Part 13

I have said that Mademoiselle de Guérin’s secluded and in a sense impersonal life was filled by two great preoccupations. One was her brother. It will be evident by this time that the other was God. “There is one thing needful, to possess God,” wrote Amiel at the beginning of his Journal. Assuredly few human beings have possessed God, have been more thoroughly possessed by the thought of God, than Eugénie de Guérin. All thoughts, all passions, all hopes, all griefs are referred constantly, in prayer and meditation, to that one source, to that one end. It is indeed beautiful to see how completely the two great interests of her life merge in each other. Madame de Sévigné adored her daughter more than God, felt and admitted that the earthly idol usurped God’s place in her eager, tender, frantic mother’s heart. Madame du Deffand worshipped Horace Walpole instead of God, a frail and singular substitute, it will certainly be admitted. With Mademoiselle de Guérin there was never any question of conflict. Her two loves were absolutely united, and one simply enhanced the other. To one object she addressed herself almost as freely as to the other, and it was matter of regret to her that she did not quite: “I speak as I please to this little book [her Journal, addressed to Maurice]. I tell it everything, thoughts, griefs, pleasures, feelings, everything but what can be told only to God, and even then I am sorry to leave anything at the bottom of the box.”

After her brother’s death, she recognizes, in a passage of wonderful self-analysis, the huge, the over-mastering power of earthly affection, yet at once her permanent instinct blends God with it all in a complete, supreme effort of submission to his will. “Shall we never be rid of our affections? Neither grief, nor anguish, nor death has power to change us. To love, always to love, to love right down into the grave, to love the earthly remnants, to love the body that has borne the soul, even though the soul has fled to heaven!... All happiness is dead for me on earth. I have buried my heart’s life. I have lost the charm of my existence. I cannot tell all that my brother was to me or how profoundly I had hidden in him all my happiness. My future, my hopes, my old age, all were one with his, and then he was a soul that understood me. He and I were two eyes in one forehead. Now we are torn apart and God has come between us. His will be done!”

In emphasizing this divine possession of Mademoiselle de Guérin, we must not, however, imply that she was actually unbalanced, or not alive to the common needs and duties of daily life. Her religion was active as well as passive. Even in the more ecstatic rites of spiritual devotion she recognizes a wholesome practical efficacy, as in her striking remark about confession. “What ease, what light, what strength come to me every time I say right out, ‘I was at fault.’” Such a normal attitude makes one regret more than ever that, in our day, at any rate, those make most use of confession who have very little to confess.

In the wide practice of charity it does not appear that Mademoiselle de Guérin was especially active. Yet here too it is evident that she gave not only money but the comfort and the sage, kindly counsel which are worth much more than money, whenever occasion called for them.

So with domestic pursuits. Though her family were of old, high standing, they were poor, lived simply, kept few attendants, and the daughters of the house were wont to turn their prudent hands to every sort of service. Eugénie had evidently been trained in the methods of careful French housekeeping. She dusts, she mends, she lays the table, she cooks, in emergency she takes the linen to the brook and washes it after the picturesque, muscular European fashion. She often finds pleasure in all these doings, also, has a true domestic sense of order and finish and propriety. Nay, she does her washing with real lightness of heart, seeing charms in it which perhaps escape the average laundress. “It is a real joy to wash, to see the fish swim by, to watch the little wavelets, the twigs, the leaves, the blossoms floating in the stream. The brook brings so much that is pretty to the toiler who knows how to see.”

But even here we note that the toiler’s thoughts were not wholly on her toil, however well she might perform it. She was not born to labor with contented indifference. Her heart was too restless, too eager, too bent on vast reveries beyond the limits of this world’s cleanliness. Therefore she willingly lets her sister be housekeeper and only stands ready to help when needed. If little tasks absorb too much of her time, she complains, almost petulantly. “I have hardly opened a book to-day. My time has been passed with things quite different from reading, things nothing in themselves, not even worth mentioning, yet which fill up every moment.” And always, through the humblest of such tasks, runs the glowing current of those thoughts which to her were the only reality in a world of tawdry, trivial, incoherent phantoms. Even when the phantoms burn her fingers, she thinks only of Saint Catherine of Sienna, who had a taste for cooking. “It gave her so many subjects for meditation. I can well believe it, if for nothing but the sight of the fire and the little burns one gets, which make one think of purgatory.”

For she was thinking of hell, and purgatory, and heaven all the time, or as I said in beginning, more justly, she was thinking of God, which included them all three, and far more. God entered into every step she took, and every breath she breathed.

We may trace Him in all her earthly affections. They were deep and strong. We have seen this in regard to Maurice. It was just as true in regard to all others. Her father she cherished tenderly. She knew that he depended on her for everything and she was ready to give him everything at any moment. The deepest workings of her soul she kept from him, because she knew that he would not wholly understand them, and in covering them even with a certain duplicity she only practiced the precept of one who had penetrated the spiritual life as deeply as she, though from a different angle, “the law of love is higher than the law of truth.” Her friendships for other women, also, were profoundly sincere and lasting. She gives much and asks little, just tenderness shown in a brief letter, or a fleeting word. Who has analyzed the passing of friendship more delicately than she? “It is said that women never love each other. I do not know. There may be deep affections that last only a short time. But I have always mistrusted these, for myself and for those I love. Nothing is sadder than a bit of death in the heart. Therefore, when I see an affection dying, I set to work to rekindle it with all my power.” Hers also is this perfect expression of a heart inclined to tenderness: “Our affections are born one of another.”

Yet, as with Maurice, in all these relations God was first. The thought of Him sanctified them. The sense of his presence enhanced and beautified them. Except as they turned towards Him, they could not live and did not deserve to live. “The tenderest affections of the heart, what are they, if they are not bent towards heaven, if they are not offered up to God? They are as mortal as ourselves. We should love not for this world, but for another.”

As with human love, so is it for Eugénie with all other phases of the inner life. By nature she had keen intellectual instincts, liked to read, liked to think, would even have been inclined to think with broad audacity. She had eminently the habit of reflection and analysis which makes solitude fruitful and also makes it dangerous. What scholar could express the charm of lonely hours with more depth and delicacy than this slightly tutored girl? “I love to linger over my thoughts, to bend over each one and breathe its fragrance, to enjoy them fully before they fade away.” Books are a refuge, a resource, a consolation to her. She hates to leave them, even for the brief journeys she is called upon to make.

Also, the very interesting catalogue of her limited bookshelf contains some authors of distinctly profane persuasion, whom she does not always shun. Victor Hugo fascinates her. Sometimes, indeed, the quality of the text forces her to confine her attention to the pictures, but again she is wrapt by the adventures of Jean Valjean and the flamboyant mediævalism of “Notre Dame de Paris.” She tries to break a long day by an exciting novel, picks “The Chamber of Poisons” for its title, but finds only disappointments, pet toads, Jesuits turned into hobgoblins, big names in petty places. She has no taste for poisons, she says. Or again, she turns to Sainte-Beuve’s “Volupté,” having been assured by her confessor that pure minds may pass untainted through strange regions. She likes the book, not perhaps wholly fathoming its depths of morbid suggestiveness. But the best is Molière. She tries him once, is delighted, and means to read more. Now what could be further apart than the worlds of Molière and Eugénie de Guérin?

But, in the main, she reads the writers of this life only to condemn them. Bossuet, Pascal, the Fathers, the “Imitation,” are her daily and nightly company. Such books are all that Christians should read or even recognize. As for the general diffusion of book-learning and education, she deplores it with the real obscurantism of mediæval superstition. The peasants, she says, were once simple-minded, earnest, reverent, devout. Now they go to school, they read the newspapers, they acquire the superficial jargon of modern culture, and as a consequence they are atheistic in their talk and immoral in their lives.

The same intense and constant preoccupation with the mystical point of view that affected Mademoiselle de Guérin’s intellectual pursuits entered into her æsthetic enjoyments. Art in its technical form was completely out of her world. She probably saw pictures with the other curiosities of Paris, but they made no appeal, and churches to her were churches, not in any way creations of architectural art. Music alone she approaches with a sort of groping sense of its vast emotional possibility. But as to this she would undoubtedly have agreed with Cowper that all music not directly intended and employed for the worship of God was corrupting, enervating, debasing. “Oh, if I knew music!” she cries, in a moment of enthusiasm. “They say it is so good for the disorders of the soul.” Yet it does not touch her. “Nothing in the world has such power to move and stimulate the soul. I know it, but I do not feel it.” And a similar experience calls forth words profoundly characteristic for more than music. “I listened to wonders, yet nothing astonished me. Is there then no astonishment save in heaven?”

But there was one region of beauty in which Eugénie’s soul opened and flowered with the most exquisite delicacy and sensibility of response and that was the world of nature. The subtle, dreamy, suggestive landscape of France, which has meant so much to poets and painters, has rarely been felt or rendered with more perfection than by this simple girl who spent her life with flowers and birds and clouds and stars. “I tried to begin a letter to you yesterday,” she says, “but I could not write. All my soul was at the window.” How often her soul was at the window, all ears, all eyes, stirred to wild joy or grief by the breath of light winds, or the dance of blossoms in sunshine, or the drift of autumn leaves. Now it is fair spring weather that delights her, now it is the long and wind-swept rains of autumn. The vast tranquillity of summer nights at times befits her mood. And again she welcomes the tumult of great storms and cries out for even thunder to jar the too monotonous quiet. Not the heart of Keats or Shelley was more vividly, more blissfully or painfully, at one with little sounds, or fleeting sights, or unknown odors that vanish as quickly as they come.

She reads Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s description of the strawberry vine, which, he says, would make matter for a volume, with all its relations and experiences. “I,” she says, “am like the strawberry vine, bound up with earth and air and sky, with the birds, with so many things, visible and invisible, that I should never get through describing them, without counting what lives hidden in the folds of my heart, like the insects that dwell in the thickness of a leaf.” And again, “I wish my heart did not feel the condition of the air and of the season so much that it opens and closes like a flower with cold or sun. I don’t understand it, but so it is, so long as the soul is encased in this frail habitation of the body.”

But nature is never all to her, never enough for her. She must have God. Either she sees Him as the whole life and beauty of it all, hears his voice in the breeze and in the storm, feels his hand in the motion of flowers and of stars, or she turns away from the beauty of earth as too apt to distract from the beauty of heaven. “The sky to-day is pale and languid like a fair face after a fever. This look of languor is full of charm. The blending of greenness and decay, of flowers that open with flowers that fall, of singing birds and creeping brooks, the breath of storm and May sunshine mingled, give an effect of fine fabrics ruffled and tossed together, of sad and sweet at once, which fills me with delight. But this is Ascension day: let us leave earth and earth’s skies; let us rise above our fragile dwelling place and follow where Christ has gone before us.” In another mood the quiet, subtle sounds of night seem to penetrate devotion with an overpowering tenderness, to waft thought higher even than meditation undisturbed. “It is black night. But you can still hear the crickets, the streamlet, and the nightingale, just one, which sings, sings, sings, in the thick darkness. What a perfect accompaniment to evening prayer!”

I said in beginning that Mademoiselle de Guérin had no active personal life of her own. This is as true of her as perhaps of any of us. She followed the thought of others and of God as the shadow follows the sun. At the same time, she was human, she was a woman, she was made of earth, as we all are. It is a study of exceeding interest to watch the stirrings of humanity, even barely perceptible and quickly crushed, in this white, pure vessel filled with the glow of an unearthly adoration.

Revolt she seems to have had none, doubt none, or only such momentary dimming of the pure flame as serves to make it shine the brighter. It does indeed trouble her a little to reflect that just those consolations which the poor need are given only to the rich who need them not. Life, she says, seems inside out and upside down, which was the view of Prometheus and of Satan, but in Mademoiselle de Guérin it does not strike us as Satanic. Also, her questioning of the divine order goes so far as a regret that she cannot have her doves in heaven. But this pulls her up with a shock, for in heaven we shall regret nothing—not even doves.

Some shreds of human frailty, some lingering hints of impatience and irritability and nerves, we are pleased to find that even this saint shares with us. How subtly and charmingly does she analyze them herself. “I am not in the mood to write or to do anything amiable: quite the contrary. There are days when the soul shuts itself up like a hedgehog. If you were here, how I would prick you.” And again, in a little different phase. “I am most unsuccessful in dealing with difficulties, and am always in too great a hurry to get at what is to give me pleasure.”

Also, I wonder whether her friends really got near her and felt at ease with her. Monsieur Anatole France speaks charmingly of _la douceur impérieuse des saintes_. Had Mademoiselle de Guérin’s infinite gentleness sometimes a touch of the imperious? I can hardly prove it. It is rare and subtle and indefinable. But I divine it—a little. She remarks, with beatific triumph, “I speak to everybody I love of the things of eternity.” She did. She did. And it seems merely prophetic despair to imply that the things of eternity might grow tiresome. But in this world we are contented only with eternal change.

There are some special matters of absorbing interest to most women. Eugénie de Guérin was a woman. Did she take no interest in these matters? Beauty, for instance? It does not appear that she had any special charm of feature or carriage. Was she aware of this? Did it trouble her? If so, she seldom shows it. Yet there are words here and there that set one thinking. When she was young, she says, she desired passionately to be beautiful, because she was told that if she were so, her mother would love her more. But as she grows older, she thinks only of beauty of the soul. Nevertheless, coming age seems to affect her with suggestions of ugliness, not of the soul only.

Dress again. Fair women employ it to enhance beauty, others to create it. Did Eugénie give no thought to what she should put on? Not much, I confess, beyond an exquisite sense of neatness and good order. Yet, here, too, if you watch closely, you get a gleam of human vanity, like the flash of a spangle on a sombre floor. She looks back and reviews the preoccupations of her youth, long since laid aside and forgotten, she says. “Dolls, toys, birds, butterflies I cherished, pretty and innocent fancies of childhood. Then books, talk, jewels and ornaments a little, dreams, fair dreams—but I am not writing a confession.”

If she had written one, would there have been men in it, fairy lovers such as girls dream, an ideal blend of manly beauty and mad tenderness? We do not know, but here again little things make us suspect. She tells us she does not like novels, because the passions are let loose in them—but she reads them. She pities the souls in purgatory because of the terrible impatience with which they await release. What expectation on earth can compare with it? she says. Not that of fortune, or of glory, or of anything else that makes the human heart pant, unless perhaps it be the longing of the beloved waiting for the lover. And elsewhere she draws a domestic picture of quiet happiness, a little house in the fields, with vines and poultry, and some one, whom? Not a peasant, she says, like ours who beat their wives. “Do you remember—?” But she stops short and does not give the name.

In such a picture the crowning object would be children and though she does not mention them here, she does elsewhere, often, with all a born mother’s tenderness. How charming is her dream of the way she would rear them and teach them. “If I had a child to bring up, how gently I would do it, how merrily, with all the care one gives a delicate flower. I would speak to them of God with words of love. I would tell them that He loves them even more than I do, that He gives them everything I give them, and besides, the air, the sun, and the flowers, that He made the sky and the beautiful stars.” When Maurice’s child is about to be born, after the father’s death, she cries out in ecstasy. “How I long to have a baby in the house, to play mother, and nurse it, and caress it.” Surely the real woman is speaking to us here.

Other feminine affairs were of less interest to her, as we have seen with things purely domestic. General society she shunned, and no doubt lost by doing so. Occasionally she is tricked out and led to a party, where she thinks every one remarks her ill, unaccustomed manner of dancing, the truth probably being that no one noticed her at all. She might, no doubt, have been successful in conversation, for she had wit, refinement, distinction, and was capable of vivacity. But she avoided what she calls the world, with a suggestion of inexpressible disdain, alleging to herself that it was futile, frivolous, and unprofitable. Perhaps a good part of the reason was that she herself was proud and shy and essentially a spiritual aristocrat. “Books are my intellectual passion; but how few there are that I like. It is just so with people. I rarely meet any one that pleases me.” When you frequent the world in that spirit, it is unprofitable indeed.

One phase of human weakness did take hold of this celestial wanderer and even threaten to disturb her saintly peace, and that was the ambition of literature. She restrains it, subdues it, disclaims it. But no one could take such nice care of expression as she does, could turn sentences so daintily, so vigorously, and not take pride in them. She is like Saint François de Sales, who announces the loftiest contempt for poor words, but uses the most cunning skill to get all he can out of them.

Writing is almost a necessity to her, she says. She turns to her pen as an outlet for all the struggles and trials and passions of her inner life. “Writing is the sign that I am alive, as that of a brook is running.” She looks to publication, too, makes delicate verses and sends them to a review, which she thinks will print them, if it prints women’s verses at all. Not that she cares for the public, oh, no! She writes only to please a friend or two who can appreciate her. And her name must not be used in print, oh, never! Still, there is a subtle charm about this newspaper notoriety, you can hardly call it glory, which does appeal, even to the saints.

Then she thinks it appeals too much. All earthly glory is vanity, even that of the poet’s corner of a magazine. Can it be right for her to spend time and thought which should belong to God on the mere tinkle of human rhyming? She consults her confessor, who assures her that no great harm is done. She consults Maurice, who is very round with her, tells her not to worry about her conscience in the matter, but to write, tells her to think a little more about the subject of her verses and less about herself, and above all suggests that she should omit devotion and mysticism and be human, advice by which he lays himself open to gentle admonition and reproof.