“My journal has been untouched for a long while. Do you want to know
why? It is because the time seems to me misspent which I spend in
writing it. We owe God an account of every minute; and is it not a wrong
use of our minutes to employ them in writing a history of our transitory
days?”
She overcomes her scruples, and goes on writing the journal; but again
and again they return to her. Her brother tells her of the pleasure and
comfort something she has written gives to a friend of his in
affliction. She answers:—
“It is from the Cross that those thoughts come, which your friend finds
so soothing, so unspeakably tender. None of them come from me. I feel my
own aridity; but I feel, too, that God, when he will, can make an ocean
flow upon this bed of sand. It is the same with so many simple souls,
from which proceed the most admirable things; because they are in direct
relation with God, without false science and without pride. And thus I
am gradually losing my taste for books; I say to myself: ‘What can they
teach me which I shall not one day know in Heaven? let God be my master
and my study here!’ I try to make him so, and I find myself the better
for it. I read little; I go out little; I plunge myself in the inward
life. How infinite are the sayings, doings, feelings, events of that
life! Oh, if you could but see them! But what avails it to make them
known? God alone should be admitted to the sanctuary of the soul.”
Beautifully as she says all this, one cannot, I think, read it without a
sense of disquietude, without a presentiment that this ardent spirit is
forcing itself from its natural bent, that the beatitude of the true
mystic will never be its earthly portion. And yet how simple and
charming is her picture of the life of religion which she chose as her
ark of refuge, and in which she desired to place all her happiness:—
“Cloaks, clogs, umbrellas, all the apparatus of winter, went with us
this morning to Andillac, where we have passed the whole day; some of it
at the curé’s house, the rest in church. How I like this life of a
country Sunday, with its activity, its journeys to church, its
liveliness! You find all your neighbors on the road; you have a curtsey
from every woman you meet, and then, as you go along, such a talk about
the poultry, the sheep and cows, the good man and the children! My great
delight is to give a kiss to these children, and see them run away and
hide their blushing faces in their mother’s gown. They are alarmed at
_las doumaϊsèlos_,[18] as at a being of another world. One of these
little things said the other day to its grandmother, who was talking of
coming to see us: ‘_Minino_, you mustn’t go to that castle; there is a
black hole there.’ What is the reason that in all ages the noble’s
château has been an object of terror? Is it because of the horrors that
were committed there in old times? I suppose so.”
-----
Footnote 18:
The young lady.
-----
This vague horror of the château, still lingering in the mind of the
French peasant fifty years after he has stormed it, is indeed curious,
and is one of the thousand indications how unlike aristocracy on the
Continent has been to aristocracy in England. But this is one of the
great matters with which Mdlle. de Guérin would not have us occupied;
let us pass to the subject of Christmas in Languedoc:—
“Christmas is come; the beautiful festival, the one I love most, and
which gives me the same joy as it gave the shepherds of Bethlehem. In
real truth, one’s whole soul sings with joy at this beautiful coming of
God upon earth,—a coming which here is announced on all sides of us by
music and by our charming _nadalet_.[19] Nothing at Paris can give you a
notion of what Christmas is with us. You have not even the
midnight-mass. We all of us went to it, papa at our head, on the most
perfect night possible. Never was there a finer sky than ours was that
midnight; so fine that papa kept perpetually throwing back the hood of
his cloak, that he might look up at the sky. The ground was white with
hoar-frost, but we were not cold; besides, the air, as we met it, was
warmed by the bundles of blazing torchwood which our servants carried in
front of us to light us on our way. It was delightful, I do assure you;
and I should like you to have seen us there on our road to church, in
those lanes with the bushes along their banks as white as if they were
in flower. The hoar-frost makes the most lovely flowers. We saw a long
spray so beautiful that we wanted to take it with us as a garland for
the communion-table, but it melted in our hands: all flowers fade so
soon! I was very sorry about my garland; it was mournful to see it drip
away, and get smaller and smaller every minute!”
-----
Footnote 19:
A peculiar peal rung at Christmas-time by the church bells of
Languedoc.
-----
The religious life is at bottom everywhere alike; but it is curious to
note the variousness of its setting and outward circumstance.
Catholicism has these so different from Protestantism! and in
Catholicism these accessories have, it cannot be denied, a nobleness and
amplitude which in Protestantism is often wanting to them. In
Catholicism they have, from the antiquity of this form of religion, from
its pretensions to universality, from its really widespread prevalence,
from its sensuousness, something European, august, and imaginative: in
Protestantism they often have, from its inferiority in all these
respects, something provincial, mean, and prosaic. In revenge,
Protestantism has a future before it, a prospect of growth in alliance
with the vital movement of modern society; while Catholicism appears to
be bent on widening the breach between itself and the modern spirit, to
be fatally losing itself in the multiplication of dogmas, Mariolatry,
and miracle-mongering. But the style and circumstance of actual
Catholicism is grander than its present tendency, and the style and
circumstance of Protestantism is meaner than its tendency. While I was
reading the journal of Mdle. de Guérin there came into my hands the
memoir and poems of a young Englishwoman, Miss Emma Tatham; and one
could not but be struck with the singular contrast which the two
lives,—in their setting rather than in their inherent quality,—present.
Miss Tatham had not, certainly, Mdlle. de Guérin’s talent, but she had a
sincere vein of poetic feeling, a genuine aptitude for composition. Both
were fervent Christians, and, so far, the two lives have a real
resemblance; but, in the setting of them, what a difference! The
Frenchwoman is a Catholic in Languedoc; the Englishwoman is a Protestant
at Margate; Margate, that brick-and-mortar image of English
Protestantism, representing it in all its prose, all its
uncomeliness,—let me add, all its salubrity. Between the external form
and fashion of these two lives, between the Catholic Mdle. de Guérin’s
_nadalet_ at the Languedoc Christmas, her chapel of moss at Easter-time,
her daily reading of the life of a saint, carrying her to the most
diverse times, places, and peoples,—her quoting, when she wants to fix
her mind upon the staunchness which the religious aspirant needs, the
words of Saint Macedonius to a hunter whom he met in the mountains, “I
pursue after God, as you pursue after game,”—her quoting, when she wants
to break a village girl of disobedience to her mother, the story of the
ten disobedient children whom at Hippo Saint Augustine saw
palsied;—between all this and the bare, blank, narrowly English setting
of Miss Tatham’s Protestantism, her “union in church-fellowship with the
worshipers at Hawley Square Chapel, Margate;” her “singing with soft,
sweet voice, the animating lines—
‘My Jesus to know, and feel His blood flow,
’Tis life everlasting, ’tis heaven below;’”
her “young female teachers belonging to the Sunday-school,” and her “Mr.
Thomas Rowe, a venerable class-leader,”—what a dissimilarity! In the
ground of the two lives, a likeness; in all their circumstance, what
unlikeness! An unlikeness, it will be said, in that which is
non-essential and indifferent. Non-essential,—yes; indifferent,—no. The
signal want of grace and charm in English Protestantism’s setting of its
religious life is not an indifferent matter; it is a real weakness.
_This ought ye to have done, and not to have left the other undone._
I have said that the present tendency of Catholicism,—the Catholicism of
the main body of the Catholic clergy and laity,—seems likely to
exaggerate rather than to remove all that in this form of religion is
most repugnant to reason; but this Catholicism was not that of Mdlle. de
Guérin. The insufficiency of her Catholicism comes from a doctrine which
Protestantism, too, has adopted, although Protestantism, from its
inherent element of freedom, may find it easier to escape from it; a
doctrine with a certain attraction for all noble natures, but, in the
modern world at any rate, incurably sterile,—the doctrine of the
emptiness and nothingness of human life, of the superiority of
renouncement to activity, of quietism to energy; the doctrine which
makes effort for things on this side of the grave a folly, and joy in
things on this side of the grave a sin. But her Catholicism is
remarkably free from the faults which Protestants commonly think
inseparable from Catholicism; the relation to the priest, the practice
of confession, assume, when she speaks of them, an aspect which is not
that under which Exeter Hall knows them, but which,—unless one is of the
number of those who prefer regarding that by which men and nations die
to regarding that by which they live,—one is glad to study. “_La
confession_,” she says twice in her journal, “_n’est qu’une expansion du
repentir dans l’amour_;” and her weekly journey to the confessional in
the little church of Cahuzac is her “_cher pélerinage_;” the little
church is the place where she has “_laissé tant de misères_.”
“This morning,” she writes on 28th of November, “I was up before
daylight, dressed quickly, said my prayers, and started with Marie for
Cahuzac. When we got there, the chapel was occupied, which I was not
sorry for. I like not to be hurried, and to have time, before I go in,
to lay bare my soul before God. This often takes me a long time, because
my thoughts are apt to be flying about like these autumn leaves. At ten
o’clock I was on my knees, listening to words the most salutary that
were ever spoken; and I went away, feeling myself a better being. Every
burden thrown off leaves us with a sense of brightness; and when the
soul has lain down the load of its sins at God’s feet, it feels as if it
had wings. What an admirable thing is confession! What comfort, what
light, what strength is given me every time after I have said, _I have
sinned_.”
This blessing of confession is the greater, she says, “the more the
heart of the priest to whom we confide our repentance is like that
divine heart which ‘has so loved us.’ This is what attaches me to M.
Bories.” M. Bories was the curé of her parish, a man no longer young,
and of whose loss, when he was about to leave them, she thus speaks:—
“What a grief for me! how much I lose in losing this faithful guide of
my conscience, heart, and mind, of my whole self, which God has
appointed to be in his charge, and which let itself be in his charge so
gladly! He knew the resolves which God had put in my heart, and I had
need of his help to follow them. Our new curé cannot supply his place:
he is so young! and then he seems so inexperienced, so undecided! It
needs firmness to pluck a soul out of the midst of the world, and to
uphold it against the assaults of flesh and blood. It is Saturday, my
day for going to Cahuzac; I am just going there, perhaps I shall come
back more tranquil. God has always given me some good thing there, in
that chapel where I have left behind me so many miseries.”
Such is confession for her when the priest is worthy; and, when he is
not worthy, she knows how to separate the man from the office:—
“To-day I am going to do something which I dislike; but I will do it,
with God’s help. Do not think I am on my way to the stake; it is only
that I am going to confess to a priest in whom I have not confidence,
but who is the only one here. In this act of religion the man must
always be separated from the priest, and sometimes the man must be
annihilated.”
The same clear sense, the same freedom from superstition, shows itself
in all her religious life. She tells us, to be sure, how once, when she
was a little girl, she stained a new frock, and on praying, in her
alarm, to an image of the Virgin which hung in her room, saw the stains
vanish: even the austerest Protestant will not judge such Mariolatry as
this very harshly. But, in general, the Virgin Mary fills in the
religious parts of her journal no prominent place; it is Jesus, not
Mary. “Oh, how well has Jesus said: ‘Come unto me, all ye that labor and
are heavy laden.’ It is only there, only in the bosom of God, that we
can rightly weep, rightly rid ourselves of our burden.” And again: “The
mystery of suffering makes one grasp the belief of something to be
expiated, something to be won. I see it in Jesus Christ, the Man of
Sorrow. _It was necessary that the Son of Man should suffer._ That is
all we know in the troubles and calamities of life.”
And who has ever spoken of justification more impressively and piously
than Mdlle. de Guérin speaks of it, when, after reckoning the number of
minutes she has lived, she exclaims:—
“My God, what have we done with all these minutes of ours, which thou,
too, wilt one day reckon? Will there be any of them to count for eternal
life? will there be many of them? will there be one of them? ‘If thou, O
Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss, O Lord, who may abide
it!’ This close scrutiny of our time may well make us tremble, all of us
who have advanced more than a few steps in life; for God will judge us
otherwise than as he judges the lilies of the field. I have never been
able to understand the security of those who placed their whole
reliance, in presenting themselves before God, upon a good conduct in
the ordinary relations of human life. As if all our duties were confined
within the narrow sphere of this world! To be a good parent, a good
child, a good citizen, a good brother or sister, is not enough to
procure entrance into the kingdom of heaven. God demands other things
besides these kindly social virtues of him whom he means to crown with
an eternity of glory.”
And, with this zeal for the spirit and power of religion, what prudence
in her counsels of religious practice; what discernment, what measure!
She has been speaking of the charm of the _Lives of the Saints_, and she
goes on:—
“Notwithstanding this, the _Lives of the Saints_ seem to me, for a great
many people, dangerous reading. I would not recommend them to a young
girl, or even to some women who are no longer young. What one reads has
such power over one’s feelings; and these, even in seeking God,
sometimes go astray. Alas, we have seen it in poor C.’s case. What care
one ought to take with a young person; with what she reads, what she
writes, her society, her prayers,—all of them matters which demand a
mother’s tender watchfulness! I remember many things I did at fourteen,
which my mother, had she lived, would not have let me do. I would have
done anything for God’s sake; I would have cast myself into an oven, and
assuredly things like that are not God’s will; He is not pleased by the
hurt one does to one’s health through that ardent but ill-regulated
piety which, while it impairs the body, often leaves many a fault
flourishing. And, therefore, Saint François de Sales used to say to the
nuns who asked his leave to go bare-foot: ‘Change your brains and keep
your shoes.’”
Meanwhile Maurice, in a five years’ absence, and amid the distractions
of Paris, lost, or seemed to his sister to lose, something of his
fondness for his home and its inmates: he certainly lost his early
religious habits and feelings. It is on this latter loss that Mdlle. de
Guérin’s journal oftenest touches,—with infinite delicacy, but with
infinite anguish:—
“Oh, the agony of being in fear for a soul’s salvation, who can describe
it! That which caused our Saviour the keenest suffering, in the agony of
his Passion, was not so much the thought of the torments he was to
endure, as the thought that these torments would be of no avail for a
multitude of sinners; for all those who set themselves against their
redemption, or who do not care for it. The mere anticipation of this
obstinacy and this heedlessness has power to make sorrowful, even unto
death, the divine Son of Man. And this feeling all Christian souls,
according to the measure of faith and love granted them, more or less
share.”
Maurice returned to Le Cayla in the summer of 1837, and passed six
months there. This meeting entirely restored the union between him and
his family. “These six months with us,” writes his sister, “he ill, and
finding himself so loved by us all, had entirely reattached him to us.
Five years without seeing us, had perhaps made him a little lose sight
of our affection for him; having found it again, he met it with all the
strength of his own. He had so firmly renewed, before he left us, all
family-ties, that nothing but death could have broken them.” The
separation in religious matters between the brother and sister gradually
diminished, and before Maurice died it had ceased. I have elsewhere
spoken of Maurice’s religious feeling and his character. It is probable
that his divergence from his sister in this sphere of religion was never
so wide as she feared, and that his reunion with her was never so
complete as she hoped. “His errors were passed,” she says, “his
illusions were cleared away; by the call of his nature, by original
disposition, he had come back to sentiments of order. I knew all, I
followed each of his steps; out of the fiery sphere of the passions
(which held him but a little moment) I saw him pass into the sphere of
the Christian life. It was a beautiful soul, the soul of Maurice.” But
the illness which had caused his return to Le Cayla reappeared after he
got back to Paris in the winter of 1837-8. Again he seemed to recover;
and his marriage with a young Creole lady, Mdlle. Caroline de Gervain,
took place in the autumn of 1838. At the end of September in that year
Mdlle. de Guérin had joined her brother in Paris; she was present at his
marriage, and stayed with him and his wife for some months afterwards.
Her journal recommences in April 1839. Zealously as she promoted her
brother’s marriage, cordial as were her relations with her
sister-in-law, it is evident that a sense of loss, of loneliness,
invades her, and sometimes weighs her down. She writes in her journal on
the 4th of May:—
“God knows when we shall see one another again! My own Maurice, must it
be our lot to live apart, to find that this marriage which I had so much
share in bringing about, which I hoped would keep us so much together,
leaves us more asunder than ever? For the present and for the future,
this troubles me more than I can say. My sympathies, my inclinations,
carry me more towards you than towards any other member of our family. I
have the misfortune to be fonder of you than of anything else in the
world, and my heart had from of old built in you its happiness. Youth
gone and life declining, I looked forward to quitting the scene with
Maurice. At any time of life a great affection is a great happiness; the
spirit comes to take refuge in it entirely. O delight and joy which will
never be your sister’s portion! Only in the direction of God shall I
find an issue for my heart to love as it has the notion of loving, as it
has the power of loving.”
For such complainings, in which there is undoubtedly something
morbid,—complainings which she herself blamed, to which she seldom gave
way, but which, in presenting her character, it is not just to put
wholly out of sight,—she was called by the news of an alarming return of
her brother’s illness. For some days the entries in the journal show her
agony of apprehension. “He coughs, he coughs still! Those words keep
echoing forever in my ears, and pursue me wherever I go; I cannot look
at the leaves on the trees without thinking that the winter will come,
and then the consumptive die.” She went to him, and brought him back by
slow stages to Le Cayla, dying. He died on the 19th of July 1839.
Thenceforward the energy of life ebbed in her; but the main chords of
her being, the chord of affection, the chord of religious longing, the
chord of intelligence, the chord of sorrow, gave, so long as they
answered to the touch at all, a deeper and finer sound than ever. Always
she saw before her, “that beloved pale face;” “that beautiful head, with
all its different expressions, smiling, suffering, dying,” regarded her
always:—
“I have seen his coffin in the same room, in the same spot where I
remember seeing, when I was a very little girl, his cradle, when I was
brought home from Gaillac, where I was then staying, for his
christening. This christening was a grand one, full of rejoicing, more
than that of any of the rest of us; specially marked. I enjoyed myself
greatly, and went back to Gaillac next day, charmed with my new little
brother. Two years afterwards I came home, and brought with me a frock
for him of my own making. I dressed him in the frock, and took him out
with me along by the warren at the north of the house, and there he
walked a few steps alone,—his first walking alone,—and I ran with
delight to tell my mother the news: ‘Maurice, Maurice has begun to walk
by himself!’—Recollections which, coming back to-day, break one’s
heart.”
The shortness and suffering of her brother’s life filled her with an
agony of pity. “Poor beloved soul, you have had hardly any happiness
here below; your life has been so short, your repose so rare. O God,
uphold me, establish my heart in thy faith! Alas, I have too little of
this supporting me! How we have gazed at him and loved him, and kissed
him,—his wife, and we, his sisters; he lying lifeless in his bed, his
head on the pillow as if he were asleep! Then we followed him to the
churchyard, to the grave, to his last resting-place, and prayed over
him, and wept over him; and we are here again, and I am writing to him
again, as if he were staying away from home, as if he were in Paris. My
beloved one, can it be, shall we never see one another again on earth?”
But in heaven?—and here, though love and hope finally prevailed, the
very passion of the sister’s longing sometimes inspired torturing
inquietudes:—
“I am broken down with misery. I want to see him. Every moment I pray to
God to grant me this grace. Heaven, the world of spirits, is it so far
from us? O depth, O mystery of the other life which separates us! I, who
was so eagerly anxious about him, who wanted so to know all that
happened to him,—wherever he may be now, it is over! I follow him unto
the three abodes; I stop wistfully before the place of bliss, I pass on
to the place of suffering,—to the gulf of fire. My God, my God, no! Not
there let my brother be! not there! And he is not: his soul, the soul of
Maurice, among the lost ... horrible fear, no! But in purgatory, where
the soul is cleansed by suffering, where the failings of the heart are
expiated, the doubtings of the spirit, the half-yieldings to evil?
Perhaps my brother is there and suffers, and calls to us amidst his
anguish of repentance, as he used to call to us amidst his bodily
suffering: ‘Help me, you who love me.’ Yes, beloved one, by prayer. I
will go and pray; prayer has been such a power to me, and I will pray to
the end. Prayer! Oh! and prayer for the dead; it is the dew of
purgatory.”
Often, alas, the gracious dew would not fall; the air of her soul was
parched; the arid wind, which was somewhere in the depths of her being,
blew. She marks in her journal the 1st of May, “this return of the
loveliest month in the year,” only to keep up the old habit; even the
mouth of May can no longer give her any pleasure: “_Tout est changé_—all
is changed.” She is crushed by “the misery which has nothing good in it,
the tearless, dry misery, which bruises the heart like a hammer.”
“I am dying to everything. I am dying of a slow moral agony, a condition
of unutterable suffering. Lie there, my poor journal! be forgotten with
all this world which is fading away from me. I will write here no more
until I come to life again, until God re-awakens me out of this tomb in
which my soul lies buried. Maurice, my beloved! it was not thus with me
when I had _you_! The thought of Maurice could revive me from the most
profound depression: to have him in the world was enough for me. With
Maurice, to be buried alive would have not seemed dull to me.”
And, as a burden to this funeral strain, the old _vide et néant_ of
Bossuet, profound, solemn, sterile:—
“So beautiful in the morning, and in the evening, _that!_ how the
thought disenchants one, and turns one from the world! I can understand
that Spanish grandee who, after lifting up the winding-sheet of a
beautiful queen, threw himself into the cloister and became a great
saint. I would have all my friends at La Trappe, in the interest of
their eternal welfare. Not that in the world one cannot be saved, not
that there are not in the world duties to be discharged as sacred and as
beautiful as there are in the cloister, but....”
And there she stops, and a day or two afterwards her journal comes to an
end. A few fragments, a few letters carry us on a little later, but
after the 22d of August 1845 there is nothing. To make known her
brother’s genius to the world was the one task she set herself after his
death; in 1840 came Madame Sand’s noble tribute to him in the _Révue des
Deux Mondes_; then followed projects of raising a yet more enduring
monument to his fame, by collecting and publishing his scattered
compositions; these projects I have already said, were baffled;—Mdlle.
de Guérin’s letter of the 22d of August 1845 relates to this
disappointment. In silence, during nearly three years more, she faded
away at Le Cayla. She died on the 31st of May 1848.
M. Trebutien has accomplished the pious task in which Mdlle. de Guérin
was baffled, and has established Maurice’s fame; by publishing this
journal he has established Eugénie’s also. She was very different from
her brother; but she too, like him, had that in her which preserves a
reputation. Her soul had the same characteristic quality as his
talent,—_distinction_. Of this quality the world is impatient; it chafes
against it, rails at it, insults it, hates it;—it ends by receiving its
influence, and by undergoing its law. This quality at last inexorably
corrects the world’s blunders, and fixes the world’s ideals. It procures
that the popular poet shall not finally pass for a Pindar, nor the
popular historian for a Tacitus, nor the popular preacher for a Bossuet.
To the circle of spirits marked by this rare quality, Maurice and
Eugénie de Guérin belong; they will take their place in the sky which
these inhabit, and shine close to one another, _lucida sidera_.