
her lifetime no eye but his ever saw it. “_Ceci n’est pas pour le
public_,” she writes; “_c’est de l’intime, c’est de l’âme, c’est pour
un_.” “This is not for the public; it contains my inmost thoughts, my
very soul; it is for _one_.” And Maurice, this _one_, was a kind of
second self to her. “We see things with the same eyes; what you find
beautiful, I find beautiful; God has made our souls of one piece.” And
this genuine confidence in her brother’s sympathy gives to the entries
in her journal a naturalness and simple freedom rare in such
compositions. She felt that he would understand her, and be interested
in all that she wrote.
One of the first pages of her journal relates an incident of the
home-life of Le Cayla, the smallest detail of which Maurice liked to
hear; and in relating it she brings this simple life before us. She is
writing in November, 1834:—
“I am furious with the gray cat. The mischievous beast has made away
with a little half-frozen pigeon, which I was trying to thaw by the side
of the fire. The poor little thing was just beginning to come round; I
meant to tame him; he would have grown fond of me; and there is my whole
scheme eaten up by a cat! This event, and all the rest of to-day’s
history, has passed in the kitchen. Here I take up my abode all the
morning and a part of the evening, ever since I am without Mimi.[16] I
have to superintend the cook; sometimes papa comes down, and I read to
him by the oven, or by the fireside, some bits out of the _Antiquities
of the Anglo-Saxon Church_. This book struck Pierril[17] with
astonishment. _Que de mouts aqui dédins!_ What a lot of words there are
inside it!’ This boy is a real original. One evening he asked me if the
soul was immortal; then afterwards, what a philosopher was? We had got
upon great questions, as you see. When I told him that a philosopher was
a person who was wise and learned: ‘Then, mademoiselle, you are a
philosopher.’ This was said with an air of simplicity and sincerity
which might have made even Socrates take it as a compliment; but it made
me laugh so much that my gravity as catechist was gone for that evening.
A day or two ago Pierril left us, to his great sorrow: his time with us
was up on Saint Brice’s day. Now he goes about with his little dog,
truffle-hunting. If he comes this way I shall go and ask him if he still
thinks I look like a philosopher.”
-----
Footnote 16:
The familiar name of her sister Marie.
Footnote 17:
A servant-boy at Le Cayla.
-----
Her good sense and spirit made her discharge with alacrity her household
tasks in this patriarchal life of Le Cayla, and treat them as the most
natural thing in the world. She sometimes complains, to be sure, of
burning her fingers at the kitchen-fire. But when a literary friend of
her brother expresses enthusiasm about her and her poetical nature: “The
poetess,” she says, “whom this gentleman believes me to be, is an ideal
being, infinitely removed from the life which is actually mine—a life of
occupations, a life of household-business, which takes up all my time.
How could I make it otherwise? I am sure I do not know; and, besides, my
duty is in this sort of life, and I have no wish to escape from it.”
Among these occupations of the patriarchal life of the châtelaine of Le
Cayla intercourse with the poor fills a prominent place:—
“To-day,” she writes on the 9th of December, 1834, “I have been warming
myself at every fireside in the village. It is a round which Mimi and I
often make, and in which I take pleasure. To-day we have been seeing
sick people, and holding forth on doses and sick-room drinks. ‘Take
this, do that;’ and they attend to us just as if we were the doctor. We
prescribed shoes for a little thing who was amiss from having gone
barefoot; to the brother, who, with a bad headache, was lying quite
flat, we prescribed a pillow; the pillow did him good, but I am afraid
it will hardly cure him. He is at the beginning of a bad feverish cold:
and these poor people live in the filth of their hovels like animals in
their stable; the bad air poisons them. When I come home to Le Cayla I
seem to be in a palace.”
She had books, too; not in abundance, not for the fancying them; the
list of her library is small, and it is enlarged slowly and with
difficulty. The _Letters of Saint Theresa_, which she had long wished to
get, she sees in the hands of a poor servant girl, before she can
procure them for herself. “What then?” is her comment: “very likely she
makes a better use of them than I could.” But she has the _Imitation_,
the _Spiritual Works_ of Bossuet and Fénelon, the _Lives of the Saints_,
Corneille, Racine, André Chénier, and Lamartine; Madame de Staël’s book
on Germany, and French translations of Shakspeare’s plays, Ossian, the
_Vicar of Wakefield_, Scott’s _Old Mortality_ and _Redgauntlet_, and the
_Promessi Sposi_ of Manzoni. Above all, she has her own mind; her
meditations in the lonely fields, on the oak-grown hill-side of “The
Seven Springs;” her meditations and writing in her own room, her
_chambrette_, her _délicieux chez moi_, where every night, before she
goes to bed, she opens the window to look out upon the sky,—the balmy
moonlit sky of Languedoc. This life of reading, thinking, and writing
was the life she liked best, the life that most truly suited her. “I
find writing has become almost a necessity to me. Whence does it arise,
this impulse to give utterance to the voice of one’s spirit, to pour out
my thoughts before God and one human being? I say one human being,
because I always imagine that you are present, that you see what I
write. In the stillness of a life like this my spirit is happy, and, as
it were, dead to all that goes on up-stairs or down-stairs, in the house
or out of the house. But this does not last long. ‘Come, my poor
spirit,’ I then say to myself, ‘we must go back to the things of this
world.’ And I take my spinning, or a book, or a saucepan, or I play with
Wolf or Trilby. Such a life as this I call heaven upon earth.”
Tastes like these, joined with a talent like Mdlle. de Guérin’s,
naturally inspire thoughts of literary composition. Such thoughts she
had, and perhaps she would have been happier if she had followed them;
but she never could satisfy herself that to follow them was quite
consistent with the religious life, and her projects of composition were
gradually relinquished:—
“Would to God that my thoughts, my spirit, had never taken their flight
beyond the narrow round in which it is my lot to live! In spite of all
that people say to the contrary, I feel that I cannot go beyond my
needlework and my spinning without going too far: I feel it, I believe
it: well, then I will keep in my proper sphere; however much I am
tempted, my spirit shall not be allowed to occupy itself with great
matters until it occupies itself with them in Heaven.”