235-7. ting myself be drawn where my other life choos- | sailed again for Smyrna, Constantinople es to lead me, often dragged by my two natures and Odessa, enjoying to the utmost the both ways at once, without strength to gain the lovely scenery of the Greek waters and all mastery over them, and by directing them by its associations, and in health for complete my own will to make them contribute to my delight. They were met at Odessa by moral and physical perfection.' - Vol. i. PP. Alexandrine's mother and her husband, and kept their quarantine in a very agreeable fashion. They were permitted to see and talk to their friends, as long as they did not touch them, and they had a large and comfortable house, and an excellent cook whom Prince Lapoukhyn had put into quarantine with them. In due time they arrived at Korsan, in the midst of the UKraine, one of the splendid palaces of the Russian nobility, full of copies of the most perfect works of art, and with an orangery in the centre of the house. Such a nature as this seems hardly fit for the active battle of life. There was no doubt much that was morbid in it, and depression of spirits was the natural effect of illness; but Albert seems to have had that remarkable power -so inconceivable to the world, which S. Paul mentions among the paradoxes of the Christian life, of being 'sorrowful yet alway rejoic.ng.' One more extract from his Pisa journal we must make to show the sweet tenderness of his nature: Feb. 17. My day began with a sad spectacle. Eight convicts were sweeping in front of our door, chained two and two with heavy fetters, and dressed in red, the sign here of being condemned for a term. Only two were in These yellow, the token of a convict for life. two likewise had in large letters upon their breast" Furto Violente." They are but recently sentenced, I think, judging by their clothes, and were no doubt the same who were lately exposed in the square, and condemned for this crime. A dreadful sight are these men, blotted out of society, with nothing more to expect from it but scorn, fear, or pity. What bitter feelings must fill their souls! O merciful God, just God, cause resignation to bring them calmness and hope in a better life! May the example of JESUS, our Saviour, teach them to accept their bitter cup, and recollect that the Divine Pattern of resignation and suffering was also a pattern of virtue and love. O Lord, my gentle JESUS, when forsaken of men, Thy angels sustained Thee, and shed tears for their Master's grief. Grant even to those unworthy of such a grace, that when men abandon the wretched, the angels from heaven may come and sustain those who are unable to hope, save in Thec, and must fail without Thy aid. Oh, pardon them; let one tear be on their heart ere their death.' Vol. i. p. 232. On the whole, Albert's health had not 'become worse during the winter, and it was decided that the summer should be spent at Korsan, Prince Lapoukbyn's estate in the Ukraine. Sea voyages were thought beneficial, and the journey to Odessa was to be made by water. In March therefore the journey was made to Naples, where the whole family were again together, and where the sisters for the last time saw Albert up and walking about. They embarked for Malta, and thence The visit began there joyfully; but before it had lasted a fortnight, the hæmorrhage began to recur, and in a few days so violent an attack came on that for a short time there was imminent danger. On one of those days of anxiety Alexandrine, opening her New Testament at hap-hazard, fell upon the words: Honour widows that are wid ows indeed.' It was her first realization of what was impending over her. However, Albert regained strength and set out to return, travelling through Austria. In the meantime M. de la Ferronnays had purchased the Château de Boury, in Normandy, and gone to reside there with the rest of the family. This had been a great delight to Albert, who had become weary of his wandering, exiled life, and longed to return to France. At Vienna, however, he was sentenced by his physicians to spend the winter at Venice, a mandate that he accepted with instinctive reluctance. It was at Vienna that he and Alexandrine for the last time went into society, and the last time that she appeared in full dress or was at any public festival. When she arrived at Venice, in October, she was still as it were halting between two opinions: she was still swayed entirely by human affections. She writes to Montalembert on the 23d of October: 'Let me speak to you with the greatest frankness. That of a sister is permissible to me, towards you, for no sister could love you better. I have a sorrow that constantly occupies me. My happiness would be in being of the same religion as Albert; but, besides the doubts that still remain with me, what chiefly withholds me is, that I should break my mother's heartthat mother to whom I owe the very happiness of being married to Albert. I should break her heart physically as well as morally. know she cannot believe that Catholics regard I as possible the salvation of those of a different faith, and she would always think that by changing, I should fix - not only for time but eternity a frightful gulf between myself and my own family. What mother would consent under such an idea? Indeed, I myself, if I were told that my poor father had the worse portion, and that Albert was destined for the better, and that by choosing one I should separate myself from the other for ever, I think that since happiness would be promised to Albert, I should let him enjoy it alone, and that I would go to rejoin my poor father, like the Pagan prince.'- Vol. i. p. 327. Here she tells at length the story of the Frisian chief whom Pauline has already described as a great hero of hers who refused baptism rather than forsake his forefathers when they were consigned to perdition by Christian teachers, not content to leave them to stand or fall to their own Master. Her mind had not yet learnt to contemplate the obligation of seeking God in His highest Truth, and His appointed means of union with Himself, and communication of His grace; as yet it was mere pious sentiment to be derived from prayer, intellectual exercises, or the exaltation of sacred music. She had attended no Protestant worship since she was at Naples she delighted in being present at those in Italian churches, and was ill with grief at the separation when Albert communicated without her. At this point she remained through the early part of the winter, but in the beginning of March, Albert had a terrible attack of inflammation - Fernand was with him, and the others were sent for from Boury. He seemed so near death on the night of the 6th of March, that he asked for a confessor, and then it was that Alexandrine cried in her anguish, Have we come to this have we really come to this! Now I am a Catholic!' At the moment Albert seems to have been too ill, or too much occupied with collecting his thoughts for confession, to notice her words; but he began to rally almost immediately after the priest left him, and a relic of S. François de Sales was brought to him in the course of the day, to which his rapid improvement was so much ascribed by all around him, that Alexandrine became more entirely confirmed in her resolution. Of course the joy her change gave to him was no small assistance in his partial recovery, and she never hesitated for a moment after the words had been spoken, regarding them, as she said, as a moment of inspiration,' and she wrote both to her mother and to Pauline Craven. M. and Mme. de la Ferronnays and Eugénie were daily expected, and Albert, who knew by this time that his state was hopeless, begged her to remain among them, and not make her home with her own mother, saying however, 'You are too young-you will marry again.' He was better by the time his parents arrived, and Eugénie wrote to her elder sister in a spirit of much thankfulness for both the joys that had met them on their arrival, though with no delusive expectations: 'How strange it is,' writes the young girl in this her first experience of trouble, to dare to approach everything, utter everything, and thus look grief in the face so very near. I think of the other life, the certainty that happiness the reason it can be done is the constant thought is nowhere but there, that life in this world is only a journey, of which one longs for the end, where weariness will rest, gloom be enlightened, and this our great need of love and thirst for happiness, will be satisfied.' - Vol. i. p. 375. By the 10th of April, Albert was well enough to be taken by easy stages to Paris, where he arrived on the 13th of May, and was placed under the care of Dr. Hahnemann, the inventor of homœopathy, then an old man of eighty. He was so much struck with Alexandrine that he took her hand and told her that in sixty years of practice he had never seen so loving a wife. But this loving wife had become so awake to the full blessings of the Church, that she could write to Montalembert that she should be happier as a widow, as a Catholic, than even with Albert if she were to continue a Protestant. Looking over this letter in after times, she wrote on the margin: O, how winning is truth, since only one of its rays, lighting on my heart, even before I embraced it, could thus make itself preferable to Albert!' This would, indeed, be a perilous book to one who did not feel that Alexandrine's gladness flowed from her new sense of union with the Church; and that the Church is as truly ours as it became hers when she quitted the religion in which she had been, as it were, a mere unit, instead of a member of a great body connected with one Head. On Trinity Sunday, the 29th of May, 1836, after attending mass in church, she dressed herself in white, with a broad blue ribbon crossed on her breast, and then returned to her husband's room, where the Abbé Martin de Noirlieu, his most confidential friend and spiritual guide, said mass at a temporary altar, and then received the abjuration which was made by Alexandrine on her knees, and which was afterwards attested by her husband, his parents, and his brother and sister. There was no question | tion came, he withdrew it from her, saying of baptizing her conditionally, as the Ro- Go, go; be altogether God's.' man Catholic Church does respect the valid- A kind of trance of spiritual ecstasy ity of Greek baptism. It was striking, that seemed to enwrap Alexandrine in these on that night the Princess Lapoukhyn days. Her journals seem lifted above the dreamt, in Alexandrine's words, that she world. One of her wedding-presents had saw me a little child again, sitting down, been a pearl necklace, which, however her dressed only in my little shift, with my head mother would not let her wear at her marcrowned with a wreath of flowers like darts; riage because of the German saying, Perlen that the costume vexed her; and then that deuten Thränen, and she now sold it, and I wanted to give her these large flowers in gave the price to the poor as a thank-offermy orown, but she refused them -Oh! ing. She wrote these thoughts on it: till when?' There was a strange, deep, holy bliss and repose resting on them all at this time. To some of them it was but the Delectable Mountains; to Albert it was the Land of Beulah a time of almost unbroken peace and joy. 'On the night of the 1st or 2d of June,' his wife writes: I was in Eugénie's room at one o'clock in the morning. I thought Albert was asleep. Suddenly we heard the notes of the piano; it made a painful impression on us. I knew it was Albert, and I think I said it was the last time he would touch those notes. I went to him. He was in a melancholy but very sweet reverie. His faithful nurse, a sister of the order of Bon Secours, was there too.' · Vol. i. p. 401. Her devotions absorbed her greatly, and perhaps the last feeling of self-reproach in Albert's sensitive mind wasfor one moment's complaint that she was less occupied with him than usual. At the sight of her tears he begged her pardon most tenderly, and afterwards said to Eugénie, I have been bad; I have been jealous of God.' Once too he threw his arm round his wife's neck with the irrepressible cry, 'I am dying; and we should have been so happy! but in general his heart was wholly fixed above, and his resignation perfect. He lived to see Mrs. Craven again, and survived till the 29th of June. That night Alexandrine was so physically exhausted with watching and fatigue that she was perfectly bewildered, and fancied herself speaking to Fernand in a window, where no one was standing. Eugénie made her lie down on her bed; and when Albert asked for her she did not know where she was going, and twice passed before his bed without seeing anything. He died at six o'clock in the Still he was on some days so well that it was hoped that he might go to the chapel of L'Enfant Jésus to share with his wife in her first communion; but he was too much reduced to be able to receive, fasting, in the forenoon, and on that account a dispensation was obtained from the Archbishop of Paris for a mass to be celebrated at midnight in his room, on Sunday, the 3d of June, as the only hour when he could receive, fasting. Otherwise, he could not have communicated except as a dying man, and the service must have been unsuitable to so joyful an occasion. The celebrating priest was the Abbé Gerbet, an intimate morning. His father alone spoke, You friend, and one of those most closely con- who have never grieved us- the best of nected with the French revival, the author children-be blessed. Go! Do you hear of Rome Chrétienne,' and other books me still? You are looking at your Alexanmuch valued in the French Church. He drine, you are blessing her.' These were his died in 1859, Bishop of Rossiguan. At the broken words, while the Abbé Martin knelt time Albert was forced to be in his bed. beside the bed, and the nursing sister reHis parents, his sisters Eugénie and Olga, cited the Litany of the Dying. The Abbé and his friend M. de Montalembert, were Martin began the words of the parting absothe other communicants. Alexandrine lution: ere it was ended, Albert was gone. was in white, her bridal veil on her head, and the altar was decked with the richest silks of her scarcely-used trousseau. She knelt by her husband's side, holding his hand, but when the moment for her recep And then follows the question - What would become of these highly-wrought feelings of Alexandrine? A large list might be written of disappointments in widows. Many a woman has been carried by a be loved husband into a higher world; and has lapsed again, when the excitement was over, into a commonplace, worldly frame of mind, and has forgotten her first faith in more senses than one. Alexandrine's own mother had, after scarcely four years, returned to a gay life and married again; and would she herself, only twenty-eight, beautiful, admired, childless, and by nature lively, play ful, and with the keenest enjoyment of all the pleasures of the world, remain faithful to the tone of exalted devotion to which she had been so recently introduced, and remain true to the beautiful portrait that Eugénie copies from S. Francois de Sales as descriptive of her in the early days of her bereavement ? The widow indeed in the Church is like a little March violet, who diffuses a peerless sweetness around her by the fragrance of her devotion, remains almost always hidden beneath the large leaves of her lowliness, and by her subdued colour witnesses to her chastened state.' This is the question answered by the second volume, to us the more interesting of the two, since it not only completely develops Alexandrine, but likewise brings into much fuller relief the two sisters, Eugénie and Olga, and the parents, who hitherto were only a sort of chorus in the life-drama of the loves of Albert and Alexandrine. The young widow was at first almost lifted above grief, but in a few days came a terrible reaction of agonizing sorrow and longing for death, when no one could afford her any comfort but the Abbé Gerbet. At the end of a week she went with the others to Boury, à dull and far from beautiful place in a flat country of field, divided by monotonous poplars. It looked very dreary to the sisters, who had been accustomed to the loveliness of Italy; but it accorded with Alexandrine's state of mind, and she always was much attached to the place. Eugénie above all devoted herself to be her constant companion and comforter, and there was a certain calmness in her life, which she was grieved to break upon by the necessity of going to meet her mother at Kreuznach. Her health was perfect; she speaks once in her private journal of almost detesting her body as a prison whose bars would not give way; but she suffered from a terrible lassi tude. and I have scarcely any of these enjoyments But what matters it? How can I wish for any solace whatever to my wretched, dejected, colourless life, without him?'. Vol. ii. p. 34. In September she returned to Boury, and there the Abbé Gerbet met her. He was, as it seemed, raised up by Heaven itself to and she never ceased to consider his presconsole and heal this sick and rent heart; ' ence at Boury at that time as one of the most thankworthy blessings of her life. On the 23d of September Eugénie wrote to her sister - Not a soul to see, not a visit to make or expect. 'Alex and I are leading quite a monastic life. Now and then we laugh; then we are surprised to hear ourselves, and we tell each other that one laughs all one's life. I think that is because of hope.' - Vol. ii. p. 86. Mrs. Craven paid them a visit in the course of the next month, and if our brief outline has taught our readers to love Alexandrine as the perusal of the book has made us do, they will not grudge reading the following picture, as a companion to her exqu site moonlight of three years before: 'A servant received us at the hall-door, and told us that my father, mother, and Eugénie who did not expect us that day -were gone to dine at Dangu, and that Madame Albert (for so Alexandrina always chose to be called) was He wanted to inalone upstairs in her room. form her; I made the mistake of preventing him, and hastening upstairs I crossed the corri dor, and entered Alexandrine's room without knocking. There was a thick carpet on the floor, and the door opened noiselessly, and I was but a few steps from her without her seeing me. O what a shock the sight of her was! I had left her at Paris, carefully, even elegantly dressed, for (I forgot to say so elsewhere) Albert, even in his last days, had clung to the pleasure of seeing her in the dresses and jewels about to lay aside forever. Now, I found her in the she had worn in their happy days and was soon deep mourning which, as Eugénie had well said, seemed to be deeper on her than on any one else. She was scated on a carved high-backed chair, which Albert had given her, and leaning on a table of the same kind covered with a skyblue cloth. The mouraful widow's cap which she was to wear habitually, was hung on the back of her chair; her head was uncovered, and her brown hair in confusion. A single small lamp on the table lighted the large room, and the bed curtains (thick green damask, also bought at Venice by Albert) still hid me from her. I saw her then, almost as in the portrait I possess. It wasa moment that I shall never forget. I advancel-Alexandrine!' She quickly raised her head, saw me, and sprang to embrace me; but surprise and agitation made fices before God, and she thus acquired a her stumble, and she fell on the floor at full peculiarly calm, sweet, meditative characlength. I was much frightened, for I thought ter, and a sort of angelic gentleness. Once she had fainted, but she was herself again when she had been taken to witness the grand quickly, and her first words were to ask pardon. "Do not think I am always like this," she said. procession of the Fête Dieu, at Naples, she "Oh no; I assure you, you will find me much saw perfectly till the moment it passed, when calmer than you suppose. There are still many the sun, flashing on the gilded banners and things that I enjoy." Indeed, when once re- on the soldiers' weapons, completely blinded covered from the first shock, she sat down by her for the time. After a silence she said, me, and with a sort of tranquillity, we had our to her sister, I saw nothing; but I am not first sad conversation, and in spite of all that vexed, I have been so happy thinking what had happened since we parted, and of all she God will let me see in Paradise to make up had to tell me in spite of our sorrow and our for all I miss here.'- P. 122, note. tears, this first hour of meeting was to both of us more sweet than painful.' - Vol. ii. pp. 36 38. - It was a peaceful life that the family were leading, under the grey sky, Eugénie devoting herself to Alexandrine, and she dwelling for ever on the papers aud journals from whence she compiled the narrative of the first volume, while Olga, now fifteen, was growing up into an important member of the circle. Eugénie was naturally of a blithe, mirthful temper, with extreme ardour in whatever she was doing, whether in the way of devotion or of common life, and her brother's death had infused into her such a deep and fervent spirit of piety, that it seemed as if only a directly religious consecration could satisfy her aspirations. Olga -tall, fair, slender, and graceful - had a graver and more thoughtful disposition by nature; and this was enhanced by the constant inconveniences caused by her defective eyesight. Her eyes had been weak ever since she was eight years old, and in so peculiar a manner that she could not see in a full light. In a shaded room, or out of doors after sunset, she could see as well as other people, but on a bright day she was dazzled, and could perceive nothing distinctly. She was eager in study, and in the cultivation of her talents, but she was often checked in the midst by incapacity of seeing, and reuced to sitting in a twilight room, dreamily touching the keys of her piano. Sometimes, when in a picture gallery, enjoying herself thoroughly, a ray of sunshine upon the most noted of all would entirely hide it from her. Sometimes when a walk was taken to see some charming landscape, at the very moment when all emerged from the shady path, and exclaimed at the glory of the scene, that very glory eclipsed the whole to her. Sometimes at church she would close her book, without showing either grief or impatience, and, as she said, begin to think, because she could not read. These constant privations, whenever they recurred, were quietly laid by her as sacri 'These eyes that, dazzled now and weak, At glancing motes in sunshine blink, Shall see the King's full glory break, Nor from the blissful vision shrink.' Of all the family Mrs. Craven considers her father to have been most affected, and the most beneficially, by his son's death. Faith had never been absent from his mind : he had always been a good, loyal, upright man and with a warmth of heart and attractiveness of manner that made him greatly beloved; but from this time his religious sentiments were quickened, and his piety, humility, and charity became remarkable, and continually grew and increased. Oh,' said his wife to Pauline during this visit, how I envy and admire your father! Since our dear child has been in heaven, he seems to be there himself." Music was the only thing that still seemed to give Alexandrine pleasure, and the Abbé Gerbet ministered to this enjoyment by composing hymns to several of the tunes to which lighter songs had been sung by her and loved by Albert. One composed by the Duke de Rohan, often sung in their days of courtship, beginning 'Ton souvenir est toujours là,' he now changed for one beginning more brightly than the worldly lament 'Oui, l'espérance est toujours là.' To appreciate French poetry is always difficult, but the Abbé Gerbet was a veritable poet soul, and his thoughts are always exquisite. There is a charming morning hymn of his at page 48 of vol. ii., which was sung at the family devotions in the chapel. Eugénie, Olga, Alexandrine, and the brothers when at home, formed a choir; an organ was purchased, and played by Eugénie, and village girls were trained to assist with their voices. The Christmas midnight mass, when Alexandrine and Olga led the Adeste |