The Catholic World Volume Ii Part 45

He re-entered France, already invested with a sort of legendary halo, and was everywhere recognized as the true type of disinterested heroism, intelligent boldness, moral dignity, independence a little haughty, and liberal instincts, which become the armies of France, at least such as they were then. Race apart, these _Africans_, as brilliant as original in the military history of Europe, as foreign to the brutal manners of the soldier of fortune led by Gustavus Adolphus and Frederic II. as to the savage and cruel pride of the lieutenants of Napoleon, showed themselves always the citizens of a free country, the missionaries of civilization, as well as the first soldiers in the world.

But military glory did not suffice for La Moriciere. Sensible to an attraction then all powerful, he aspired to enter political life, and as soon as he was initiated into it he relished it, and devoted himself to it with that pa.s.sion which he carried into everything he undertook. In 1846 he solicited and obtained the suffrages of his fellow-citizens. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies, he took his place with the moderate opposition. By a privilege rarely accorded, it was given him to conquer at once, on this new and {292} difficult battle-field, a distinction and an authority almost as fully acknowledged and as legitimate as that which he had gained on the theatre of his exploits in Algeria.

La Moriciere was born with the gift of eloquence--that gift which is the first condition neither of the love of liberty nor of the exercise of power, but which is seldom separated from either in countries and times which permit free discussion. He united the three qualities, very rare, which the prince of contemporary orators, M. Thiers, exacts of those who aspire to govern--knowledge of public affairs, ability to expose them lucidly and in order, and the weight of character necessary to defend them. But, against the ordinary rule, his eloquence was not at all the result of labor. With him the orator was not slowly disengaged, as with the most ill.u.s.trious, step by step, in a continuous progress toward perfection; he revealed himself at once as a bold and successful improvisator, who, on a chosen ground, had nothing to fear from anybody. He jeered those who pa.s.sed for eloquent without having his extemporary facility. "You Academicians," said he, "must always retire to make the toilet of your speech, and are never ready when you are wanted." As for him, he was always ready, and it was a real pleasure to hear him, and to see him spring to the tribune, to mount it as if it were his horse, stride it, so to speak, and master it at a single word, with the ease of the perfect horseman--then broach the most complicated questions, provoke the most formidable adversaries, even M. Thiers himself, overcome the tumult, regain and fix the distracted attention, instruct and charm even those whom he failed to convince. His eye sparkling, his head aloft, his voice thrown out by jerks, he seemed always in speaking to be sounding a charge. He managed figures, metaphors, arguments, with as much celerity, dash, and freedom as his Zouaves. Supple and impetuous, bounding as the panther, he turned around his adversary, as if seeking his vulnerable point, before springing upon and prostrating him.

Rarely did he descend from the tribune without having moved his auditory, enlightened a question, corrected a misapprehension, repaired a defeat, prepared or justified a victory. Never was the celebrated word of Cato on the Gauls, _Rem militarem agere et argute loqui_, more exactly verified. Under this relation, as under so many others, he was the most French of the Frenchmen of our age.

This double superiority was manifested with an _eclat_ as sudden as complete in the midst of the frightful dangers of the revolution of February, 1848. Named minister by a last effort of expiring legality, he presented himself with his accustomed intrepidity before the insurgent populace. The populace mistook and outraged him: dragged from his horse, wounded with the thrusts of a bayonet, he with difficulty escaped with his glorious life from the cowardly a.s.sa.s.sins.

When the Provisional Government issued from the mob, he would neither serve it nor combat it. But he promised to accept the Republic, and to be loyal to it, if it would preserve the army. That army was about to become, in the hands of the National a.s.sembly and under the orders of the _African_ generals, the last bulwark of European civilization.

When the terrible days of June came to show the depth of the abyss excavated by February, La Moriciere was then by the side of his friend Cavaignac, who, become his chief, after having been his lieutenant, and retained himself from personally engaging in the struggle by his duties as head of the executive, hastened to confide to him the princ.i.p.al part in repressing the most terrible insurrection that ever broke out in the most revolutionary city in the world. Those who were there--those who breathed the inflamed atmosphere of those solemn and terrible days, run through those narrow streets inc.u.mbered with barricades and heaps of the {293} slain, and where flowed literally streams of blood, those deserted quays and blocked-up quarters, whose silence was broken only by _the sublime horror of the cannonade_--those who were obliged to deliberate through three days and two nights amidst the roar of that cannonade, while came alternately messages of death and bulletins of the most sad but most necessary victories--those alone can know by what means and at what cost their country could really be saved, without violating the laws of justice, honor, or humanity. Those who were not there will never form a conception either of the extent of the danger or of the yawning gulf in which he came so near being swallowed up, nor of the mixture of determined energy and invincible patience needed to vanquish those misguided but intrepid ma.s.ses inured to war, and desperate, and whose blows too large a number of former military officers directed against the inexperience of the Gard Mobile or the hesitation of the troops that had just entered Paris.

La Moriciere, more than any other, was the man for the occasion. His fiery temperament protected him from that patriotic sadness which overcast the countenance of General Cavaignac all through the b.l.o.o.d.y crisis which must raise him to supreme power. In exposing himself as at Constantine, for a longer time, and to still greater danger than at Constantine, in rus.h.i.+ng himself the first against the barricades, defended by adversaries far more formidable than Arabs or Kabyles; in prolonging the struggle with a revolution madder than that of the insurgents. La Moriciere finally succeeded in wresting Paris from the insurrection. The confidence with which he inspired the troops, the high spirits and gaiety, the heroic recklessness which he mingled with his indomitable resolution, triumphed over every obstacle, and decided the victory. Thanks to that victory, and to that alone, France was drawn from the abyss and saved from barbarism.

Hence, on his return from the fearful struggle, he was greeted only with a unanimous shout of enthusiasm and grat.i.tude. Cavaignac hastened to set his seal to the general acclamation by a.s.sociating him to his government as minister of war.

There was then a short period of confidence, of union, of calm, and of relative security. Those days must have been sweet to the two friends placed at the head of the country which they had just saved, and which gave them freely the grat.i.tude which they had so richly merited. Their union, intimate and loyal, cordial and frank, contributed often to the charm and well-being of that bright interval. It received an official and touching consecration during the discussion of the const.i.tution, on the occasion of the articles relative to the public force. It was a beautiful scene. An imprudent member, _apropos_ of the promotion, a little irregular, of the future Marshal Bosquet, accused the minister of war of acting from private friends.h.i.+p, and spoke of those whom chance and fortune had placed at the head of the army. La Moriciere remained calm under the insult, but Cavaignac, seated by his side on the ministerial bench, was indignant, and, ascending the tribune, and addressing the aggressor, said: "There is one thing that astonishes me; it is that you, sir, who were there, on the soil of Africa, as well as me,--that you could see no other motive for the elevation of that man but chance and fortune. As for me, if I am surprised, it is to see him in the second rank, while I am in the first." A n.o.ble word, and worthy of the n.o.blest antiquity, such as could sometimes, by the side of others by no means felicitous, fall from the lips of the proud and loyal Cavaignac, then still the idol of the fickle enthusiasm of conservative France, and which was so soon to leave him only the right to say, with not less of modest dignity, "I have not fallen from power; I have descended from it."

La Moriciere was then at the {294} apogee of a fortune which n.o.body was disposed to regard as excessive or usurped. At the age of forty he was everywhere known, was invested with universal popularity, and was the second man of France. The superiority he had won on the battle-fields of Africa and at the much more formidable barricades in the streets of Paris, he maintained and exercised in the councils of his country and on the uncertain and perilous soil of the tribune.

[Footnote 45] Even when individuals were not of his opinion, which was often the case with his friends of the evening as with those of the morrow, they regretted or were astonished not to agree with him; they ceased not to admire him, and were drawn toward him. It was known, it was felt, that however the pa.s.sions of the moment might mislead him, the miserable instincts of envy, servility, selfishness, mean ambition, or thirst for wealth, could never find a place in his robust and manly heart. We loved him even when we were forced to oppose him.

Beside, we knew not yet how much better and further on many essential points he saw, in his transports and gruffness, than many others more calm or more experienced, and who were, though in a different manner, as much deceived as he.

[Footnote 45: "Never has been pushed farther the intelligence, and the power of labor, with the pa.s.sion or struggle under all the forms which create public life."'--_Discours du General Trochu sur la tombe de la Moriciere a Saint-Philibert de Grand-Lieu._]

Moreover, in the public life of free nations and great a.s.semblies, if the clas.h.i.+ng of opinions and the collision of self-loves give birth to noisy or pa.s.sionate dissents, they are rarely deep or lasting. This is evident from what is seen every day and has been for a long time in England. One is not forced there to brood in silence and darkness over animosities which their very impotence renders incurable. Often, on the contrary, in that open-day life, friends.h.i.+ps the most serious, and alliances the most sincere, succeed to misunderstandings or transports which with well-born souls cannot survive the action of time and the lights of experience, when people are agreed on the great conditions of liberty, dignity, probity, and honor, without which all is null of itself. But more than this, La Moriciere, a short time before getting power, gave to what was then called the _conservative reaction_ a pledge the best fitted of all to make us forget the dissensions which had separated him from us. It was he who directed the first steps of the Roman expedition, and imprinted on it from the outset its real character, _that of defending the Pope, and a.s.suring the liberty and the security of the visible head of the Church_.

To him is due the honor of initiating that expedition, of which twelve years later he must write the sorrowful epilogue with the blood of the young martyrs of Castelfidardo. To him and to the a.s.semblies belongs the glorious responsibility of that grand act of French politics, which has been too often thrown at us as a crime, by the Caesarian democracy, hoping to gain the right to give to others an homage not their due.

Even afterwards, when the subst.i.tution of Prince Louis Napoleon for General Cavaignac had removed him from office, when the dismissal of his friends, Odillon-Barrot, Tocqueville, and Dufour, had involved his resignation of his emba.s.sy to Russia, which he had accepted at their request--when, in fine, the conservative party met him often among its most active opponents, before dividing and turning against itself. La Moriciere preserved in the eyes of all a position apart and a marked ascendency. In the present he had no peer, and the future, whatever might happen, seemed to reserve to him a place always eminent, and always preponderant in the destinies of France and of Europe.

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II.

In one day, or, rather, in one night, all this present and all this future crumbled. La Moriciere, at the age of forty-five, falling from the most enviable position a French soldier could occupy, without its being possible to reproach him with the shadow of a crime or even of a fault, saw for ever closed to him all access to either of the two careers in which he had won so much glory, and in which he walked as the peer, or the superior, of all his contemporaries. His military and public life was closed. The most brilliant of our soldiers succ.u.mbed to a military revolution. The statesman and the tribune, so in love with popular sympathies, was swept away by a movement sanctioned by a popularity none could dispute. He was broken when the law was broken with the a.s.sent of the people; he was broken for having remained faithful to an opinion which had for it const.i.tutional right and the inviolability of oaths; broken much less by the unmerciful demands of victory than by the forgetfulness and abandonment of France; broken for not having comprehended that France had wholly changed her gait and her tendencies, and no longer held anything which she had pretended to hold and to love ever since 1814. He must then, in his turn, undergo those prodigies of inconstancy and ingrat.i.tude with which the contemporary public delights to visit princes when they are liberal, and superior men when they are honest.

No cup of bitterness was spared him: I mean bitternesses of the mind and the heart, the most poignant and the most unbearable of all; and I speak not for him alone, but also for his valiant and unfortunate companions in glory and in exile. In the first years of his exile he met, outside of his family and his wife, little sympathy in that Belgium where Catholics especially were almost all under the fascination of the conqueror. At that period of life when we have the full consciousness of our strength and our resources, when the employment of the gifts received from G.o.d is a prime necessity, he saw himself condemned to forego not only the exercise of power and the management of great affairs to which he had become accustomed, but all public life, and, indeed, all active life. In vain he repeated the device of his generous rival and friend Changarnier, _Happiness is gone, but honor remains;_ in vain he spoke and wrote with Count de Maistre after Tilsit, _Europe is Bonaparte's, but my heart is mine;_ he was forced to experience a long while the mortal tediousness of the dead calm after the salutary and quickening excitements of the storm, and to sink into a wearisome idleness, the mother, as Fouquet says to Pignerol, of despair. He had to bear the laceration of impatience, that mortal despite, that sterility of walks and books for a man of his condition, that la.s.situde of a life deprived of all occupation, that fatigue of doing nothing of which the bare thought made Saint-Simon shudder, and held him fast in the ante-chamber of Louis XIV.

But there was for him a more cruel trial still, a thousand times more bitter, of which neither Fouquet nor Saint-Simon had the remotest conception.

France was on the point of making war, a great war; and these valiant guards, these great war-chiefs, are not to be there! From Africa are drawn the battalions they formed, which they commanded, and so often led to victory. These battalions are now to march under other chiefs to new victories. Themselves so long first and alone, on whom the eyes of France and of Europe were so long accustomed to be fixed--themselves all glowing with military ardor, full of vigor and patriotism--having never failed their country, honor, or justice, are now condemned to inaction, to forgetfulness, to nothingness; noted subalterns rise and seize the first rank in the eyes of the world!--who can tell, who can conceive, the anguish, the torture of these men, so ill.u.s.trious, so intrepid, and, be it not forgotten, so innocent, so irreproachable before the country and the army?

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The "Epoque" tells us to-day that a word, a single word, had sufficed to recall them to France, and to commands in the Crimea, the baton of the marshal, and all the augmented splendor and prosperity which victory brings in its train. Nothing is known of it. Always is it a fact that this word, whether it would have been listened to or not, was not spoken, and since it was not, it no doubt ought not to have been spoken.

What, moreover, was that marshal's baton so cruelly stolen from those who had so well earned it? Those grades, decorations, gildings, and salaries, the vulgar food of vulgar souls, were they what attracted, what inflamed, these heroic souls? No, a thousand times no. It was danger; it was devotedness, enthusiasm, action, the service of France, the love of country, the love of the n.o.ble flag which they had borne aloft for twenty years; the glorious brotherhood of arms with so many good soldiers and brave officers, their own offspring, so to speak; the burning desire, a thousand times legitimate, of adding new laurels to those already won; in a word, it was HONOR--and it was precisely honor that condemned them to silence, to inaction, to death--the real death and the only death they had ever dreaded.

Never did Calderon, the great Spanish poet, in those famous dramas of his which always turn on the imperious exigencies, the merciless refinements, the torturing delicacies of honor, imagine a situation more striking, a trial more acute, a narrower pa.s.s, or a yoke more crus.h.i.+ng. The trial was submitted to, the pa.s.s was traversed, the yoke was borne to the end. All we cannot say, and what we do say is nothing by the side of the suffering we have seen, felt, known, and shared.

Perhaps a day will come when these tortures of the soul will be comprehended and rewarded with the admiration which is their due. But who knows? To hope that, it is necessary to believe in the justice of history, and who knows if there will be again any history worthy of the name? We may well doubt it, when we mark what is pa.s.sing around us in an age which for a long time boasts of having regenerated history, and when we see liberals make the panegyric of the 10th of August, Christians applaud the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and writers in high credit with their several parties undertake to rehabilitate the reign of terror, the Inquisition, and the Roman empire.

Nothing was wanting, we have said, to the evil fortune of our friend.

After years of exile in Belgium, his only son fell ill in France. And while were debated with the desolate father the conditions of his return, the son, the only hope of his family, died. When at length he was permitted to return, it was too late; he received not the last sigh of his child. He was inconsolable. "They restore me my country,"

he said; "but who will restore me my child?" It was no longer his country, such as he had known it, that was restored to him--the country, above all, by which he had been so well known, so proudly boasted, and so admired. The real exile is not in being torn from our native country, but in remaining in it and finding no longer that which made it specially dear to us. La Moriciere perceived it only too soon. But he comprehended the difference alike of time and men, and conformed with an intelligent and manly resignation, which held in nothing from his adhesion, and which took nothing from the energy of his convictions or the dignity of his att.i.tude. For the rest, he had brought back with him from the land of his exile neither the illusions of the _emigre_, blind animosities, nor mean or noisy bitterness. And yet he was not at the end of his cross.

There remained to him a last human good, a last plank saved from s.h.i.+pwreck!--his old popularity among {297} his contemporaries, and the companions in that s.h.i.+pwreck, near his old political friends, in the bosom of the party which he had not only served and defended, but, above all, had honored and protected with his glory. That popularity he risked totally in the most abandoned, the most contested, and the most vilipended cause in the world. He risked all, and he lost! A priest whom he had known as a soldier in Africa, under the flag of France, before becoming his relation and his friend, offered him, in the name of Pius IX., an opportunity of braving new perils, with the certainty of being vanquished in the desperate struggle. He ran thither. Forthwith a long and loud howl of insult and derision rose from the bosom of the whole so-called European democracy. He was dragged to the _gemoniae_--both he and the young warriors that followed in his footsteps. A hideous clamor arose from the lowest depths of human baseness, from the Thames to the Arno, and pursued with invectives, railleries, and calumnies the devoted band and their heroic chief. The vapid calumniators of disinterested virtue spoke all at once, and spoke alone; France and Europe justified them. New Italy blushed in her turn to find herself approached by men bold enough to dare to fight and die under the colors of a pontiff and a father. She asked and obtained freedom to crush them. But she essayed to kill them with falsehood before attacking them with the sword, and by falsehoods such as the world had not heard since the imperial trap set at Bayonne in 1808. A Cialdini dares call, in an order of the day to his army, La Moriciere and his companions "_mercenaries_ thirsting for gold and pillage," and King Victor Emmanuel announces to the Emperor of the French that he "is marching his troops into the Marches and Umbria to re-establish order there in relation to the temporal authority of the Pope, and, if it should be necessary, to give battle to the revolution on the Neapolitan territory." [Footnote 46] Eight days after the troops of the king pounced, ten to one, on the little army of La Moriciere. The obscure burgh of Castelfidardo is immortalized by that butchery. Pimodan perished there by a death worthy of his chief, who sought refuge in Ancona, and capitulate when his last gun was dismounted. This French general--and what a general!--gave up his sword to the Piedmontese! His young companions, prisoners like himself, pa.s.sed over Italy in the midst of insults and outrages. La Moriciere, himself released as soon as the work of spoliation was consummated, returned to France, where he met the scoffs and jeers of those who insulted his departure.

[Footnote 46: _Circular of M. Thouvenel_, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 18th October, 1860. The "National Opinion," a worthy "Moniteur" of Piedmont, adds in its number for Sept. 14, 1860: "Victor Emmanuel proposes precisely to protect the Holy Father and his temporal authority against the enthusiasm of the volunteers."]

From that moment all was accomplished or marching toward the end foreseen and determined. The darkest forebodings, the saddest predictions, are verified. Christian France is resigned, and Europe has habituated herself to what five years ago appeared to be the _nec plus ultra_ of impossible iniquity. People have even come to regard confining the spoliation within its present limits as a benefit which, if a.s.sured, would make a _Te Deum_ break forth from the whole Catholic world, asleep or deceived.

La Moriciere had seen and suffered all this, and it was only the last phase of a disgrace which lasted fifteen years without relaxation and without revenge. As his life, rent asunder, drew toward its end, by an insolent freak of fortune, by a contrast and a coincidence the strange mystery of which will astonish the future, Abd-el-Kader arrives in France to be received there as a sovereign!

The conqueror and the conquered, it is said, met in the street: La Moriciere on foot, confounded with the {298} mult.i.tude; Abd-el-Kader with all the pomp of his official train, and the grand cordon of the Legion of Honor on his breast. They exchanged a single look. After which, the prisoner of 1847 is found sufficiently avenged on the prisoner of the 2d of December; pursuing his course with loud din, caressed, feasted, toasted by courtiers, functionaries, and freemasons, presented to the universitarian youth as the type of modern civilization and the religion of large souls, Abd-el-Kader quitted triumphantly the soil of France, to return with his wives, who accompanied him, to his palace in the East; La Moriciere entered his house to die there, and he did die there, all alone, forgotten by the mult.i.tude, unknown by the rising generation, and buried in the silence of the flatterers and satellites of fortune. The death of this great servant of France is announced by the official journal among the "Miscellaneous Facts," after an article on conducting water into Paris! At the decline of day his coffin, in being directed toward a village cemetery, traverses obscurely the streets of that Babylon which he had saved, really saved, from barbarism--those very streets lately ploughed by the pompous _cortege_ of a marshal of France, named grand master of freemasonry by an imperial decree.

Whilst the Cialdinis, the Fantis, and so many authors and fomentors of the _guet-apens_ of Castelfidardo, so many other violators of the law of nations and of their sworn faith, survive and triumph, rolling in opulence and prosperity. La Moriciere, for having been faithful to law, to honor, and to religion, is extinguished and disappears, vanquished, ignored, forgotten.

I have said that I suspect the judgments of history, because history is almost always the servant or the priestess of Success; but its recitals are always instructive, and I consent that it be questioned to ascertain if it furnish many instances of a destiny more tragic.

III.

But after having touched the bottom of the abyss, the soul rises to contemplate and adore the grandeur and glory of adversity. La Moriciere, we know and confess it, triumphant and satisfied, marshal of France, conqueror at Alma or Magenta, hailed by the curiosity of the eager mult.i.tude, fat and heavy by prosperity, had not risen above the throng of successful generals, had attained no other glory than military glory, with which France in all times has been smitten, and in all times been saturated. His image, placed in its rank in the galleries of Versailles, in the midst of so many others, would have awakened in the souls of the visitors only a transient and commonplace emotion; but La Moriciere, betrayed by fortune, disgraced, proscribed, insulted; La Moriciere, conqueror of anarchy and victim of the dictators.h.i.+p; La Moriciere, condemned by his sense of honor to the punishment of an obscure idleness; La Moriciere, beaten at Castelfidardo and a captive at Ancona; La Moriciere, submitting to the wrongs of fate with a modesty and a gravity wholly Christian, then dying all alone, but standing with the crucifix in his hand--is a personage of another stamp, and rises at once from the ranks of the herd to the loftiest height of human admiration. This is a glory apart, which re-youths the soul, which stimulates and purifies it, and which it would not exchange for any other. This is a spectacle such as history too rarely offers, such as we Frenchmen, we Catholics, too docile wors.h.i.+ppers of force and fortune, have special need of. Yes, this glory is enviable, and in reality the most enviable of all glories. In vain nature rebels, reason and faith unite to proclaim it. We are all moved by the recollection of Catinat, old, retired, and resigned in his retreat, and recalling there, as says Saint-Simon, "by his simplicity, his frugality, his contempt of the world, his peace of mind, and the uniformity of {299} his conduct, the memory of those great men who, after triumphs the best merited, returned tranquilly to their plough, always loving their country, and little affected by the ingrat.i.tude of Rome, which they had so well served." But Catinat, really unfortunate; Catinat, a prisoner, exiled, disgraced; Catinat, removed at the flower of his age from the command of armies, had been much greater still, and, as our La Moriciere have recalled St. Louis in chains. The ancients said that the good man struggling with adversity is the most worthy, if not alone worthy, of the favor of G.o.d. Christianity adds, that it is a sight the most necessary and salutary to the heart of man.

La Moriciere was chosen among us to give this high lesson in all its majesty and in all its beauty. He has shown that double character of docility under trial, and of empire over misfortune, which makes great men and great saints. It was because there was in him the stuff of a great Christian.

Trials and exile rapidly developed in his soul the germs of faith which early domestic education had planted, and which pure and n.o.ble examples near him led him to admire and cherish. By his marriage with the granddaughter of the Marchioness of Montagu, he entered a family in which calamities the most atrocious and the most unexpected, borne with superhuman energy, had left in the soul only a sublime serenity, and compa.s.sion greater still for the executioners than for the martyrs. Inflamed by the recitals of a mother-in-law who continued to the last his most devoted and enthusiastic friend, he had the first thought of a publication destined to count among the treasures of our history, and of which he himself dictated the first draft. [Footnote 47] In learning to appreciate the action of Christian virtue on the most touching victims of the Reign of Terror as on the obscure duties of domestic life, he was conducted further and higher still. A study, an active study, ardent and profound, of the doctrines and results of religion, became henceforth his princ.i.p.al occupation, and he continued it with unwearied perseverance to his last moments. Once a Christian in practice as well as in belief, he would be so openly, and no more recoil before human respect and the disdains of infidelity than before the Arabs or the barricades. He was seen at the foot of the Christian pulpit, following the words of the preacher with deep attention, and the lively gesticulation habitual to him, marking on his n.o.bly chiselled features an expressive a.s.sent and sometimes an impatient contradiction, as if he felt that he must in his turn mount the tribune and reply. One day, at Brussels, a former colleague and friend, who had known him quite different from what he was now, found him bending over his maps, tracing the progress of our army in the Crimea. To hold them unrolled he took the books which he now generally, and which were the Catechism, his ma.s.s-book, the Imitation of Jesus Christ, and a volume of Pere Gratry. At sight of these four witnesses of a preoccupation so novel, the visitor could not dissemble his surprise. "Yes, indeed," said the general, "I use these, I occupy myself with that. I do not wish, like you, to remain with my feet dangling in the air, between heaven and earth, between light and darkness. I wish to know whither I go, and by what I am to hold. I make no mystery of it."

[Footnote 47: _"Anne Dominique de Noailles, Marquise de Montagu."_ Rouen, 1859. It May be well to remind the American reader that the Marquise de Montagu, grandmother of General La Moriciere's wife, was a sister of Madame Lafayette, who so heroically shared the prison of Olmntz with her husband, and whoso faith and purity gave a superhuman strength and energy to her n.o.ble character.--THE TRANSLATOR. ]

This public courage against the enemies of the faith availed him from G.o.d the unhoped for and incomparable gift of magnanimous patience, which he needed to enable him to accept and bear his trials, and to offer to G.o.d all the goods of his glorious life, which he had sacrificed. The progress of {300} that great soul, becoming every day more obvious, was manifested especially by his resignation in presence of the heavy cross which was inflicted on him.

"We welcome the cross at a distance," says Fenelon, "but shrink from it when close by." It was not so with La Moriciere. He had seldom welcomed the cross when afar, but when it came home to him, he embraced it, raised it up, and bore it even to the tomb, with a supernatural generosity, serenity, and simplicity. The _crucifying experience_ which, according to Fenelon, is always needed to detach us from ourselves and the world, found in him no revolt, no fainting, no feebleness. He entered this new career and walked in it to the end with the vehement and obstinate resolution of a man of war determined to become a man of G.o.d.

A great genius has said it concerns the honor of the human species that souls born to suffer should know how to suffer well. La Moriciere was not born to suffer; he was born to combat, to command, to conquer, and to dazzle; nevertheless, when life became to him only one long suffering, he learned how to suffer well, to suffer as a Christian, as a soldier of Christ, as the conqueror of evil--to suffer not during fifteen days or fifteen months, but through fifteen years, till death came to relieve him from his post.

All of us who have known and visited him in this second and sorrowful phase of his existence, owe to him great and valuable lessons, which his memory and the stern example of his death must render for ever sacred to us. Doubtless, the acts of the saints, the examples of the heroes of the Christian life, their trials and their triumphs, transmitted by historians or commentators to their spiritual posterity, are much; but they are nothing, or next to nothing, in the real presence, if I may so speak, of a man marked with the seal of election, of a confessor, not merely of the faith, but of virtue, patience, resignation, and Christian abnegation. What history, what preaching, could avail so much as a clasp of that valiant hand, an accent of that vibrating voice, a look of that lion's eye, coming to the support of a truth recognized, a.s.serted, and practised by a soul of that temper?

No; the flame of that beautiful eye, so limpid and so proud, will never be forgotten by any who have once seen it, whether touched with the surprise of generous indignation or softened by sympathy and the desire to persuade; and that flame, always living in our memory, will continue to illumine for us the mysteries of life and suffering.

Besides, no exterior metamorphosis accompanied the deep and salutary change in his interior. Such as he was seen on the field of battle, or in the a.s.semblies of which he was a member, in the most brilliant and the most agitated portion of his career, such he was in the solitude and obscurity of his new life. He was as vehement and as dazzling as ever, with all his fire and all his charm, with his exuberance of life, youth, originality, enthusiasm, which seemed always anxious to overflow on all and on everything around him. Only sourness, wrath, irritation even the most legitimate, seemed swallowed up in one master pa.s.sion, the pa.s.sion for good--seeking and accepting the will of G.o.d, in the love of souls.

Nothing in him was worn-out or enfeebled, but all was pacified, reduced to order, animated with a higher and purer inspiration. The touching forgetfulness of his human glory, humanly buried, rendered him only the more dear and the more sacred to his friends. These friends were still numerous; and friends, relations, old comrades, old colleagues, we were all proud of him, all under his charm as soon as he reappeared, for too brief moments, amongst us. Nothing, indeed, could be more natural, for I cannot too often repeat that he preserved in his private relations all his old fascination, and all his old {301} attractiveness. Essentially French, with all the good and generous instincts of our country; essentially modern, also, in the turn of his mind, his ideas, and his convictions, having nothing stern, morose, or superannuated in his religion, and willing to place at the service of the old law, and the old faith, all the resources of modern civilization, which none better knew or more justly appreciated; in fine, he remained a liberal in spite of so many disappointments, so many defections, and so many mad crimes committed in the name of liberty--a liberal certainly more moderate and more practical than in the days of his youth, but liberal _altogether a soldier_, as affirms to us one of those valiant knights who fought with him at Castelfidardo. He thought with the new generation, and held liberty a thing so beautiful and so good that he was willing to accept it frankly and cordially whatever the hand that offered it.

As the price of his suffering, G.o.d granted him the conversion of his soul. As the price of his conversion, it was given him to fix for a last time the eyes of Europe and of posterity on himself, by a struggle as unequal as generous, in the service of a cause as legitimate as abandoned. All has been said both before and since his death on the epic grandeur and the Christian heroism of the sacrifice he made for the Papacy, so basely betrayed. It was, as repeated over and over again, not the sacrifice of his life, which he had a hundred times exposed with joy on the field of battle, but the sacrifice of his name, his reputation, his military glory, the victories he had won. _Se et ante actos triumphos devovit,_ according to the truly Roman device of the medal offered him by the magistracy of Rome. "He marched," says General Trochu, "with weakness against force, a signal and rare honor which remains attached to his name in the judgment of all honest men of all creeds and of all countries."

Let us endeavor to define clearly what it was, aside from the justice of the sovereign and the sanct.i.ty of the right he went to defend, that marks his devotion with a character of exceptional grandeur and purity, which places him--dare I say it?--almost above Lescure and Larochejaquelein. He was not young, obscure, and inexperienced, as were those heroes so pure; he was not attracted by novelty, the irresistible charm of the unknown, the chances of the struggle, or the fortune of battle; he was vanquished in advance, and he knew it; he marched in cool blood to an inevitable defeat, and a defeat not simply material. To yield to that sublime seduction of a duty which can end only in a catastrophe, he was obliged to break with most of his political friends. He knew perfectly to what he exposed himself; he knew thoroughly the cosmopolitan power and implacable fury of the party which he was sure to stir up against him. He knew that _clerical_ unpopularity is that which is the hardest to efface, and the last that is pardoned. He knew it, and as formerly before the breach of Constantine, he threw himself, head lowered, against it. He had the n.o.ble courage to be unpopular, and so became unpopular even to heroism. Taking the man such as we have known him, with his character, his age, and his antecedents, I fear not to affirm that in no epoch has Christian chivalry ever conceived anything more difficult, more meritorious, more worthy of eternal memory.

Thus in what must be his check, G.o.d granted him here below a glory as rare as refined and imperishable. He counts in the first ranks of those who are the seconds for G.o.d in the great duel between good and evil--men predestined to be sponsors for the good, for honor and justice. [Footnote 48]

[Footnote 48: Mgr. Dupanloup _"Oraison funebre du morts de Castelfidardo."_]