Part IV.—The Immolation.

L.

While our travellers are completing the last stage of their journey, we will precede them to St. Petersburg, and transport our readers for a short time among scenes very different from those in which the incidents of our story have hitherto occurred.

The sentence of condemnation has been pronounced, and for some days the names of the five persons who were to suffer death have been known and privately circulated; privately, for the trials which excited universal interest were seldom discussed in society. At that epoch (different in this respect from a subsequent one, when liberty to say anything was allowed in Russia before anywhere else), whether through prudence, servility, or a fear resulting from the reign of the Emperor Paul, rather than the one just ended, every one refrained with common accord from any public expression of opinion whatever respecting the acts of the government. Flattery itself was cautious not to excite discussions that might give rise to criticism. The sovereign authority did not require approval, but only to be obeyed, not judged. This was generally understood, and the consequence was a general silence respecting forbidden topics; whereas, on every other subject, as if by way of indemnification, Russian wit was unrestrained, and so keen that the nation which prides itself on being the most _spirituelle_ in the world found a rival, and only consoled itself by saying Russian wit was borrowed. It is incontestably certain that, though there were still some survivors of the time of Catherine’s reign, the French language was now so universally used in society at St. Petersburg, that people of the highest rank, of both sexes, spoke it to the exclusion of their own tongue, and wrote it with such uncommon perfection as to enrich French literature; whereas they would have been very much embarrassed if required to write the most insignificant note, or even a mere business letter, in the Russian language.

There is no intention of discussing here the causes that led to this engrafting of foreign habits, or of examining whether the Russians at that period, in imitating the French, were always mindful that when others are copied it should be from their best side. Still less would it be suitable to consider whether the people who possess the faculty of assimilation to such a degree are the most noble, the most energetic, and the most sincere. This would lead us far beyond our modest limits, to which we return by observing that, in spite of a splendor and magnificence almost beyond conception, in spite of a tone of good taste and a courtesy now almost extinct in France, in spite of hospitality on a grand scale, characteristic of Slavonic countries, an indefinable restraint, felt by all, prevailed in this attractive and brilliant circle, insinuating itself everywhere like an invisible spectre, modifying and directing the current of conversation—even the most trifling—and affecting not only the intercourse of fashionable life, but the freedom of friendly converse and the very outpourings of affectionate confidence.

The Marquis Adelardi had had several opportunities of mingling in this society, and found it congenial. It was a society in which he was specially adapted to shine, for he, too, as we are aware, had passed his life in a school of enforced silence; and, if he was formerly numbered among those who revolt under such restrictions, he had now renounced all efforts to break through them, and learned to turn his attention elsewhere. He understood, better than any other foreigner at St. Petersburg, how to navigate amid the shoals of conversation; to be entertaining, agreeable, interesting, and even apparently bold without ever causing embarrassment by an inadvertent remark; and if, in the ardor of discourse, he approached a dangerous limit, the promptness with which he read an unexpressed thought sufficed to make him change, with easy nonchalance, the direction of a conversation in which he seemed to be the most interested.

He was not, however, disposed to talk with any one the day, or rather the evening, we meet him again—this time at the Countess de G——’s, a woman of superior intellect, already advanced in years, whose salon was one of the most brilliant and most justly popular in St. Petersburg. Everything, indeed, was calculated to facilitate social intercourse of every degree, and, if there was a place where the bounds we have just referred to were invisible, though never forgotten, it was here. What could not be said aloud here, more than elsewhere, had a thousand facilities for private utterance. On the other hand, for the benefit of prudent people who preferred to say nothing at all, there were tables where they could play whist or a game of chess. A piano at one end of the spacious salon was always open to attract amateur performers, then more numerous than now, when no one ventures, even in the family circle, to play without unusual ability.

In this friendly atmosphere, our marquis, generally so social, was silent and preoccupied. Seated in a corner on a sofa where no one else was sitting, he took no part in the general conversation. And yet, as the room filled, and various groups were formed, here and there foreigners, and especially the members of the diplomatic corps who frequented the house, broached the great topic, and by degrees were heard on various sides the names of Mouravieff, Ryleieff, Pestel, and two others likewise condemned to death, as well as the names of those who were to be exiled—a punishment almost as terrible.

A young German attaché, perceiving Adelardi, approached, and took a seat beside him. “And Walden,” said he in a low voice, “have you not had permission to see him twice?”

“Yes.”

“Have you seen him since he was informed of his fate?”

“No; but I have reason to hope I shall obtain that favor.”

“He is not sorry, I imagine, to escape the gibbet.”

“Not the gibbet; but as to death, I am sure he thinks it preferable to the fate that awaits him.”

“Poor fellow! but then, _qu’allait‐il faire_?”—

“_Dans cette galère?_” interrupted the marquis with displeasure. “The question is certainly apropos, and I would ask him if I could obtain a reply that would avail him anything.”

“By the way,” said the other, “I suppose you know who has just arrived at St. Petersburg?”

The marquis questioned him with a look of uncertainty, for he was expecting more than one arrival that day.

“Why, the fair Vera, who has returned to her post.”

“Really!” exclaimed Adelardi eagerly. “In that case perhaps we shall see her here, for I am told she comes every evening when in the city.”

“Yes, but not till the empress dispenses with her services. It is nearly ten o’clock. She will probably be here soon. Our agreeable hostess is one of her relatives.”

“I was not aware of it. I know the Countess Vera but little. She was not at court when I was here three years ago. I only saw her two or three times at the Princess Lamianoff’s, who was then here, but was not presented to her.”

“At the Princess Catherine’s? I believe you. It is said she wished Vera to marry her son, who was indeed very assiduous in his attentions. The young countess did not appear wholly insensible to them at that time. Do you suppose she is still attached to him?”

“I do not know.”

“Poor girl! I pity her, in that case, but it is not very probable she will long be infatuated about a convict. Besides, she will find others to console her, if she makes the effort.”

At that moment the piano was heard. The young diplomatist was requested to take a part in a trio, and the music put an end to the conversation that was becoming too ardent on every side, through the interest caused, not by the offence, but by the misfortunes of the criminals. Every one knew them, and several of them belonged to the same coterie which now scarcely dared utter their names aloud.

Adelardi remained in the same place, his head resting on his hand, more absorbed than ever. He pretended to be listening to the music, and was mechanically beating time. But he was thinking of something very different, and only started from his reverie whenever the bell announced a new arrival. Then he eagerly raised his head and looked towards the door, but only to resume his former position at the entrance of each new visitor—as if not the one whom he desired to see.

LI.

At the beginning of the same evening a different scene was occurring, not far distant, in a salon still more elegant and magnificent than the one we have just visited. It was not, however, intended, like that, for the reception of visitors, but solely for the pleasure and comfort of her who occupied it—a lady, as was evident, though there was no profusion of useless trifles or superfluous ornaments. But it seemed as if her hands could only touch what was rare and costly. Gold, silver, and precious stones gleamed from every object destined to her constant use, from the open _cassette_ that contained her work to the sumptuous bindings of the books scattered over the embroidered covering of the table, or lying on a small _étagère_ of malachite near a large arm‐chair. This chair, intended for reading, was also adapted to repose by the soft cushion covered with the finest lace for the head of the reader to rest upon in an attitude at once convenient and graceful. On all sides were flowers of every season in as great abundance as if they grew in the open air at the usual time. They gave out an exquisite odor, which, with perfumes more artificial but not less sweet, embalmed the apartment.

If, as some think, and we have already remarked, places resemble those who inhabit them, the reader may be eager to know the owner of this. We will endeavor to describe her as she appeared to those who knew her at the time of our story: a woman of that age when beauty is in all its freshness; who was truly said to have the dignity of a goddess and the form of a nymph; a face sweet and pale, but with noble, delicate features; a complexion of charming purity; a look and smile that were captivating; and the whole picture was framed by hair floating in long curls over graceful white shoulders.

Such was the person who, at the sound of a manly and sonorous voice, entered the salon just described, and threw herself into the arms of him who had called her by name. Their first words were expressive of joy at seeing each other again after a long separation of some hours, and for a time they seemed only to think of each other. Their glances, their smiles met, and it might have been supposed they had nothing in the world to do but love each other and tell each other so.

But the tone of conversation gradually changed. She grew earnest and he became uneasy. He made an effort to reply to the questions she addressed him and sometimes persistently repeated, but he appeared to do so unwillingly, as if he yielded out of condescension, and with difficulty resisted a desire of imposing silence on her. Once he rose and left her, but she followed him, softly placed her arm within his, and, drawing herself up to her utmost height (for, though she was quite tall, he was a whole head taller) whispered in his ear. He bent down to listen, but while she was talking a frightful change suddenly came over his face. She perceived it, and looked at him with surprise and an anxiety she had never felt before, as he leaned against the mantel‐piece and remained there grave and silent with folded arms.

He was then twenty‐nine years old, and in the brilliancy of that manly beauty which suffering, care, the violent passions of a later age, and time itself, scarcely altered. Besides his lofty, noble stature, and features so regular that no sculptor could idealize them, there was a charm in the expression of his face and the tone of his voice which inspired attachment as well as admiration. Hitherto resentment or anger had seldom been known to flash from his eyes or cause his voice to tremble, and perhaps this was the first time she had ever seen his blue eyes light up with so threatening a gleam. She did not dare persist in her request, but waited for him to break the silence. By degrees his ominous aspect gave place to profound and bitter melancholy. “Ah!” said he at length, “this is a sad beginning!” Then after a short silence, he looked around as he continued: “Cherished home! we shall perhaps often regret the happy days passed here!”—

“We will not leave it,” replied she with a quickness that betrayed how unused she was to contradiction. “We will keep it as it is, and always come back to it. Our _grand_ days shall be passed, if need be, in the gloomy Winter Palace, but our _happiest_ days shall be spent here, and they shall be in the future what they have been in the past.”

He shook his head: “The past was ours: the future does not belong to us. We must henceforth devote ourselves to our great country, and sacrifice all—all! God requires it of us.”

“All!” repeated she with alarm. “What! even happiness and mutual confidence? Oh! no, that portion of the past nothing shall infringe upon! And there is still another right I shall never renounce—that of imploring favor and pardon for the guilty.” She hesitated, and then went on, clasping her hands and fixing her eyes on him with a supplicating expression: “Will you no longer listen to me?”

“Always in favor of the unfortunate, but never for the ungrateful!”

He frowned as he said these words, and turned towards the door, but she stopped him.

She felt it would not do to persist, and with the _adresse_ which is the lawful diplomacy of love, she at once changed the subject, and obliged him to listen while she discussed projects she knew he had at heart. She spoke of herself, of him, of the happy past, their brilliant future, of a thousand things, and indeed of everything except her whispered petition which she now wished him to forget.

The reader has already discovered himself to be in the presence of the young emperor and empress, whose unexpected accession took place in the midst of a storm. They were in the habit of meeting thus in the palace where they lived during the happy days of their early married life, when no thought of the throne disturbed their youthful love!(188) Both hesitated a long time about leaving this charming palace for the sovereign residence, and, when constrained to do so by the necessity of their position, they kept it as it was, without allowing anything to be changed, as a witness of the days that, in spite of the imperial purple, they continued to call the happiest of their life.

After the empress was left alone, she remained thoughtful a moment, then, approaching the malachite _étagère_, hastily rang a small gold bell. A door concealed beneath the hangings instantly opened, and a young girl appeared. She stopped without speaking, awaiting an order or some observation. But there was nothing in her attitude to indicate the timidity that might have been expected in a maid of honor answering the bell of her sovereign. On the contrary, there was a majestic beauty and an air about her which might have seemed haughty had it not been modified when she spoke. Then, there was a caressing glance in her eyes, though they sometimes sparkled as if betraying more passion than tenderness; but her fine form, her black eyes, her thick fair hair, and the delicacy of her complexion, rendered her at once striking and imposing. She waited some moments in silence—then, seeing her mistress did not address her, she advanced and spoke first: “Did your majesty venture to plead his cause?” said she.

The empress started from her reverie and sadly shook her head. “My poor Vera,” she replied, “you must renounce all hope.”

The young girl turned pale. “Renounce all hope!” exclaimed she. “O madame! can that be your advice? Can it be there is no hope?”

The empress, without replying, seated herself in her arm‐chair, took a book from the _étagère_, and began turning over the leaves as if she wished to put an end to the conversation. Vera’s eyes flashed for an instant, and it was with difficulty she repressed an explosion of grief or irritation. She remained silent, however, and stood beside the table absently plucking the petals from the flowers in a crystal vase before her.

The empress meanwhile kept her eyes fastened on her book, but presently she raised them and looked at the clock. “I do not need you any longer, Vera. It is ten o’clock. You are going to the Countess G——’s this evening, I think.”

“Yes, madame, if your majesty has no further orders to give me.”

“No, I have nothing more.—Ah! I forgot. Open that drawer,” pointing to the other end of the apartment. “You will find a letter there.”

Vera obeyed, and brought the letter to her mistress.

“Be sure to forward it to the address,” said the latter. “It is the permission for the Princess —— to accompany her husband to Siberia. I am happy to be able to render that heroic woman this sad service. But she is not the only one.”

“What a fate those women are bringing on themselves!” said Vera, shuddering with horror.

“Yes, it is indeed fearful,” said the empress; “but I admire them, and will serve them every way in my power.”

Vera was silent, and after a moment, seeing the empress had nothing more to say, she gravely approached to take leave of her. As she bent down to kiss her hand, the empress pressed her lips to her forehead.

“Come, Vera,” said she, “look a little more cheerful, I beg you. To satisfy you, I promise to make one more effort. But I think, my dear, you are very generous to express so much anxiety about him, for it is not the emperor alone who has reason to call him ungrateful!”

At this, Vera’s face crimsoned, and she drew herself up at once. “Your majesty has a right to say anything to me,” said she in a trembling voice, “but this right has generally been used with kindness.”

“Whereas you now find me cruel. Well, be it so; we will let the subject drop. Good‐night, and without any ill‐feeling, my dear.”

She dismissed her maid of honor with a motion of the head. Vera bowed, and without another word left the room.

LII.

“The Countess Vera de Liningen!”

At this name the Marquis Adelardi looked up, but this time he did not resume his former attitude, for the person he had so impatiently awaited at last appeared. It was she! The cause of this impatience, if we would know it, was a resolution to make an effort that evening in behalf of his friend through the Countess Vera, but it was first indispensable to be sure of her feelings towards him. He wondered if he should discover any traces of the ill‐concealed passion she once manifested for George, or if time and indignation, aided by the influence of the court, had done their work? Or had his inconstancy inspired an indifference which had not been disarmed by his misfortunes? All this Adelardi flattered himself he should discover in a single conversation, provided she consented to an interview. As to any fear of her eluding his penetration, he had too good an opinion of himself in that respect.

As soon as she appeared, he looked at her with lively interest, and an attention which he indulged in without scruple. Having seen her only twice some years before, without speaking to her, he thought she would not recognize him till he was formally presented.

Vera crossed the salon without embarrassment, and with the ease and grace of a person accustomed to high life and the sensation she produced. She was dressed in black, the court, and even the citizens, still wearing mourning for the Emperor Alexander. This made the dazzling whiteness of her complexion and her golden hair the more striking, and suited her form of perfect symmetry, though noble rather than slender. The only ornament she wore was a knot of blue ribbon on her left shoulder, to which was attached the _chiffre_ of diamonds (her badge as maid of honor), in which were woven together the initials of the three empresses: Alexandrine, then reigning; Mary, the empress‐mother; and Elizabeth, Alexander’s inconsolable widow, who was so soon to follow him to the tomb.

Recent emotion still flushed the young girl’s cheeks, and the tears of wounded pride, hastily wiped away, gave her a mingled expression of melancholy and haughtiness which at once inspired a desire to pity and a fear of offending her.

She first approached the table where the lady of the house was playing whist. The latter raised her eyes, and merely smiled as she gave her a friendly nod of the head. Vera, without offering her hand, bowed, and made a salutation at once graceful and respectful, which was customary in that country when one lady is much younger than the other; she pressed her lips to the edge of the black lace shawl which the elderly lady wore; then she remained standing a moment near the card‐table, looking around the room. There was in this look neither eagerness, nor curiosity, nor coquetry: it was a mere survey of the room and its occupants, and it was easy to see she was seeking no one and expecting no one. She only replied to the salutations addressed her by a slight inclination of the head, sometimes by a smile.

Presently, seeing a vacant seat, she went to take possession of it, and thus found herself near the _canapé_ occupied by the Marquis Adelardi. She was scarcely seated when the young diplomatist who had so recently spoken of her approached with lively eagerness, to which she only responded by a look of indifference and giving him two fingers of her gloved hand.

The Marquis Adelardi took advantage of this favorable opportunity to approach the young German and beg to be presented to the Countess Vera. Adelardi’s name was no sooner pronounced than it awoke a remembrance, at first vague, then distinct enough to make her blush. This lively embarrassment was quite evident for a moment. She bowed without speaking as he was presented, and, turning her face immediately away, continued for some moments to converse with the other, but only long enough to recover from her confusion. She speedily put an end to this trifling conversation, and, suddenly turning towards Adelardi, she said, without any trace of her recent embarrassment: “I remember very well, Monsieur le Marquis, your visit at St. Petersburg three years ago, but I was so young then you had probably forgotten me.”

Adelardi replied, as he would have done in any case, but in this instance with truth, that such a supposition was inadmissible.

“And as for me,” he continued, “never having had the honor of a personal acquaintance, I necessarily thought myself wholly unknown to you.”

“Your friends have so often spoken of you that your name was familiar, but your features, I acknowledge, were somewhat effaced from my memory.”

“Yours naturally clung to mine. Besides, I also heard you constantly spoken of.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Have you seen the Princess Catherine lately?” said she.

“No, I left Florence at the beginning of December.”

“For St. Petersburg?”

“Yes.”

“And have you been here ever since?”

“Yes. You were absent at my arrival, otherwise I should not have waited till the present time to solicit the favor I have just obtained.”

There was another momentary pause. The young girl looked around, and continued, in a lower tone: “You were here, then, the twenty‐fourth of December?”

“I was.”

She hesitated an instant, then, lowering her voice still more, said: “And have you seen your friend since that fatal day?”

“Yes, and I hope to see him once more—alas! for the last time.”

Vera bit her lips, quivering with agitation, but soon resumed, with a coolness that surprised and, for a moment, disconcerted the marquis:

“I formerly knew Count George de Walden, but for some time had lost sight of him. Nevertheless, his sentence fills me with horror, and I would do anything in the world to deliver him from it—him and the rest.”

“Him and the rest? One as soon as the other?”

“One as soon as the other; they all excite my pity. I wish the emperor would pardon them all.” Her voice by no means accorded with her words; but Adelardi continued as if he did not perceive it:

“Pardon them all! That would be chimerical. But there are some who are deserving of clemency.”

“The emperor is more lenient towards inferior criminals than to those who, after being loaded with favors, forget his kindness.”

“And yet there may be extenuating circumstances even in some cases of that number.”

“Do you know of any that would be of any avail to Count George?” said she eagerly.

“Not quite so loud; we may be overheard.”

“Yes; you are right,” she said, resuming her former tone. “Let us change our seats; we look as if we were plotting something here, and should avoid attracting attention. Let us examine the albums on yonder table. There we can continue our conversation with less restraint.”

“Well,” continued she, as soon as they had effected the change proposed, and were seated before the albums, which they pretended to be examining carefully.

“Well,” replied Adelardi, “what I mean is that many things of no avail in the eye of the law might not be without influence over him who is head of the law.”

And while she was listening with interest, unintentionally betrayed by her eager, agitated expression, her glowing cheeks, and parted lips, Adelardi pleaded his friend’s cause, relating what we have already learned respecting his apparent, rather than real, complicity, his ignorance of the actual designs of the conspirators, and the circumstances that led to his presence among the insurgents on the twenty‐fourth of December. In short, he gave her all the details of which she had been totally ignorant, having only heard, during her absence, of George’s offence and the sentence he had incurred.

“And the emperor,” said she eagerly, “does he know it was he who saved his brother’s life that dreadful day?”

“I doubt it; there were only two witnesses who could attest it. One of these did not come forward, for fear of compromising himself; the other was exceptionable.”

“Who was the other?”

“A man named Fabiano Dini, George’s secretary; but a great culprit, not considered worthy of credit. He told the truth, however, ardently hoping his testimony might save his master.”

“He is doubtless condemned to the same fate?”

“Yes, but to a more severe one; his sentence is for life, whereas George’s is only for twenty‐five years.”

“Only twenty‐five years!” repeated she, with a shudder.

“Yes, it is horrible; it is worse than death! And George will envy the wretch who was the prime cause of his misfortune, for Dini, seriously wounded on the twenty‐fourth of December, will probably die before the sad day fixed for their departure.”

They were now interrupted by something not foreign to the subject of their discourse. A lady, unpretendingly clad, who till now had remained aloof, approached the young maid of honor, and, with a faltering, respectful tone, asked if the petition addressed his imperial majesty had been granted.

“Yes,” said Vera eagerly. “Permission has been accorded. The Princess —— received it this very hour. I left it myself at her door, on my way here.”

She kindly extended her hand to the person who addressed her. The latter bent down as if to kiss it, but Vera prevented it by cordially embracing her.

“Behold a true, faithful friend in misfortune,” said she, as the other left them. “She herself is capable of going to Siberia with her whose _dame de compagnie_ she was in happier days. But then, the Princess —— has in her misfortunes the happiness of feeling herself beloved and respected by all.”

“Assuredly,” said Adelardi. “She is really an admirable woman.”

“So admirable that she is beyond my comprehension.”

“How so?”

“I do not understand how a person can resolve on the course she wishes to pursue—she and the others.”

“What!” said Adelardi, looking at her with surprise. “You do not understand how a woman can thus wholly devote herself to the man—the husband whom she loves.”

Vera shook her head. “No,” said she. “I do not wish to appear better than I am. If I were in such a position, if I had the misfortune of loving one of those convicts, he might rely on my exertions to obtain his pardon, and to use every means in my power to that end. But, as to sharing his lot and following him to Siberia, no, my dear marquis, I frankly acknowledge that is a proof of devoted affection I feel wholly incapable of.”

Another form at this moment passed before the marquis’ mental vision, beside which the beauty actually before him paled, and slightly modified the lively admiration with which he regarded her.

“Well,” said he, after a moment’s reflection, “I know one of these convicts for whom a woman—a young lady of about your age—is ready to give a still greater proof of devotion than the Princess ——, for she is not his wife. She is only—his betrothed, and wishes to marry him on purpose to share his fate.”

“That is something entirely original,” said Vera.

“To do that,” pursued Adelardi, “she has a double favor to obtain, and is coming to St. Petersburg for that purpose. She will be here to‐morrow, or, at the latest, in a few days. I have been commissioned to solicit for her an audience of the empress. Can I do so through your instrumentality?”

“Certainly. All these requests pass through my hands, and none have been rejected. But this is really the most singular case that has occurred.” She drew her tablets and a pencil from her pocket. “The name of your _protégée_?” said she.

Adelardi hesitated an instant, then, noting a little anxiously the effect produced, said:

“Her name is—Fleurange d’Yves.” He was relieved to hear the maid of honor say, after carefully writing down the name:

“Fleurange! that is a very singular name, and one I never heard before. To‐morrow,” continued she, rising, and returning the tablets to her pocket, “before noon you shall have a reply. _Au revoir_, Monsieur le Marquis.”

As she gave him her hand, she added in a low tone: “I thank you for all your information, and will endeavor to avail myself of it. If you see Count George, tell him—but no, tell him nothing. If by the merest chance I succeed, it will be time enough then to tell him what he owes to my efforts. If I do not—it will be better for him to remain ignorant of my failure.”

The Marquis Adelardi returned home greatly preoccupied, and absently took up two letters lying on the table. But after opening them, he successively read them with equal interest. First, he looked at one of the signatures: “Clement Dornthal? He is the cousin who accompanies the fair traveller. They have arrived, then.—Well, the end of the drama is approaching: we must all endeavor to play our parts with prudence. Mine is not the easiest!”

He opened the other note, and hastily ran over it. “Thursday! I shall see him on Thursday at two o’clock. Poor George! it will be a sad meeting, in spite of the news I have to surprise and console him.”

He had the satisfaction of learning by this note that, thanks to the powerful influence brought to bear on the occasion, he would be permitted to pass an hour with the prisoner every day during the week that yet remained before the sad train of exiles would set forth.

“Poor George!” he again repeated. “Can it be he has really come to this?—But who knows what may yet take place? If the proverb, ‘What woman wills, God wills,’ is true, all hope is not lost, for here are two women evidently with the will to aid him, and energetic enough to overrule the most adverse destiny. Two—doubtless one too many, and I have been rather bold to risk a fearful collision. But things have come to such a point that they can hardly be worse. If the fair Vera succeeds, it is George’s affair to get out of the complication of gratitude to her who has saved him, and the one ready to follow him. But if she fails, as seems only too probable, then the case will be very simple: our charming heroine will have no rival to fear.”

LIV.

After the succession of disagreeable surprises Mademoiselle Josephine had experienced during her painful journey, another of a different nature, but the greatest of all, awaited her at the end. Her imagination, we are aware, never furnished her with anything beyond the strictest necessity. It was only with difficulty she succeeded in comprehending that her dear Gabrielle had decided to marry a stranger condemned to the galleys, and this inconceivable idea seemed to have penetrated her mind to the exclusion of all others. She was going to join a prisoner, and from the day of her departure from Heidelberg she looked upon herself as on the way to a dungeon. When therefore she heard the words, “We have arrived!” and their sledge passed under the arch of an immense _porte cochêre_, she shivered with fear. It was, consequently, with a sort of stupefaction she found herself in a brilliantly lighted vestibule, whence a broad staircase led to a fine long gallery opening into one salon after another, at the end of which our travellers were ushered into a dining‐room, where supper was awaiting them of a quality to which mademoiselle was quite as unaccustomed as to the splendor with which it was served. She looked around with mute surprise, hardly daring touch the dishes before her, and looking at her two companions with an interrogative expression of the greatest perplexity. But they both seemed affected and preoccupied to such a degree as not to notice what was passing around them, and mademoiselle, faithful to her habits, forbore questioning them for the moment.

The repast was made in silence; after which Clement wrote a note which she heard him ask a valet to send to _M. le Marquis_. Then the two ladies were conducted to the apartments prepared for them. Fleurange embraced her companion and wished her good‐night, and Mademoiselle Josephine was left alone in a chamber surpassing any she had ever seen, with large mirrors around her, in which for the first time in her life she saw herself from head to foot. There was also a bed _à baldaquin_, which she scarcely dared think destined for her modest person, but in which at length she extended herself with a respect that for a long time troubled her repose. Never had the excellent Josephine found herself so completely out of her element. She wondered if it was really herself beneath those curtains of silk, and, when at last she fell asleep, it was to dream that Gabrielle, splendidly apparelled, was mounting a throne, and she, Mademoiselle Josephine, arrayed in a similar manner, was at her side. Her disturbed slumbers were not of long duration. Before day she was up, and impatiently waiting for the hour when she could leave her fine chamber and sally forth to explore this strange dwelling which the night before seemed so much like a fairy palace.

This impression was not lessened by the light of day. The rooms were really splendid, and furnished with the taste the Princess Catherine everywhere displayed, and which was as carefully consulted in the house where she only spent three months of the year, as in her palace at Florence, which she made her home. Mademoiselle went from one room to another in a state of continually increasing admiration, and, while thus walking about, she found everywhere the same mild temperature, which seemed something marvellous, for all the doors were open, and not only were there no fires to be seen, but no glass or even sashes in the windows. Apparently there was nothing to screen her from the frosty air without—freezing indeed, for on their arrival at St. Petersburg the thermometer was down to fifteen or sixteen degrees, and yet—what was the secret of this wonderful fact? She was not cold in the least, though the sight of the large windows made her shiver, and she only ventured to stand at a distance and look at the view without.

She beheld a vast plain covered with snow, with carriage‐ways in every direction, bordered with branches of fir. Vehicles of all kinds were crossing to and fro. Yonder was a succession of vast buildings, and farther off were the gloomy walls of a fortress flanked by a church whose gilded spire glittered in the winter sun—a sun radiant, but without warmth; which imparted a dazzling brilliancy to the snow, but whose deceptive light, far from alleviating the severity of the season, was, on the contrary, the surest sign of its merciless rigor.

While thus admiring and wondering at everything, Mademoiselle came to the last salon of the _enfilade_, where, before one of the large windows, she perceived Fleurange motionless and absorbed in such profound reverie that she did not notice her approach.

“Ah! Gabrielle, here you are! God be praised! I was lost, but no longer feel so, now I have found you. But, for pity’s sake! what are you doing at that open window?”

At this, Fleurange turned around with a smile. “Open! my dear mademoiselle? We should not be alive long, clad as we are.”

“I really do not understand why I do not feel the cold, and yet—”

Fleurange motioned for her to approach (for the old lady still kept at a respectful distance from the dangerous openings), and made her touch the thick glass, one pane of which composed the window—a luxury at that time peculiar to St. Petersburg, and which often deceived eyes more experienced than those of the simple Josephine. Reassured, but more and more amazed, she remained beside Fleurange at the window, profiting by the occasion to ask all the questions hitherto repressed. Everything was gradually explained to her, and she comprehended that this magnificent house belonged to Count George’s mother.

“And he?” she ventured to say when Fleurange had answered all the questions,—“he, Gabrielle, where is he?”

“He!” repeated Fleurange, as a flush rose to her cheeks and her eyes filled with tears—“he is there: there, mademoiselle, within the walls of the fortress before us!”

Poor Josephine started with surprise. “Pardon me!” said she. “If I had known that, I should not have mentioned him.”

“Why, mademoiselle?—The sight of those walls does not make me afraid! On the contrary, I long to enter them. I long to leave all this splendor which separates me from him as it did before! O my dear friend! you must not pity me the day I am united to him!”

The language of passion always had a strange effect on this elderly maiden, but she only allowed herself to reply meekly:

“Well, my dear child, we will not pity you! It is Clement and I who will need pity when that day comes, and you must not be vexed if—” And in spite of herself, great tears filled her eyes, which she promptly wiped away.

She remained silent for some moments, then spoke of something else, feeling if she resumed the subject it would speedily lead to an explosion of grief which she resolved to restrain that she might not afflict her young friend.

“What wide plain is that between the quay and the fortress?” she soon continued.

“That is the Neva,” replied Fleurange, smiling.

“The Neva?”

“Yes, the river that runs through the city.”

“The river?” repeated Mademoiselle Josephine. “Come, Gabrielle, I know I am very ignorant of everything relating to foreign countries, but still, not to such a degree as to believe that. A river!—when I see with my own eyes hundreds of carriages on it, sledges and chariots of all kinds, going in every direction, and houses and sheds!—And what are those two great mountains I see yonder?”

“They are ice‐hills, such as they have in Russia, mademoiselle, and which were imitated in wood three years ago at Paris. Do you remember? I am told these are only erected temporarily during the carnival.”

“Very well; but what you have said does not prove that to be the river, and that you are right.”

“It seems incredible, I know, but everything we see there now will disappear in the spring, leaving only a broad stream between that fine granite quay and the fortress. But I confess I can scarcely realize it myself, never having seen it.”

Clement now appeared. He looked pale and disposed to be silent, and gave every indication of having passed a no less restless night than Mademoiselle Josephine, though for a different reason. After exchanging some words with his companions, his eyes glanced over the broad river, and, like those of Fleurange, fastened on the gloomy walls of the fortress. It was a strange chance that led them all there precisely opposite. Clement gazed at the place with despair, jealousy, and horror, but still was unable to turn his eyes away.

“There, then, is the end,” thought he; “for her, the end desired: for me, the grave of my youth! Yes, when she once enters those walls, all will be at an end for me, were I to live beyond the usual period. My life will be ended at twenty years of age!”—

These reflections and others of the same nature were not calculated to make Clement very agreeable that morning. He was not only serious, which often happened, but, contrary to his habit, he was gloomy and taciturn. Their breakfast was despatched in silence, after which it was only by a great effort he gradually succeeded in regaining his usual manner.

“Cousin Gabrielle,” said he then, “I appear morose this morning, I am aware, and I beg your pardon. But I am only sad, I assure you—sad in view of what is approaching. This is pardonable, I hope,” continued he, taking Mademoiselle Josephine’s hand; “you will not require us, will you, to leave you without regret?”

“That is what I said to her a moment ago,” said poor Josephine, wiping away her tears. “She says she is happy; that she longs to be there,” casting a glance across the river. “We only desire her happiness, I am sure; but then for us—”

“Yes,” said Clement, with a sad smile of bitterness, “for us the few days to come will not be very happy, and we really have reason to be sad. As for me, Gabrielle, I also regret those just ended; for in this new sphere my _rôle_ is at an end. I am now to be for ever deprived of the pleasure of being useful to you in any way.”

He was still speaking when the Marquis Adelardi was announced; and he hastily rose.

“Stay, Clement,” said Fleurange eagerly—“stay. I wish this excellent friend to become acquainted with you.”

“I also wish to make his acquaintance, but not now. Tell him that to‐ morrow, yes, to‐morrow morning—or even this evening, if he will receive me, I will call at his residence. Do not detain me now.”

And before the marquis appeared he was gone. He felt he should be _de trop_ at this interview of such deep import to Fleurange, for such it was. To see George’s friend once more, his confidential friend—him who at this solemn period had become the intermediary authorized by his mother!—There was great reason to be agitated at such a thought. Besides, Adelardi had always inspired her with sympathy and confidence, and in this new sphere she realized how beneficial his experience would be, for Clement was right in saying he could no longer be of any use. He was as ignorant as she of the habits and usages of the court. And yet, to obey the Princess Catherine’s instructions, her first object must be to obtain an audience of the empress—a formidable prospect, which frightened her a thousand times more than all that afterwards awaited her. She therefore received the marquis with such childlike confidence as to redouble the regard he had always felt for her. There was the same beauty, the same simplicity about her, and, above all, the charm most attractive to eyes as _blasés_ as his—of resembling no one else in the world! The extraordinary courage she showed herself capable of made him appreciate the more that which she manifested in separating from George, and revealed to him the whole extent of the sacrifice then made with so much firmness.

The mission confided to Adelardi assumed, therefore, a graver aspect in his eyes than before, and he was for an instant tempted to reproach himself for having, the night previous, invoked the aid of a rival in George’s behalf, who might prove an enemy to the charming girl before him. On all accounts, however, he could not regret this last effort for his friend’s welfare. In case Vera failed, and by chance was afterwards tempted to display any ill‐will at another’s performing an act of devotedness she declared herself incapable of, he had taken some precautions to defeat her, and flattered himself the favor would be obtained before she discovered by whom it was implored.

Meanwhile, the maid of honor was punctual. The marquis had already received her reply, and now placed it in his young friend’s hands.

“Your request is granted: Mademoiselle Fleurange d’Yves will be received by her majesty on Thursday, at two o’clock.

V. L.”

“The day after to‐morrow!” said Fleurange with emotion. Then, blushing as she continued: “But how happens it that the name which I have not borne for so long occurs in this note?”

“It is yours, is it not?” replied the marquis evasively.

“Yes, it is mine, but—” she stopped. A particular remembrance was now associated with the name of Fleurange. No one had called her so but George for more than three years. And the day for ever graven on her memory, he told her he should keep that name for himself—himself alone. She regretted to find it here written by a strange hand, and felt an involuntary contraction of the heart.

“I should have preferred the request made in the name I generally bear.”

“Pardon me. I am to blame in this,” said Adelardi. “I supposed it a matter of indifference. I thought the name of Fleurange would particularly attract the attention of her whose favor you seek, and remain more surely in her memory.”

This was merely an excuse which occurred to him in reply to a question he had not anticipated. His real motive was to conceal from the maid of honor another name perhaps more familiar, and which might be connected in her mind with some prejudice injurious to the success of the petition of which she was the intermediary.

To Be Continued.

Sayings.

“We serve God by climbing up to heaven from virtue to virtue; we serve Satan by descending into hell from vice to vice.”—_S. Bonaventura._

He who reflects upon death has already cut short the evil habit of talkativeness; and he who has received the gift of inward and spiritual tears, shuns it as he would fire.—_S. John Climacus._

Spiritual blessings attained by much prayer and labor are solid and durable.—_Ibid._

The first degree of interior peace is to banish from us all the noise and commotion created by the passions, which disturb the profound tranquillity of the heart. The last and most excellent degree is to stand in no fear of this disturbance, and to be perfectly insensible to its excitement.—_Ibid._

The heart of the meek is the throne on which the Lord reposes.—_Ibid._

The day will belong to him who is first in possession.—_Ibid._

Prince Von Bismarck And The Interview Of The Three Emperors.

By M. Adolphe Dechamps, Min. D’état

From La Revue Générale De Bruxelles.

MY DEAR FRIEND: You question me about the events which during the past two years have been subverting Europe, and you in particular ask me what I think of the meeting of the three emperors at Berlin, and of the policy of von Bismarck.

Your first inquiry is too general for me to take up in a letter which I wish to avoid making too long, but in a work which I am writing at present I will endeavor to do so to the extent of my ability. About the year 1849, I went to work on an _Étude sur la France_, out of which, during the second Empire, I put forth three separate publications.(189) In these I followed the course of Napoleon III., both in the successes and in the blunders which brought about his fall; and now in the midst of the obscurity of general politics which thickens more and more from day to day, and wherein the attentive observer perceives more sinister flashes than gleams of sunshine, I am about to complete the main work which I began more than twenty years ago.

In 1859, I sent my first publication on the _Second Empire_ to the aged Prince von Metternich, who honored me with his friendship, and asked him for his views about the condition of Europe, which was then on the eve of being profoundly changed by the war in Italy.

The following is an extract from the interesting reply which I received from him only a short time before his death: “After having been a witness and spectator of the catastrophes which burst forth between the years 1789 and 1795, in the latter one I made my first entry into the higher walks of the political world, and 1801 was the first year of my diplomatic career. I consequently cannot be in ignorance of anything that has taken place since the two remote epochs above mentioned. Now, am I thereby in advance of other living men? Can I consider myself capable of drawing up a prognostication of what will happen even so far only as regards the most immediate future? Certainly not! But, nevertheless, one thing I know I can do, I can venture to affirm that not during the course of the last seven decades has there been a single moment when the elements which make up _social existence_ have found themselves plunged in so general a struggle as they are now.”

Since the prince thus wrote me, we have had the campaign of Italy against Austria in 1859; the war in Germany which ended in Sadowa; the civil war in the United States of N. A.; the colossal war of 1870; the astounding fall of the second French Empire; the rule of the Commune, and the conflagration in Paris; a Republican government in France; the setting up of the Empire of Germany; the Italian Revolution in Rome, which keeps the Pope a captive in the Vatican and all the church in mourning; we have had Spain contended for by three dynasties and a prey to anarchy and civil war; and we have a socialistic revolution stirring up everywhere the laboring masses and unsettling the deepest foundations of the society of our day!

What would old Prince von Metternich say if, having before him the immense upheaving of which we are witnesses, he could be now called upon to reply to the general inquiry which you have put to me? He would decline giving an opinion; he would refuse to make any predictions; he would confine himself to the expression of deeper fears, because of the general and formidable struggle now raging between all the elements which make up the very life of society. I will do just as he would, and for a hundredfold more reasons than he could have. I feel, as do all those who have any political instinct, that decisive and dreadful events are drawing nigh; though I cannot yet distinctly perceive them, I feel them, as one does the approach of a storm, from the heaviness of the air before seeing the lightning flash or hearing the thunder roll.

I lay aside, then, your general inquiry, and take up the second one, which is more precise, and which relates to the meeting at Berlin and to the policy of von Bismarck.

It is almost needless for me to mention that, retired as I have been for a long time from politics, any opinions which I may express are merely individual ones, that I alone am responsible for them, and that nobody can claim a right to extend that responsibility to my friends, and still less to the political party which I have had the honor of serving. I make this express reservation.

What is, then, the meaning, the character, and the bearing of the meeting of the three emperors? Is it a congress? Is it an alliance?

It is neither one nor the other, and this has been carefully proclaimed. It is not an _European_ congress, since England and France were not present at it, the one having been left aside, and the other naturally excluded. It is not a _congress_, since no treaty will sanction its views and results. But, besides, Prince von Bismarck wants neither congress nor treaty. He attached great importance to signing the treaty of Prague alone with Austria and the treaty of Frankfort alone with France; he refused, with a certain _hauteur_, to allow any interference of the other European powers in those treaties, although they brought about a fundamental change in the status and equilibrium of Europe.

In times past, after a great war, Europe has always intervened through a solemn congress in which it dictated the terms of a general peace, thereby securing for it solidity and duration. Thus the treaty of Westphalia brought with it its consequent peace, the treaty of Vienna the peace of 1815, and more recently the treaty of the Congress of Paris in 1856 followed upon the war in the Crimea. Heretofore Europe has been subject to a system of equilibrium: Bismarck has done away with the latter, and broken up the former.

But he perceived the danger of this attitude and this situation. Germany had vanquished Austria, crushed France, and had won European supremacy, but she stood alone. Austria, forced out first from Italy, afterwards from Germany, could not, without feeling a deep and natural jealousy, see the German Empire rise to the first rank while she sank to the second. Russia cannot see the German Empire extend from the Danube to the Baltic, and overtop the Slavic Empire, without becoming also jealous. England cannot look upon this state of things, which leaves her nothing to do but to keep quiet and silent, without feeling somewhat as Austria and Russia do. There is felt, then, at St. Petersburg, as at Vienna, and perhaps at London, an invincible distrust of the predominance of Germany and of the rupture, for her benefit, of the equilibrium of Europe. There are deep and opposing interests which are incompatible with a true alliance between the three emperors, and, albeit they have at Berlin shaken hands, toasted, and fraternally embraced one another and exchanged certain general ideas, they have not allied themselves on settled political views.

M. von Bismarck has himself pretty accurately defined the meeting at Berlin: “It is of importance that no one should suppose that the meeting of the three emperors has for its object any special political projects. Beyond a doubt, this meeting amounts to a signal recognition of the new German Empire, but no political design has directed it.”

It amounts to this or very nearly this: M. von Bismarck wanted neither a congress nor a treaty, nor did he seek an alliance which was impossible of attainment just now; but he was determined to put an end to his present isolation, and he sought in particular to cut short the dream of retaliation in which France might indulge from a hoped‐for alliance with Russia or with Austria.

The government of Berlin has in the meeting of the three emperors sought two and perhaps three ends: I. To bring about the recognition of the German Empire by the two great military powers of the North, and in that way deprive France of all hope of finding an ally, with a view to war, either at St. Petersburg or at Vienna. II. To discourage at the same time the _particularism_(190) of Bavaria and of South Germany, which has always looked for a support in the direction of Vienna. The third end may be to disarm the resistance of Catholics to the absurd and odious persecutions organized against them, by intimating to them that their cause has been abandoned by the Apostolic Emperor, the head of the House of Hapsburg.

The remarkable letter published in _Der Wanderer_ of Vienna, under the heading of “The Order of Battle,” sets forth very cleverly each of these two hopes aforesaid of the Berlin diplomats.

“Those diplomats,” says _Der Wanderer_, “are rather barefacedly making game of Austria’s good‐nature. They calculate that this good‐nature will have the effect of paralyzing two (as M. von Bismarck considers them) implacable enemies of the empire, but heretofore friends of the Hapsburg dynasty; I mean the particularism of the minor states and the Catholic opposition. ‘Thanks to the house of Austria,’ say they, ‘we are going to disarm those reptiles, and pull out their venomous fangs.’ At the same time, those diplomats do not conceal their joy (premature, I hope) at what they call the _Canossa_(191) of Berlin and the retaliation of Olmutz. ‘We will get the old seal of the empire’ (I quote their words textually) ‘affixed to our heritage by the House of Austria.’ ”

It would seem, then, that the Emperor of Austria, by appearing at Berlin, meant to say to particularism and perhaps to the Catholic body: You need no longer count on me. And the Emperor of Russia went there to offer a toast to the German army and to signify to France: Do not count on any alliance with me for a war hereafter.

This would indeed be the crowning of M. von Bismarck’s policy. Since the two great wars against Austria and against France which by their prodigious results assuredly far surpassed his hopes and previsions, he has but one solicitude and one thought—to isolate France, to secure her military and political impotence, to file down the old lion’s teeth and to muzzle him.

To this end, he needed strong and impenetrable frontiers, which he got by the acquisition of Alsace and Lorraine. Prince von Bismarck cannot fail to perceive that the annexation of these two provinces to Germany constitutes for it, in a political point of view, a source of weakness rather than of strength; that it is an additional embarrassment to the difficulties following the organization of German unity; that Alsace and Lorraine will be, for a long time to come, another bleeding Poland on the flanks of the new empire; nevertheless, the conquest of these two provinces seemed to him, in a military point of view, indispensable as a first material guarantee against the possibility of retaliation on the part of France. By the possession of those provinces, he turns against France the formidable triple line of defence of the Meuse, the Moselle, and the Vosges; at Strasbourg and at Metz he holds the strategical keys of France; these two strongholds are, so to speak, iron gates of which the bolts are kept at Berlin. The other Rhenish frontiers are defended by the armed neutrality of Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, and Switzerland. Seated behind its impassable frontiers, and relying upon its powerful military organization and the remembrance of its recent triumphs, the German Empire appears perfectly secure from attack.

But even all this was not enough for Prince von Bismarck. He has just been repeating the policy which turned out so well for him in the war of 1866 against Austria. Then, through the guilty and senseless connivance of Napoleon III., he allied himself to Italy; he compelled Austria to divide her forces, to have two armies, one at Verona, the other in Bohemia—which was making sure beforehand of the defeat of Austria. M. von Bismarck has just begun a second time this skilful manœuvre. He has formed an offensive and defensive alliance with Italy which owes its political life to France, and repays the boon by treachery. By means of this alliance he would compel France, in the event of a war, to have an army of the Alps and an army of the Rhine, which would be equivalent to certain defeat.

Any war of retaliation is consequently for a long time to come rendered impossible.

There would be left to France only one resource, and that a distant one, viz., an alliance with a great military power, such as Austria, or, in particular, Russia, whose secret jealousies she would turn to her account.

But such an alliance presupposes France raised up, in a political, military, and moral sense, from her present ruin, and in possession of a settled government, stable within and influential without. Can a republic, even a conservative one, and even if it always had at its head as capable a statesman as M. Thiers, so raise France? Can a republic which is a good enough raft to take refuge on for a while, a so to speak narrow bed, which will do for France, wounded and ailing, to lie on during the period of convalescence—can it, in a country which lacks manly habits and historical institutions, unite enough solidity, security, wise liberty, strength, and grandeur to become the ally of so great an empire as Russia? To my mind, the idea of an alliance between a French republic and one of the two empires of the North against the German Empire is one of those impossibilities which need but to be asserted, not to be argued. If France could succeed in reuniting the separated links of her history, in reconciling her present with her past, if she were to again become a traditional, representative, and free monarchy, one holding itself equidistant from the abuses of the old _régime_ and the errors of the Revolution—oh! then her situation would indeed be changed, and great alliances at present impossible might become possible soon thereafter. But such alliances would not have for their object never‐ending retaliations and new wars; they would bear their fruits through social peace, through the restoration of authority and order, and through that true, prudent, and measured liberty which, now that they have it not, they talk so much about. The greatness of France depends less on the extent of her frontiers than on her political, social, and religious renovation.

It is because M. von Bismarck understands perfectly that an alliance between one of the great military empires of the North and republican France is a chimerical project, that he encourages the adherents of the republic at Versailles to sustain their work.

Anyhow, M. von Bismarck, having in view the nature of contingencies, has sought to shut France out from hopes or temptations in this direction; after, having in her folly dreamt of getting a frontier on the Rhine, she has wretchedly lost, through the folly of her emperor, her eastern frontier; after, having sworn to tear in pieces the treaty of 1815, to which she had submitted with detestation, she has had to sign at Frankfort the treaty in virtue of which she was invaded and dismembered.

The new Empire of Germany, resting on its formidable army, protected by impenetrable frontiers, certain of an alliance with Italy which renders the undertaking of war against it almost impossible for France, sustained by the official friendship of Austria and of Russia, compels France to be resigned and peaceful; condemns her to political and military impotence, or, what may sound better, to walk in the ways of prudence. M. Thiers, in words which the French press has published, has recently made a resolute profession of this policy of prudence, by proclaiming that he desires peace—peace to build up and fructify; and that France, at all events, will not seek to break it.

When, from the balcony of the Imperial Palace at Berlin, it is proclaimed that the object and result of the meeting of three emperors is to sanction the _statu quo_ of Europe, and to consolidate a general peace, we believe that they mean what they proclaim; but what is the signification of the proclamation? Why, that they have thereby accepted the actual state of things which has grown out of the recent wars; that is to say, the European supremacy of the German Empire, founded on the powerlessness or the cautious prudence of France; and that they think to have extinguished the centre of combustion from which the firebrand of war might be again hurled over Europe.

This is assuredly a clever policy, one in which Prince von Bismarck might allow himself to take a certain pride.

But in this serene sky there is one dark cloud, and we may well suppose that this cloud has disturbed the optimism of the diplomats assembled at Berlin. This cloud is that dreaded unknown future when France will be no longer governed by M. Thiers.

Salvation is not to come to France from the republic; in France there is neither a republic nor a monarchy; the forces which tend to a monarchy are disunited, and consequently powerless, and those which tend to a republic are still more divided; the nation is living under an administration _ad interim_; there is an absence of settled government and settled institutions, and an impossibility of establishing either, because of the wide divisions of irreconcilable parties, of anarchy in principles and ideas. The salvation of France for the time being is one man, a leader whose hand is pliable, firm, and commanding enough to hold political parties in submission and keep down the rivalries which would give France over to another civil war. M. Thiers believes that any present attempt to set up a monarchy would light up a civil war; while the conviction of the majority of the Assembly at Versailles is just as strong that, if the republic lasts, this civil war will break out on the morrow of the day when France will have lost M. Thiers. Probably both are right; it is rather to the condition itself of France than to the men that lead her that this lamentable state of affairs is to be attributed which finds its expression in the government of a provisional republic having nothing to look forward to in the future but unfathomable darkness and mystery.

M. Thiers is the embodiment of the conservative republic, which will last just so long as he lives, and I desire that his needed dictatorship be prolonged for a long while yet; but can we reasonably entertain such a hope? He has undertaken the admirable work of saving France; he has in Paris fought and won the great battle against anarchy; he has carried the loans through, reorganized the army and finances of France; he is pushing forward the evacuation of her territory; he maintains order. All this is very fine and grand; he is indeed acting the part of the saviour of his country; but let him not seek to do more; let him not be ambitious to become the founder of a government; let him rather be content with merely playing the first part at the head of affairs.

I thoroughly appreciate the work M. Thiers is engaged in; he directs his policy by the light of present events, the only ones he can control; he is going through the reparative period, _but what is he preparing_? What is he founding for the future? What heritage will he leave after him, and who will be his heir? Such are the questions which must come up to every reflecting mind, and in particular to his, so remarkably clear, perspicacious, and penetrating.

The weak side of his policy is that it leaves France on a political _terra incognita_. The creation of a few additional institutions will not suffice to raise France out of the provisional status in which she lies since her fall; I mean such as a vice‐presidency, the establishing of a lower house, all which would be adding shadows to shadows. It would never amount to anything more than an administration _ad interim_, and a period of expectation of a definite, stable, regular government having influence abroad, such an one as France feels that she does not but should possess. The question for M. Thiers, as well as for France and for Europe, remains the same: What is being prepared, what will the future bring?

As we know the tree by its fruits, so do we judge a policy by its results, and so will M. Thiers be judged.

If he leaves after him the heritage of a traditional and representative monarchy, or if, like a second Washington, he leaves as his successor to France a second John Adams or Thomas Jefferson who will enter upon the work of consolidating a republic really conservative, free, Christian, and powerful, he will indeed be a great man; but, if he is to be followed in power by a Gambetta who will be the predecessor of the socialist _commune_ of Paris, he will, notwithstanding the immense services he has rendered, be severely judged by history. No one assuredly ought to understand this better than he.

Is the second President of the fourth or fifth French Republic to be a now unforeseen Jefferson or a Gambetta?

Such is the dreaded question now before us. These threatening eventualities have doubtless been attentively considered at the conference in Berlin. M. von Bismarck may have developed thereat the political plan which I have endeavored to analyze, and which has for its object the founding of the peace of Europe on France’s inability to undertake another war; but revolutionary and demagogical France, bearing incendiarism from Paris to Madrid, to Rome, and perhaps elsewhere, must be opposed in some other way than by the establishment of impenetrable frontiers and the formation of alliances; and on these other means of opposition the three emperors must have seriously conferred at Berlin, and I doubt much whether waging war against the Catholic Church has seemed to them the best way to avert the danger aforesaid.

II.

I have sought in this letter to set forth the character and import of the meeting at Berlin, and to show the policy which Prince von Bismarck has endeavored to inaugurate there. I have not been eaves‐dropping at the doors of the chambers in which the three emperors and their chancellors held their deliberations; but there is no difficulty in conjecturing what was talked about, and, I may add, what was thought therein.

We must not overestimate the importance of these conversations; the meeting at Berlin will no more bring about positive results for the solution of pending questions in Europe than did the numerous interviews which Napoleon III. had with the Emperor of Austria, the ministers of Great Britain, and the czar. As we have stated before, it is not a congress; it forms no alliances, and no treaty determining the new European equilibrium will come out of it. What M. von Bismarck wished particularly to bring about was the presence of the two emperors with their counsellors in the capital of the new empire. Their mere presence signified, in the eyes of the prince chancellor:

The recognition of the German Empire; the sanction of the treaties of Prague and Frankfort, which were to form the basis of the new equilibrium of Europe.

The impossibility for France to find a powerful ally that would enable her to attempt a war of retaliation.

On the part of Austria, the abandonment of all idea of returning to her old German policy, and the repudiation of all connivance with the _particularistic_ resistance of the lesser states of Germany.

I will presently examine whether the presence at Berlin of the head of the dynasty of Hapsburg signifies also the repudiation of the Catholic movement which the persecutions directed against the church have stirred up throughout entire Germany.

Assuredly this policy of M. von Bismarck shows, I will not say grandeur, but skill and audacity; and it has been crowned by wonderful success. When I saw Prince von Bismarck raise Prussia, that a few years ago could hardly rank among the great powers, to the height of the Empire of Germany through the victories of 1866 and 1871—when I contemplated these astounding results, I was for a moment tempted to consider him as a great minister, as one of the rare successors of Richelieu or of Stein.

I was the more inclined to this judgment because, as a Belgian, I was grateful for the honest and upright policy which he had followed as regards Napoleon III. before the last war. There is no longer any room for doubt, now that the diplomatic documents are known, that Napoleon III., in order to redeem the unpardonable blunder which he had committed by favoring the war of 1861 between Prussia and Austria, endeavored to obtain in Luxemburg and in Belgium the compensations which he considered needful for him in view of the aggrandizement of Prussia. We know about the rough draft of the Benedetti treaty, which no amount of equivocation and timid denial can do away with.

I had, in my work published in 1865, clearly denounced the plot; and from the Belgian tribune, because I had pointed out these perils to its government, I have been called a political visionary and almost a traitor to my country. Subsequent events have justified my allegations, and now every one knows that the dangers which we ran for a time were more real, nearer at hand, and greater than even I imagined them to be.

The war of 1870 was the consequence of the refusal of the government of Berlin to yield to the guilty covetousness of Napoleon III. I ascribe the honor of the former to M. von Bismarck and to the integrity of William IV. I had proclaimed the existence of two eminent perils: a diplomatic peril, viz., an alliance of France with Prussia, of which Belgium would have been the stakes and the victim; the chance of a war between those two nations, in which France might have been victorious. We have, almost by a miracle, escaped those two perils; through the war of 1870, Belgium has been preserved from diplomatic conspiracies, and as a Belgian I can never forget it.(192)

Belgium, since the late war, finds herself in a new position which has not attracted the attention it deserves.

Belgium, for a long time back coveted by France, particularly by France under the Empire and under the Republic, had, above all, to fear an alliance between France and Prussia, which latter might sacrifice her to the political combinations growing out of such an alliance. That is what Napoleon III. attempted in the Benedetti negotiation, and it was this peril which before the recent war alarmed my patriotism.

Now this peril has vanished. An alliance between the German Empire and France is now put off for a long time. But there is another motive still more powerful, and which constitutes our complete security, which is this: that the existence of a _neutral_ and _strong_ Belgium has become henceforward for the German Empire a necessity of the highest order. Since the government of Berlin has thought it indispensable for strategic purposes to hold Metz and the lines of the Meuse and of the Vosges, it cannot allow, under any consideration, independent Belgium to disappear and France to occupy that territory of Belgium which is watered by the Meuse and the Scheldt. Our neutrality protects the Rhine on the side of the gap between the Sambre and the Meuse, but can afford this protection only provided our neutrality is politically and militarily strong to such an extent as our financial resources will warrant.

Our neutrality, in order to be one of the supports of the peace of Europe, must be ever an honest one; it must stand as a barrier against aggression whether from the east or from the south; it must be hostile to no power. On the other hand, it is plain that, in order to fill this position of barrier and guarantee, Belgium must remain always armed and able to repel an attack at the outset; otherwise, she would become politically useless, and, in the event of a war, the occupation of her territory would follow as the fatal result of such omission.

This was true before the late war, and on this point my views have not changed; but, since the new European situation created by the war, this truth is twice as plain, and our duties to Europe have increased twofold. It is important that all our political men, without distinction of party, and that the entire nation, understand well the position to which we have been brought by recent events.

Far from being hostile to the German Empire, I find in it a new guarantee for the independence of my country. Our neutrality now rests on all the powers and on all the treaties that have been made: it had become a habit, after the advent of the Napoleonic Empire, to consider England as the special protector of our national independence, but now that Germany has a particular and powerful interest in that independence, instead of one special support only, we now have two.

It is proper that I should make this statement, as I am about to submit M. von Bismarck’s policy to a severe criticism. In this page of history which I have been rapidly writing, I have not been wanting in praise; and, if these lines are ever read by M. von Bismarck, he cannot complain of the appreciation which I have so far expressed of his policy. In the pages that follow, I shall not spare criticism. Much as I have admired the policy which prepared the war, in equal degree does my mind fail to comprehend the policy followed at Berlin since the peace, and which appears to me to be a perfect antithesis of the former one.

This latter policy appears to me so incomprehensible that I ask myself whether Prince von Bismarck, instead of being a political genius like Stein, is not entering upon the path of error in which Napoleon III. came to his ruin.

Napoleon III. has also been the ruler of Europe; the second Empire for many years enjoyed preponderance in Europe, and might have retained it much longer but for the accumulated blunders of imperial policy. Napoleon III., who had begun his reign isolated from other monarchs, and to whom the appellation of _my cousin_ had been disdainfully denied, found himself, immediately after the war in the Crimea and after the Congress of Paris, at the head of a great Western alliance formed with England and Austria and by isolating Russia and annulling Prussia. He had reached the zenith of power in Europe; he had a star in which he and every one besides believed; kings and emperors came to Fontainebleau and to the Tuileries to pay their court to the _parvenu_ sovereign who had been transformed into a Louis XIV., just as has happened at Berlin.

When I saw Napoleon III., at the summit of such a situation, break with his own hands, like a hot‐brained child, this magnificent Western alliance to which he was indebted for his high fortune; conspire at the Congress of Paris with M. de Cavour to bring about that fatal war in Italy against Austria which was the first cause of his disasters; turn out of the straight path of conservative principles which he had sworn to follow, and then lose himself in the tortuous and obscure ways of revolution, my judgment of him was definitively made. A man who could commit such a folly was neither a statesman nor a political genius; he was merely a lucky adventurer who had been helped on and spoiled by events, but who did not know enough to turn them to account.

It was just then, in 1859, on the eve of the war in Italy, that I wrote my first work on _Le Second Empire_, in which I did not hesitate to predict that this war, no matter how much glory it might make for the emperor, would nevertheless amount to a political defeat which would lead to the fall of the Empire. “The heads of even the wisest men,” I said, “are liable to turn when they have reached such an elevation as he has arrived at.” And I selected as the epigraph of my work, the words which old Prince von Metternich had uttered when speaking of the extreme good‐fortune of the Emperor of the French: “He is successful,” said the prince to me; “he has excellent cards in his hands, and he plays his game well, but he will be lost as a revolutionary emperor on the Italian reef.” This remarkable prediction, made long before the war in Italy, has been verified to the letter, and my book, written in 1859, was merely a commentary upon it which subsequent events have confirmed.

M. von Bismarck is also at the acme of his triumph; he is presiding at his Congress of Paris. Behold Prussia, which but a few years ago had hardly any voice in the councils of Europe, now become the German Empire, and behold the Emperor of Germany getting the czar and the Emperor Francis Joseph to sanction at Berlin his victories, his conquests, and his political supremacy, by leaving France isolated, and making of no account England, which had kept herself aloof in her policy of forbearance.

Well, I do not hesitate to select this hour of triumph, when M. von Bismarck’s policy has been crowned at Berlin, in the midst of festivities the splendor of which is talked of far and wide, to predict its failure in the end if he does not change it. My reason for asserting this in presence of a state of things so contrary to my prediction is that M. von Bismarck is committing one of those blunders, I dare not say one of those political follies, which astonish reason, and which form the premises of a syllogism having for its conclusion an inevitable failure. The blunder is precisely similar to that perpetrated by Napoleon III., who, in consequence of having allied himself with revolutionary Italy, was led from Mexico to Sadowa, and from Sedan to Chiselhurst. This blunder on the part of M. von Bismarck, and of which he will yet repent, is his alliance with revolutionary Italy, which drags him into a war against the Catholic Church, which has always proved fatal to those who have attempted it, and which destroys the work of German unity which he had associated with his name. The epigraph of my work on _Le Second Empire_, borrowed from Prince von Metternich, might serve for this letter as well, if applied to the Emperor of Germany and his chancellor; if the head of the dynasty of the Hohenzollerns continues in the path of revolution in which M. von Bismarck has led him, “he will also perish, like the revolutionary emperor on the Italian reef.”

Is it rashness on my part to point out to Prince von Bismarck and to the German Emperor the Tarpeian rock so nigh to the capitol to which they have ascended? Am I unjust towards the prince chancellor?

No one had a higher opinion of his political merit than I, and in appreciating, as I have done in this letter, his astounding successes, I have not been sparing of praise nor indeed of admiration. If, then, I am compelled to draw a comparison between Napoleon III. and him, and to measure by the blunder committed by the Emperor of the French in 1859 that which he is now committing, I must ask his pardon, for I make a great difference between those two contemporary personages. In the same degree that Napoleon III. was irresolute, beset by somnolent indolence and continual hesitation, so does, on the other hand, Prince von Bismarck know how to show a tenacious persistence and audacity in the carrying out of his designs; but this very tenacity may be a source of additional danger, if he enters upon a road which leads to an abyss; he will go forward in it quicker and more irremediably than another would, because he knows neither how to stop nor to draw back.

Let us, then, study the policy of M. von Bismarck.

And, in the first place, without wishing in the least to belittle the share which evidently belongs to him in the triumphs of Prussia, we must, nevertheless, admit that another important share falls to Count von Moltke, the greatest warrior of our day; and an equally considerable part is due to the blunders of his adversaries, Austria and Imperial France.

If, for example, Napoleon III. had not betrayed Austria in 1866 by allowing and favoring the alliance between Prussia and Italy, a war against Austria would have been impossible, and the victory of Sadowa would not have taken place; the senseless war of 1870, which grew out of the victory of Sadowa, would have been without either cause or pretext; France would be now erect, Austria would have maintained its influential position in Germany, and the German Empire would not have been established for the profit of Prussian _unitarisme_.

With the foundation of German unity, of the German Empire, Napoleon has had almost as much to do as M. von Bismarck. The great chancellor has found ready for him two instruments which he did not invent: the military genius of von Moltke, and the folly of Napoleon. To complete the expression of my thought, I will add that the German Emperor has only been, as he himself proclaimed after his victories, a mere instrument in the hands of Divine Providence for the chastisement of France. France has been unfaithful to her past history, from which she has severed herself; she has been unfaithful to the monarchical form of government which has rendered her glorious, and to the church which has made her great; she has lost, by a twofold apostasy, her political faith and her Catholic faith; she no longer possesses her institutions, which have been, one after the other, destroyed either by the old _régime_ or by the Revolution; she no longer knows how to restore the monarchy, the elements of which have been scattered in the tempests of revolution; she knows not how to keep up a republic of which she has neither the habits, the historical conditions, nor the conditions social and political; she is in that state through which nations, condemned to perish, fall and decay, and out of which those nations which God wishes to save can get, only through punishment by fire or by the sword. M. von Bismarck has been, and may become again, that fire and that sword; which may perhaps be an honor, but does not justify pride.

The political work, then, which has produced the German Empire undoubtedly deserves praise, and assuredly does honor to the political merits of Prince von Bismarck, but does not facilitate the forming of a definitive judgment in his regard. It is in the work of peace that the statesman shows himself, and I must say it, that in this respect I do not find M. von Bismarck as great as events seemed to have made him out to be; just as he has been seen to be intelligent, fortunate, almost great during the period of warfare, so in like degree do I incline to consider him, in the period of present organization, improvident and blind.

This work of organization is a difficult one; it requires wisdom and time. M. von Bismarck has recourse to precipitation, to force, and to wrath.

German unity, inuring to the benefit of Prussia, could not, before the war of 1866, have been foreseen. When, in 1863, the Emperor of Austria made his triumphal entry into Frankfort, bearing in his hand federal reform, he was surrounded by all the princes of Germany. Prussia stood alone, abandoned by all Germany; and, if Napoleon had not foolishly thwarted the plans of the Emperor Francis Joseph, the Emperor of Germany would have been crowned, not at Berlin, but at Vienna.

After the war of 1866, Prusso‐Germanic unitarism had not yet been accomplished. Saxony and the states of the South which had fought by the side of Austria were defeated; they submitted to, rather than accepted, the terms which Prussia forced on them as the consequence of their defeat. Northern Germany was bounded by the Main, and the minor states ever felt themselves drawn towards Vienna, their old centre of attraction.

It was the war of 1870, declared by Napoleon against the whole of Germany, notwithstanding the patriotic protest of M. Thiers, which all at once created this unity; this unity, which brought all the Germans together under one flag, received thus the baptism of glory and of blood.

But the Prusso‐German unitarism, extemporized and rough‐cast by the war, was not consolidated; many difficulties remained to be overcome.

M. von Bismarck saw before him two formidable adversaries: the particularism of the middle states, and socialist democracy, which claims to abolish unity for its own gain, by substituting the German Republic for the German Empire.

Several symptoms go to show that the particularist movement, which had been stopped by the war, is reviving, and certainly the hostile action directed against the Catholics assists powerfully towards giving it new life. The symptoms of the awakening of this movement are numerous; it is needless that I should enumerate them; they are perfectly known at Berlin, and have assuredly become aggravated since the religious war undertaken by M. von Bismarck.

The particularism of the states, then, is not dead, and red democracy is full of life. These are the two great difficulties which M. von Bismarck’s policy finds in its way. To these must be added a third one: the assimilation of the two conquered provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, so thoroughly French by the ties of history, of religion, of habits, and of interests.

To overcome these obstacles, to organize unity, the basis of the new empire, to accomplish his great work, M. von Bismarck needs prudence, time, and the hand of a true statesman.

Now, what does the Prince von Bismarck do? To the three considerable existing obstacles he adds another one, greater and more dangerous than the former, a difficulty which did not exist, which he of his own accord created, which he wantonly got up, and which will crush him; I mean the religious difficulty, the brutal war, the veritable persecution which he is organizing against the Catholics. He had to fight against particularist opposition and radical opposition; he himself, with deliberate purpose, needlessly and without reason, raises up a third one—the opposition of sixteen millions of Catholics united with their bishops; that is to say, almost half of the new empire which he thus unsettles and, so to speak, dissolves with his own hand.

Can anything be imagined more incomprehensible or more thoroughly preposterous?

What end is M. von Bismarck pursuing? By what thought and what views is he guided? The prince chancellor is neither mad nor blind; he has given abundant evidence of this; and yet, is it not folly, is it not blindness, to thus throw, without any appreciable motive, and with a heart as light as that of M. Emile Ollivier, sixteen millions of Catholics, including all their clergy and all their bishops, into a resistance which will be all the more obstinate and formidable because it will derive its strength from the oppression of conscience, from the suppression of liberty, the rending of the constitution, from the violation of justice and of rights? I have put these questions to eminent Germans of all parties, but have never got clear and satisfactory answers.

The Catholic Germans behaved admirably during the war; the Bavarian, Westphalian, and Rhenish troops were everywhere foremost under fire and in earning honor and glory. The priests and religious, both men and women, have shown a heroic devotedness on the battlefields, in the ambulances, and in the hospitals, so that M. Windthorst was enabled to say in the parliament at Berlin that many of those religious would go into exile wearing on their breasts the iron cross which they had earned during the last campaign.(193) The old antipathies against Prussia which prevailed along the Rhine and beyond the Main among Catholic populations were dying out; the establishment of religious liberty in Prussia on a more generous basis than in the lesser states had won the Catholics over to unity under Prussian hegemony; and the illustrious Bishop of Mayence, Mgr. de Ketteler, in an address which made a great noise in Germany and throughout Europe, raised the standard of rallying and unity.

The German Empire was consequently very near being established. M. von Bismarck stirs up a religious war which divides it in two and breaks it asunder. The war had brought together under the same flag Germans of all nationalities and all religious beliefs. Should not, then, all manner of pains have been taken to keep them united in the mutual work of the organization of the empire? Should not the first thought of a politician, after having achieved such wonderful success, and having before him the obstacles which still remained to be overcome, have been to begin by establishing peace in religious matters?

But I must repeat the question, What did M. von Bismarck do? He repulses the Westphalians and people of the Rhine who had become reconciled; he revives in Bavaria and in the South that particularism which was dying out; and on the political grievance he grafts a religious one; he doubles the obstacles of all kinds which lie in the way of his plans for Germanizing Alsace and Lorraine, so thoroughly French and Catholic; into their bleeding wounds he, as it were, introduces gangrene, by entering upon an unheard‐of religious persecution, and without any pretext that he dare avow; he compromises in the most serious manner the work of unity, towards the founding of which he had aided so much; he acts as would the greatest adversary of that unity who could not contrive any better means for its destruction than to do just what Prince von Bismarck is doing—he drives into the ranks of opposition nearly half of the soundest population of the empire; he sets against himself the two hundred million Catholics spread throughout the world, and who are everywhere protesting against his oppression; he will also turn against him the old conservatives, who have been deeply hurt by the enactment of the law in regard to schools, as well as all sincere friends of religious and political liberty, so audaciously ignored by him. These friends of liberty are becoming scarce; they maintain, in the face of this odious violation of their principles, a shameful silence which they will have to break, if they wish to avoid making liberalism synonymous with hypocrisy.

Have I erred in comparing the policy of M. von Bismarck with that of Napoleon III., and his present blunder with that committed by the ex‐ emperor when, after the Congress of Paris, he broke up the splendid Western alliance?

When I endeavor to interpret M. von Bismarck’s conduct, I can find but one motive which can serve for its explanation, and that is his alliance with Italy. That alliance, which he conceived necessary in order to keep the forces of France divided, and to render a war of retaliation impossible, has drawn him into a fatal hostility against the Catholic Church.

His ally, Victor Emanuel, has conquered the Roman States by stratagem and by violence; he has usurped in Rome the throne of the pontiff king, who among the monarchs of Europe possesses assuredly the most ancient and most venerated titles to sovereignty; he holds the Pope captive in the Vatican, until such time as he can compel him to set out on the road to exile; he deprives the Sovereign Pontiff of the church of that sovereignty on which his independence rests, and thus throws the universal church into alarm and mourning.

This outrage against the church, perpetrated at Rome by the Italian government, has had its counterpart in Berlin. No doubt the condition which Victor Emanuel set upon alliance with him has been to make the German Empire enter into the vast plot got up against the independence and liberty of Catholicity.

Well! without being a prophet, it is not difficult to predict that the Italian alliance will prove as fatal to the German Empire as it has been to the second Napoleonic Empire, and that on the Italian rock M. von Bismarck’s work will be dashed to pieces, if he allows it to remain in the evil path in which it is now so deeply sunk.

III.

Prince Bismarck considers himself to be the successor of Stein, to whom he has caused a statue to be erected, and whose great policy he claims that he is continuing. In this respect, he is profoundly mistaken; and, very far from following that policy, he abandons and betrays it.

Stein and all his school have, like Burke and Pitt, combated the principles of the French Revolution. French ideas had, at the close of the last century, invaded Germany, and the armies of the first Republic had no difficulty in conquering by their arms a country which they had before overrun with their ideas.

Baron von Stein, that restorer of the German _Vaterland_ and liberty, was a mortal foe of the French Revolution. His mission and his work were to withdraw Germany from the fatal path into which, following France, she had strayed, and to bring her back into the path laid out for her by her history.

He could not save Prussia from the defeat at Jena, but he trained her, by his thorough and excellent reforms, for revenge at Waterloo and Sedan. He it was who formed Scharnhorst, the organizer of military Prussia, and whose system Count von Moltke perfected; he, probably, who became the soul of the patriotic movement in 1813; he it was who, together with Scharnhorst, Stadion, and Gagern, gave to Germany that powerful impulse out of which came the great present situation; he it was who stood the distinguished protector of the German historical school, that real antithesis of the French revolutionary school, which former had as its influential organs Niebuhr, Eichhorn, Schlegel, Görres, the two Grimms, de Savigny, etc., and which M. de Sybel represents still in our day.

Stein was a conservative, a patriot, and a Christian. What he fought against in the French Revolution was that philosophic and abstract method that France had adopted, destructive of all national tradition; that spirit of exclusive and narrow equality which influenced her course, and in the pursuit of which, according to M. de Tocqueville, she has lost liberty; that absolutism, whether in democracy or in Cæsarism, that obliteration of the individual, that indifference to rights, that worship of brute force, that extinguishment of all local, provincial, and autonomous life, that exaggerated idea of the state, that oppression of religious liberty, of Christian teaching, and of the Catholic Church, all of which characterized the French Revolution.

Stein wanted a Germany united, but federal, Christian, liberal, traditional, and historical; he wanted her, as Burke did England, to be the reverse of revolutionary France.

Now, is it not Stein’s work, that Germany born of his reforming genius, that M. von Bismarck is destroying? The _liberal national_ party, on which he leans, is merely a _doctrinaire_ French party, anti‐historic, ideological, and anti‐religious, the harbinger of levelling and radical democracy; a party which inclines to absolutism and Cæsarism, adores centralization, unconditional unification, and the omnipotence of the state, and which is the adversary of all proud and free consciences, and of any independent church. It is not the Protestant idea, but the Masonic and Hegelian one which this party represents.

Stein was a Christian, a conservative, and a German; the Prince von Bismarck is sceptical, revolutionary, and belongs to the French school. Stein sought to found German unity on federal liberties, in the alliance of the church with the school, and on peace between religious denominations; M. von Bismarck overturns that basis, substitutes in its place absolutist and Prussian unification, secularized teaching, and religious discord.

It is surprising that, when in France the ideas which inspired the French Revolution have been abandoned even by the most intelligent part of the school of liberalism; by such men as Tocqueville, Thierry, and Guizot, who are discouraged, and talk more openly of their disappointments than of their hopes; when M. Renan asserts that the French Revolution “is an experimental failure”; when the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, through the pen of M. Montégut, proclaims “that the Revolution is politically bankrupt”; on the very morrow of the final miscarriage of that Revolution under its two forms of government, the Empire fallen at Sedan, and the social Republic fallen under the ruins of the Paris Commune—it is at that very time that Prince von Bismarck thinks it skilful and profound to import that French revolutionary system into Germany! M. Renan has cause for rejoicing; he has given utterance to a wish which M. von Bismarck has set about to fulfil. “France,” he said, “need not be considered lost if we can believe that Germany will be in her turn drawn into that witches’ dance in which all our virtue has been lost.”

To sum up: German unity, the great German Empire, which such an extraordinary concurrence of circumstances had created, is being dissolved and ruined by Prince von Bismarck through the most inconceivable of political blunders. He throws sixteen millions of Catholics, once friendly to the Empire, into opposition to it; he gives a new food and new strength to the particularism of the Southern States, and to the Polonism of Posen; he makes twofold the difficulties of accomplishing the assimilation of Alsace and Lorraine; to political grievances he superadds religious grievances, far more to be dreaded than the former; he enkindles an implacable religious war upon the ruins of that denominational peace which King Frederic William III. had happily established, and by aid of which the present emperor and the empress Augusta had, in the opening period of their reign, won the hearts of the Catholics of the Rhine. To cover this blunder, M. von Bismarck enters into the Italian alliance which destroyed the second Napoleonic Empire, and will destroy the German Empire; and he abandons the historic German policy restored by Stein, to rush into the retinue of the _national liberal_ party, into the paths of the French Revolution, into that _witches’ dance_ to which M. Renan refers; and he inoculates his own country with the poison which has killed France!

IV.

But there is one final consequence of the policy of Prince von Bismarck to which I wish to call attention, and which is not least in gravity.

Austria, after having lost Italy, had, by the treaty of Prague, been excluded from Germany. Nevertheless, the German Empire, under the hegemony of Prussia, had not been set up; there existed only a Northern Germany, having the Main as its boundary; the Southern States, and even Saxony, preserved a certain autonomy; and Austria might hope by a wise policy to draw little by little into the sphere of her influence and attraction those countries which had been accustomed to look upon Vienna as their political pole.

The war of 1871 against France, which had united all the Germans under one flag, established German unity and the German Empire. The boundaries of the Empire were moved from the Main to the Danube, and all hope for Austria to regain her old German position was gone.

Austria accepted this situation; the Emperor Francis Joseph and his two counsellors, Count von Beust and Count Andràssy, worked together to bring about a sincere reconciliation between Austria and the German Empire.

They gave up the idea of bringing back the Southern States into the circle of Austrian influence; they feared, on the contrary, lest the German provinces of Austria, detaching themselves little by little from the weakened rule of the Hapsburgs, might be irresistibly drawn towards Berlin, the powerful and glorious centre of the German _Vaterland_.

Those fears may at present be entirely set at rest. There has been a complete reversal in the position of things. The people, for the most part so Catholic, of the Tyrol, of Lower Austria, and of Bohemia, will lose all inclination to draw nearer to the German Empire, where a bitter persecution is being waged against their religious faith. The bonds which unite them to Austria will be drawn the tighter. On the other hand, will not the Catholics of the Rhine, of Westphalia, of Poland, of Suabia, of Franconia, of Würtemberg, of Bavaria, of Alsace, and of Lorraine, driven from the bosom of the German Empire, in which they are no longer citizens, but pariahs, be tempted to look again in the direction of Austria, the centre of their older sympathies? All Austria has to do is not to interfere; M. von Bismarck is working for her.

The prince chancellor, notwithstanding the elated confidence which he has in his strength, has understood the danger of the situation.

In order to change it, he had but one easy thing to do, and that was to modify his policy, to give up persecuting the Catholics, to admit that he had gone astray, and to return to a calmer and wiser policy; but this he would not do; he has preferred to keep on, and to try to drag Austria into the same road.

Last year, at Gastein, he tried to induce Count von Beust to join in the campaign which he wished to begin against the _internationale rouge_ and the _internationale noire_, but the Emperor Francis Joseph baffled the attempt. The prince chancellor renewed it the same year with the emperor himself at Salzburg, but he failed a second time.

Has he met with more success at Berlin, upon the occasion of the meeting of the three emperors? Has he tried to get Russia and Austria to recognize not only the German Empire, but to sanction by their adhesion to it his home policy against “Romanism,” that is to say, against the Catholic Church, or has he at least succeeded in inducing the belief that he had not tried in vain? Has he sought to drag them into the war which he is carrying on against the Jesuits, against the religious orders, against denominational liberty, against Catholic teaching, against the clergy and the bishops, until such time as he can make it break forth at Rome, by laying, in the next conclave, an audacious and sacrilegious hand on the pontifical tiara?

We shall find this out before long. If Austria follows the policy of the centralist party of the German professors at Vienna and at Prague, to which Count von Beust has already yielded too much, and which is identical with the policy of the _national liberal_ party of Berlin, she will have advanced the interests of Prince von Bismarck, and not her own; she will have labored for him and against herself; she will have turned aside the danger imminent to the German Empire through M. von Bismarck’s blunders, and of which the Austro‐Hungarian Empire should have profited; she will have, with her _historical good‐nature_, served the views of Prussia to the detriment of her own; and Francis Joseph, the Apostolic Emperor, unfaithful to his traditions and to the arms of his house, will have made his policy subordinate to that of a Lutheran emperor!

I positively refuse to believe that any such result can come out of the interview at Berlin, albeit that our generation is accustomed to the realization of political impossibilities. I would fain persuade myself that, if the Prince von Bismarck has endeavored to draw Austria into his war against the Catholics and against Rome, he will have failed at Berlin as he did at Salzburg through the good sense of the Emperor Francis Joseph.

V.

The more I study M. von Bismarck’s policy, the less I understand it. If he were a sectarian pietist, I could account to myself for the idea of perfecting the political and military unity of Germany by a religious unity, of creating a _Protestant state_: it would indeed be a sorry Utopia, and to attempt it would be to make the mistake of being three centuries behind his time.

But M. von Bismarck is neither a sectarian nor a fanatic; he is rather, I believe, a sceptic who has little care for religious controversies, and who probably understands very little about the question of the Papal Infallibility which he is wielding as a warlike weapon against the church. M. von Bismarck is a politician; politics he aims at and should be busied in; his mission is to help found an empire and not a schism or a sect. Now, it is the Empire, the political work, which he gravely compromises by disturbing so profoundly through a denominational conflict the religious quiet which that work needed for its consolidation. Instead of the _German state_ founded on unity and general assent, it is the _Protestant state_ founded on the deepest and most incurable divisions that he seems to aim at creating. There is no difficulty in predicting that he will lose the political unity in the pursuit of a religious unity which is but a chimerical and impossible anachronism.

This political course which the prince chancellor has inspired the Emperor William to follow, whose past one makes such a striking contrast with it, is to me an insoluble enigma, and raises doubts in my mind of M. von Bismarck’s transcendent ability.

I will nevertheless try to make out this political enigma, by studying the pretexts on which the government of Berlin relies to justify itself, the circumstances by which it has been enticed, and the temptation to which it has yielded.

The _pretext_ which it puts forward is the decision of the Vatican Council in regard to the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff in matters of doctrine.

The _circumstances_ by which it was carried away are the Italian alliance abroad and the alliance with the _national liberal_ party at home.

The _temptation_ that misleads it is the hope, fortunately disappointed, which the stand of the _inopportunist_ bishops of Germany and of Austria caused it to form, which stand the Berlin government had mistaken for a real dissent from doctrine, and destined to become the foundation of a national church separated from Rome by that dissent.

I call the question of Papal Infallibility a pretext, and, in fact, it is a groundless quarrel without any importance or earnest meaning.

I am not called upon to enter here into a theological dissertation upon the dogma of the infallibility of the church and of its sovereign magistracy, etc. I refer my readers to the excellent works which have been published on the subject, and I trust to be excused for mentioning in particular those written by my brother the Archbishop of Mechlin.

I will say but one word _en passant_ on the question. For every Catholic, there is no longer any open question. Before the council, discussion was allowable; since the definition proclaimed by an œcumenical council united to the Pope, all discussion is closed.

Every one knows of the conversation between a very intelligent lady of great faith and the Count de Montalembert, shortly before the death of that illustrious friend, in which she asked him what he would do if the council together with the Pope should define infallibility. “Well, I will quietly believe it,” replied the great orator, with the firm accent of the Christian who knows his catechism, and who recites his act of faith.

In fact, no father nor doctor of the church, from Origen and S. Cyprian down to S. Thomas and Bossuet, no council, no theologian, no Catholic, has ever doubted the doctrinal infallibility of the church. The controversy lay with the Gallicans, who claimed that the words of the Pope addressed to the church _ex cathedrâ_ needed the assent of a council or of the church throughout the world to acquire the character of infallibility.

All the old Catholics of all the schools, Gallican even included, were agreed to accord to the definitions of a council united with the Pope, that is to say, the church, the divine privilege of infallibility set forth in Holy Scriptures and in all tradition. On this point Bossuet holds the same doctrine as Fénelon and Count de Maistre.

Now, in the present instance we have a council united to the Pope, and no council, from that of Trent back to that of Nicæa, has been more numerously attended, more solemn, freer, or more œcumenical, than that of the Vatican. To deny this is downright nonsense, in which those take refuge who seek to hide their apostasy from their own eyes. If the Council of the Vatican has not been œcumenical and free, then manifestly no council in the past has ever been.

To reject the doctrinal definition of the Council of the Vatican, in which the Sovereign Pontiff and the bishops of all the world, whether opportunist or inopportunist, have agreed, would undoubtedly be to abandon the church of Christ, and to renounce the Catholic faith; it would be going beyond Gallicanism, which never thought of calling in question the decisions of a council united to a pope; even beyond the Jansenism of Port Royal, which would perhaps have accepted the Bull of Innocent X. if sanctioned by a council; it would be going beyond 1682, back to Luther; that is to say, to open heresy, and to the entire abandonment of the church, our mother.

How can M. Döllinger not see this? He who in 1832, at Munich, where the encyclical of Gregory XVI. reached M. de Lamennais, insisted with the latter, with all his force as a theologian, that he should submit to the pontifical encyclical, which, in the doctor’s eyes, was binding on conscience, although no council had adhered to it—how can he now, in his own case, resist the decisions of Pius IX. and the Council of the Vatican? He who has written so many works of grave learning, and in particular that one on _The Church and the Churches_, how comes it that he does not see that he is no longer in the church, and that he is seeking a shelter for his revolt in the smallest, the poorest, and the most dilapidated of those churches of a day which, in the name of history, he has so severely condemned? How can he find himself at ease and his soul tranquil in those ridiculous conventicles of Munich and of Cologne, by the side of Michelis, of Reinkens, Friedrich, Schulte, the ex‐abbé Michaud, the ex‐father Hyacinthe, and surrounded by Jansenist and Anglican bishops, by Protestant and schismatic ministers, by rationalists of all colors? How comes it that his faith and his learning are not shocked when brought into the midst of that confusion of doctrines and of tongues, and of ignorance of all kinds, which rendered the Congress of Cologne so notorious; that congress whereat the question was discussed “of the reunion of the old Catholics with the other churches having affinity of faith,” which means with all the sects separated from Rome, to the exclusion of the great universal church of S. Augustine, S. Thomas, Pascal, Descartes, Bossuet, Fénelon, de Maistre, Lacordaire, of the eight hundred bishops of the council, and of the sainted Pontiff Pius IX.? How can he, a man of learning, a priest, advanced in years, on the brink of eternity, prefer to put himself under the pastoral crook and the jurisdiction of the Jansenist Archbishop of Utrecht, or of a schismatic Armenian bishop, and fraternize with the Anglican bishops of Lincoln, Ely, and Maryland, rather than remain an humble priest, but proud of that Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church whose admirable unity bursts forth in the midst of the vast persecution which is being begun and prepared for her, and of which the Provost of Munich consents to be the guilty instrument?

This closes my parenthetical remarks on Dr. Döllinger and the Old Catholics, who are in reality merely old Jansenists and very old Protestants, and I come back to M. von Bismarck and to his policy.

Prince von Bismarck and the governments of Germany have no occasion to trouble themselves about the question of settling whether infallibility attaches to the Pope speaking _ex cathedrâ_, or to the Pope united to the council; these are all dogmatic theses with which they have no concern. The pretext got up by politics for trespassing on the domain of religious faith is the following: The politicians allege that the declaration of the council has conferred upon the Pope a _new authority_, that this authority is _absolute_ and _unlimited_, and that this state of things affects the relations between the church and the state, which is thereby thrown upon its defence against possible usurpation. The Emperor of Germany, in a conversation which he recently had at Ems with M. Contzen, the courageous Burgomaster of Aix‐la‐Chapelle, brought out this singular idea of the politicians when he alleged “that the church, by proclaiming the dogma of infallibility, had declared war to the state.”

How can this be? In what respect does the question of the infallibility of the church touch the relations between the church and the state?

The declaration of the Vatican Council is not new; it belongs almost textually to the Council of Florence when it proclaimed the faith which had existed for centuries; it is ancient; all, or nearly all, the bishops at the late council were agreed, and are now all agreed, as to the ground of the doctrine; they were only divided on the question of opportuneness, and Mgr. the Bishop of Orléans, in his pastoral letter of assent, declared that he has always professed the doctrine which had been proclaimed.

Nothing, then, has been changed, and church and state remain in precisely the same situation of reciprocal independence in their distinct spheres, and of harmony in their relations, in which they were before the council.

Some either imagine, through most admirable ignorance, or hypocritically make show of believing, that the pontifical infallibility is a _personal_ privilege, in this sense, that it is conferred _on a person who cannot err in anything_, that the Pope is infallible in all that he says and in everything; that he could lay upon the faithful the obligation of believing any decision that he might proclaim whether in the exclusive domain of science or in the exclusive domain of politics, where faith is not at all involved.

The object of infallibility is the doctrine of the faith and of the revealed law. The church has the deposit of revelation, of the Holy Scriptures, and of tradition; the Pope is its supreme guardian; the evangelical promise of infallibility is nothing else than the promise of _fidelity_ in the custody of this sacred deposit! When the Pope or the council united to the Pope declares that a truth is contained in the deposit of revelation, they do not invent matter, they repeat and discern; they do not create a new truth, they confirm an old one, and cause new light to beam from it.

Infallibility is, then, not personal in the absurd sense in which the word is used; neither is it absolute and without limits; its domain, which is that of faith and morals, is clearly marked out by the constitution of the Vatican Council. “According to the perfectly clear text of the decree,” say the Prussian bishops who met at Fulda in 1871, “all allusion to the domain of politics is completely excluded from the definition of this dogma.” His Eminence Cardinal Antonelli, in his despatch of the 19th of March, 1870, to the Nuncio at Paris, is even more precise. “Political affairs belong,” he says, “according to the order of God and the teachings of the church, to the province of the secular authority, _without any dependence whatever_ on any other.”

But, as between the secular power and the church, relations are necessary, these are settled by the two authorities through arrangements or concordats.

I allow myself to call Prince von Bismarck’s attention to this point. Positive relations between the church and states have been settled by concordats only; always, at all periods of history, the popes alone have negotiated concordats with the states; pontifical infallibility has absolutely no connection with concordats, and the Pope when he signs them does not speak _ex cathedrâ_ and as supreme doctor of the church. How, then, can the declaration of the council have changed the relations between the church and governments, and how can the church, by proclaiming the dogma of infallibility, be said to have declared war to the state?

It is, then, a mere matter of pretext. In point of fact, it is the German Empire which is laying claim to absolute and unlimited power in the domain of religion as well as in the domain of politics; it examines and judges dogmas, intrudes itself into ecclesiastical discipline; it closes the priest’s mouth in his pulpit—by the lex Lutziana; it closes Catholic colleges and schools; it forbids religious to preach, to hear confessions, and even to celebrate Mass; it forbids the bishops to canonically exclude from the bosom of the church those who openly separate themselves therefrom; it banishes, for no crime, without trial and in bodies, the religious orders, in the same way that Louis XIV. (though he could give better reasons) drove the Huguenots from the soil of France; it favors schism, and aims at establishing a national church. It is, then, the German state _which is declaring war to the church_, and which is raising claim to political and religious infallibility by founding a veritable civil theocracy.

Let us put aside the pretext, which can in no wise serve either for the justification or for the explanation of the conduct of the government of Berlin. Let us examine the real motives which governed that conduct, the circumstances by which the emperor was carried away, and the fatal temptations which deluded him.

VI.

Foremost among these reasons and temptations has been, as I have said before, the alliance with Italy. It was the first cause, and was the signal for the sudden change which took place in the interior policy of the German Empire. This is evident from the fact that the political storm burst forth during the last session of Parliament precisely upon the occasion of a paragraph in the draft of the address got up by the national liberal party, and which was a stone hurled at the papacy. This was taking place at Berlin at the very hour when the Italo‐German alliance had been concluded at Rome; the coincidence is striking, and proves that war against the Catholic Church and her head has been made a condition of this alliance.

The next temptation, the second blunder of Prince von Bismarck, has been his exclusive alliance with the national liberal party, whose character I have defined above. This alliance with pseudo‐liberalism is the corollary of his alliance with Italy; both rest within and without on the revolutionary and anti‐Christian principle. War on Rome and the papacy has been the condition of the alliance with Italy; war on the Catholics in Germany has been the condition of the alliance with the national liberal party.

Prince von Bismarck had, for several years, met a keen resistance to his plans from the national liberal party, while during the same period he found a support in the conservative section of the Prussian chambers, with whom were joined the few Catholics of note who happened to be members of them.

To‐day he turns away from this weakened but still powerful conservative section, and he wages the bitterest war against the centre section, which is made up of Catholics. These two sections watch over the deposit of old German traditions; they wish to preserve the federal and constitutional character of the Empire, to maintain the Christian and denominational character of the schools, and throughout the nation, religious peace. Latterly the conservative section has become weak; it has yielded to M. von Bismarck’s policy; but sooner or later its traditions will bring it to the side of the section of the centre, in order that both may unite in sustaining the historic principles of the Germanic race against the centralizing anti‐religious policy of the national liberal party, which represents above all else the idea of the French Revolution.

The section of the centre, which, in 1870, in point of numbers amounted in the parliament to but very little, has seen its power increase proportionately with the development of the pseudo‐liberal party of centralization, of omnipotence of the state, of political levelling, and of anti‐Christian reaction. The outrage committed on the papacy by the Italian government gave increased energy to the Catholic movement, and the section of the centre, which, at the time it was first organized, consisted of fifty members only, saw its numbers increase after the elections to more than sixty, all united together by strong convictions; it can count to‐day nearly eighty, and it is safe to predict that, unless the government sends into the interior, or into exile, or puts in prison the leaders of the Catholic movement, the party of the centre will, after the next elections, thanks to the war begun against the church, have gained a force of more than one hundred votes, which will thus counterbalance those of the national liberal party.

It is this growing power of the party of the centre, the fruit of M. von Bismarck’s policy, which has impelled him to his policy of violence and anger against the Catholic Church; he means to make the clergy, the Jesuits, the religious orders, and the bishops pay for the political loss of rest occasioned to him by this phalanx which is growing into a legion, and at whose head stand such powerful leaders as Reichensperger, Mallinckrodt, and Windthorst. The eloquent words of these orators, as in former times those of O’Connell in England, and Montalembert in France, spread beyond the boundaries of Germany, to arouse and stir up everywhere all lovers of right, justice, true liberty, and the church of Jesus Christ.

The third temptation of the German government has been the stand taken in the Vatican Council by nearly all the bishops of Germany and of Austria. These pious and learned prelates were all agreed, along with those of the entire world, as to the mere ground of the doctrine; all or nearly all were infallibilists; Josephism, Fébronianism, had been for a long time dying, if not dead; but these same bishops were nearly all inopportunists. This M. von Bismarck misapprehended, he believed that there was, among the bishops in council, a real dissent as to doctrine; he imagined that the majority of the German and Austrian bishops would separate from Rome to follow M. Döllinger in the path of defection or of schism, through which he is moving to his ruin. The Italian alliance and the alliance with the national liberal party carried M. von Bismarck into hostile action against Rome; the difference of opinion among the bishops on the question of the opportuneness of the decision by the council led him to hope that he would find therein the elements for a _Janist_(194) and national church.

In this he has been entirely mistaken. “He had left the Holy Spirit out of his reckoning,” said recently to me a learned ecclesiastic of Berlin, and I add that he had also not reckoned on the faith and virtue of the episcopate.

Observe what is going on and how the Catholic tide is rising and resisting. M. von Bismarck met at Sedan a splendid, courageous French army, which, badly led and crushed by the fire of the German artillery, was forced to capitulate; he will henceforth find in opposition to him the Catholic populations, with their clergy and their bishops at their head, who will rise, in the name of God and of the liberty of the church, who will resist and never surrender.

M. von Bismarck is about to have experience of what the Catholic bishops are and of what they can do. They will not conspire; they will not sow rebellion and revolution; they will not join themselves to the red international party, but they will resist and will not yield. “In this present sad condition of things,” said the bishops met together at Fulda in April, 1872, “we will fulfil our duty by not disturbing the peace between the church and the state.” “As Christians,” said the learned Bishop of Paderborn, in his touching address to the exiled Jesuits—“as Christians, we can oppose neither force nor overt resistance to the measures of governmental authority. Albeit such measures seem to us iniquitous and unjustifiable, we may only meet them by that passive resistance which our divine Master Jesus Christ has taught us by his words and example; that silence, calm and full of dignity; that patience, tranquil and resigned, but abounding in hope; that loving prayer which heaps burning coals on the heads of our persecutors.”

Such is the admirable language of the German bishops, as it fell from the lips of the Archbishop of Cologne, Mgr. von Droste‐Vischering, on the very day preceding that on which he was led captive by a guard of soldiers to the fortress of Minden. The calm and intrepid Bishop of Ermeland is deprived of his salary and injured in his authority; he is marked out for punishment, and he awaits the coming of the soldiers with the fetters to bind him.

I cannot recall the venerated name of Mgr. Krementz without adding to it the illustrious one of Mgr. Mermillod, whom all Europe will continue to address as Bishop of Hebron and Geneva, despite that decision of the council of state which forbids him to exercise any function whatever, whether as bishop or as curate, and which cuts him off from all salary. Here, then, we have this _republican_ and _liberal_ Switzerland suppressing the Jesuits and all cognate religious orders, the brothers of the schools, the sisters of charity; closing seminaries, as at Soleure, because the moral theology of S. Liguori was taught there; unseating bishops, as at Geneva; and the people that do these things are yet shameless enough to talk of liberty, while all the speech‐makers of liberalism, whose hair stands erect at the mention of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and who dinned the world with their clamors in the young Mortara case, cannot find a single word of liberality, not a single protest, not a single expression of indignation, to stigmatize these unheard‐of outrages against all liberties at once, and against all the rights of human conscience.

I have just been adverting to the passive resistance of the bishops in Germany; but the lay movement, which is kept strictly within the law, is less passive, less resigned, and is somewhat inflamed by politics. The reaction against the unwarranted persecution set on foot a year ago is breaking out everywhere. A committee of direction has been formed at Mainz, whose business is to centralize the legal resistance of German Catholics for the defence of religious liberty thus threatened and assailed. This committee, in their address dated in July last, call upon the Catholics of Germany to a crusade in opposition to the aggressions of the government. “We claim,” says this address, “for our creed that liberty and independence guaranteed to it by the constitution; and under the device, _For God and our Country_, we will fight to the last for the maintenance of our rights.” This address is signed by some of the most illustrious names of Germany, foremost among which I may mention those of Count Felix de Löe, of Baron de Frankenberg, of Count C. de Stolberg, and of the Prince of Isenburg.

A numerous meeting of Catholics voted to send the Archbishop of Munich an address praising him for his firmness and encouraging him in the contest which he is maintaining. At Breslau, a Catholic Congress has just assembled with great _éclat_. All the Catholic men of note in Germany were present at it. Vent was therein given to the most energetic complaints and the most indignant protests, resolutions of great firmness were adopted, a new impulse was given to all those associations which, like that of S. Boniface, of S. Charles Borromeo, and of Pius IX., have multiplied on German soil works of teaching and of charity; powerful preparations were in this congress made for resistance, while confiding in their rights and in God.

While the Catholic laity were thus meeting and organizing at Breslau and at Mainz, the bishops were quietly deliberating at Fulda, presided over by the Archbishop of Cologne, who is mindful of his illustrious predecessor, Clement Augustus. There, as the apostles of old in the _cenaculum_, they tarry in prayer, and they will come forth with a confidence and a courage such as have overcome adversaries far more powerful than the Prince von Bismarck.

VII.

The old _régime_, before it died out, made trial of rebellion against the church. Frederick the Great was certainly as able as M. von Bismarck; he had the world at his feet, and the church in Germany, infected with the doctrines of Fébronius, was apparently in the pangs of death. The last act recorded in history of the then three ecclesiastical electors of Mayence, Cologne, and Trèves had been to meet with the Archbishop of Salzburg, Primate of Germany, for the purpose of drawing up the _Punctuations of Ems_ (1786), which were a code of rebellion against the Holy See. What a contrast with the present assembling of the German bishops at Fulda! These servile _Punctuations of Ems_ were beginning to be carried out, when the armies of the French Republic came down and inflicted upon the authors of them the punishment they deserved.

Every one knows about Pombal, Choiseul, and Charles III., who confined the Jesuits within certain territorial limits, drove them away, cast them into prison, or sent them into exile, pretty much in the same way as M. von Bismarck is doing.

The power which did all this was swallowed up by the French Revolution.

This revolution, _satanic_, to use M. de Maistre’s term, _out and out anti‐Christian_, as M. de Tocqueville calls it, in its turn drove out, exiled, put to death, whether in the massacre of September, the drownings of the Loire, by the axe of the guillotine or the dagger of ruffians, the priests, Jesuits, and religious whom the old régime had spared.

But this sanguinary revolution went down in the slough of the Directory, and Napoleon put an end to it.

That extraordinary man perceived that persecution wounds the hand which uses it; he sought to make peace with the church; he reopened the churches, recalled the priests and the bishops, and signed the concordat. This was the great epoch of his reign: Ulm, Austerlitz, and Jena.

But the potent emperor, intoxicated by glory and by pride, having become master of the world, thought he would be master of the church as well; his rule was over bodies, he sought to extend it over souls; which is the dream of all founders of empire. He stretched out his hand to the States of the Church, and annexed them to the French Empire; for which he was excommunicated by that gentle Pope Pius VII. He seized the pope, bore him away from Rome into exile at Savona and at Fontainebleau, and he found that under the lamb‐like exterior of his victim there beat the heart of a lion. He summoned together the council of 1811, thinking that it would be an easy matter to form a national church of which he would be Supreme Pontiff.

This took place in 1811. The next year brought the campaign of 1812, to be followed by the events of 1813 and 1814; Leipsic, Elba, Waterloo, and the rock of St. Helena last of all.

There is another example nearer to our times, upon which I have looked as a witness, and which I submit for the meditations of the Emperor of Germany.

King William I. of Orange fell into precisely the same blunder which William IV. is now repeating. He ruled over the beautiful kingdom of the Netherlands, so easy for him to maintain, and which through his mistakes was broken up. He, too, sought to constitute national unity through unity of language and of religion. So he suppressed, in 1825, the Catholic schools and colleges in Belgium, drove out the Jesuits and the brothers of the Christian schools, founded at Louvain the Philosophic College in which the clergy of the future national church were to be trained, violated the right to teach and of association, prosecuted the Bishop of Ghent, Mgr. de Broglie, got him condemned, and he was pilloried, in effigy, on a public square of Ghent, between two felons. This reckless and blind policy excited in Belgium a movement of resistance similar to that which we remark at the present moment in Germany. Five years later, in 1830, the Catholic liberal union was brought about, and every one knows the events to which it gave birth.

This much is matter of history. The German persecution is a trial for the church and for Catholics, but it will also bear with it the salvation which a trial properly borne always brings. Two results will come out of this trial: the Catholic Church, which they mean to weaken or prostrate, will, as always heretofore, come out of the contest more united and more powerful; Protestantism, in whose name the persecution is set on foot, will be mortally wounded by it, and will see its dissolution hastened; pseudo‐liberalism, which will have played the part of intolerance and persecution, will be unmasked, and all the friends of a prudent and sincere liberty will make their reconciliation with the persecuted, one with that great Catholic Church, ever militant, ever attacked, sometimes a martyr, but which ever in the end comes out triumphant over these trials which temper her anew, purify her, and add to her greatness. The world will understand that in trials such as she is now going through in Germany she is fighting for the liberty of the conscience of the human race.

Governments, and in particular great empires founded on force, look upon the independence of the universal church with feelings of jealousy and impatience; the idea of a national church has always been a favorite and a pleasing one with despotisms, because it promises them a servile instrument to carry out their designs. But when the church is subject to the state, there can be no church. The high level of the consciences of the people sinks as freedom disappears. The true and divine church can be contained within no boundaries and in no nationality; it is the spiritual kingdom of consciences and of souls; from the independence of the church, the independence of consciences and souls derives its life. If the church is under the yoke of the state, all consciences must suffer like subjection. The world will at last comprehend that national churches, that is, churches in subjection, can have only enslaved souls as followers, and that there can be no freedom for the conscience of man, except upon the sole condition of the independence of a church, accountable, not to any human power, but to God.

Will the persecution which has been begun be kept up with the same tenacity and violence which the Prince von Bismarck now displays? I fear less from it for the church than for himself and the German emperor, whose good sense, uprightness, and religious conscience must feel out of place in the midst of a policy so _outrée_, revolutionary, anti‐Christian, and anti‐constitutional, so contrary to his instincts, his natural disposition, and his antecedents. “It cannot be,” said M. A. Reichensperger, “that a monarch, crowned with the laurels of victory, after having achieved external peace through the courage and the fidelity of the _entire_ German nation, will authorize the persecution of millions of Germans on account of their faith, and consent to destroy internal peace—that peace which in particular is the work of his royal brother, whose memory is still blessed by all Catholics.”

I add my prayer and my hope to the prayer and the hope of the great German patriot and orator, but I confess that his fears, which are greater than his hopes, are felt by me also, and to like extent. The times are gloomy. “The deluge is drawing nigh; but on the waters I see the ark of the church,” said Count de Montalembert. “She will ride it out, she will live, and will preside at the funeral of the very powers that thought to have prepared her own.”

Let Prince Bismarck not forget the words recently uttered by Pius IX. at one of those allocutions so sublimely eloquent and touchingly holy in spirit, which, from his prison in the Vatican he addresses to the world. He was addressing German Catholics, and he told them: “Be confident, be united; for a stone will fall from the mountain, and will shatter the feet of the Colossus. If God wills that other persecutions arise, the church does not fear them; on the contrary, she becomes stronger thereby, and she purifies herself, because even in the church there are things that need to be purified, and nothing contributes more thereto than the persecutions exercised on her by the great ones of the earth.”

Prince von Bismarck may perhaps have smiled on reading these words fallen from the lips of the Pontiff Pius IX.; if so, he is sadly mistaken; those old popes who are imprisoned and exiled, but who, to use the profound expression of the Count de Maistre, _always come back_, are also gifted with the command of words which are “as burning coals heaped upon the heads of their persecutors.” The Emperor Napoleon I., too, smiled at the excommunication hurled at him by Pope Pius VII., then weak and disarmed, and his complete ruin followed shortly after. I advise the prince chancellor to bear in mind the stone falling from the mountain and breaking the feet of the Colossus. I had myself, in my book published in 1860, ventured to refer to that same passage of Scripture: “That splendid figure,” I said, “which Daniel sets before us of kingdoms WITH FEET PART OF IRON AND PART OF CLAY, and of the church, _that stone, cut out of a mountain, without hands, which broke in pieces the kingdoms_, and _became a great mountain_, and filled _the whole earth_—that figure has its application in every age, and should stand for all Christians as a hope amid trials and a teaching to all the proud.”

A Christmas Memory.

God did anoint thee with his odorous oil To wrestle, not to reign; and he assigns All thy tears over like pure crystallines For younger fellow‐workers of the soil To wear for amulets.

E. B. BROWNING.

No more brilliant party ever assembled for Christmas festivities in Northern Vermont than that which met on such an occasion, very early in this century, at the home of a young lawyer in the beautiful little village of Sheldon, since widely renowned for the efficacy of its healing waters.

The host and hostess were from families who came among the first settlers to Vermont. The company was gathered from all parts of the new and sparsely settled state, with a sprinkling of students who were completing their legal course at the famous law‐school of Judge Reeves, in Litchfield, Conn.—of which their host was a graduate—and of young ladies and gentlemen from different places in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Several of these young ladies were passing the winter with acquaintances in Sheldon, and the whole country from the “Province Line” (and even beyond it) to St. Alban’s was made merry with a succession of gay parties, sleigh‐rides, dinners, suppers, and dances given in their honor. Even the sequestered hamlets of Richford and Montgomery, nestled among their own green hills, did not escape the general hilarity, but were startled from their quiet decorum, and resounded with a merriment which awakened unwonted echoes in their peaceful valleys.

Among the guests at this Christmas festival was a young lady of Vermont, Miss Fanny A——, whose fair form rises before us as we write from the dim mists of childhood’s earliest memories—a vision of gentle dignity and youthful loveliness which time has no power to efface.

Though some years younger than the lady of the house, she was her very dear and intimate friend, and was now passing a few weeks with her. Her queenly manners, the silver ripple of her low, sweet voice in the flow of a conversation which held her listeners spell‐bound, as it were, by its clear and impressive utterances, bore witness to her familiarity with the most refined circles of city and country society, and the high culture of her splendid intellect.

Other circumstances, as will be seen, combined with her personal charms at this time to make her the centre of interest and attraction wherever she appeared.

She was the youngest daughter of a Green Mountain hero whom Vermont most delights to honor. Her father died when she was too young to realize her loss. Some years later, her mother—from whom she inherited her remarkable beauty and graceful dignity—married a most amiable man, who was capable of appreciating the rich treasure she committed to his charge in the person of her young daughter. Every advantage the country offered was secured to develop and polish the gem of which he was inexpressibly proud, and over which he watched with a solicitude as tender as her own father could have exercised.

At that time, the gay society in New England was strongly tinctured with the species of infidelity introduced and fostered by the writings of Thomas Paine and his disciples, among whom Fanny’s father had been conspicuous. Her step‐father was not of that school, but he detested the cant and Puritanism of the only religious people he had ever known—regarding them as pretensions of which even those who adopted them were often the unconscious dupes. He had never been drawn within reach of better influences, then exercised only by the Protestant Episcopal Church in Vermont, to rescue intelligent thinkers from the grasp of infidelity. He conducted the education of his gifted daughter, therefore, with the most scrupulous care to avoid entirely all considerations of religion in any form. When her active and earnest mind would peer beyond the veil he had so carefully drawn between its pursuits and the interests of eternity, and send her to startle him with some question touching those interests which he could only answer by evasive ridicule, or an emphatic request that she would refrain from troubling her head about such matters, she would retire to ponder within herself, even while striving to obey her earthly father, the higher obligations imposed by One in heaven. Light and wisdom from above soon illuminated the soul that surrendered itself a willing victim before the altar of eternal truth. She was led by a divine hand, through paths she knew not, to a temple of which she had scarcely heard, and, while still living among those to whom the Catholic religion was entirely unknown, entered its portals to find herself—scarcely less to her own astonishment than to the amazement and horror of her devoted parents—a Catholic, as firmly established and steadfastly resolved as if she had been born and educated in the faith!

The grief and indignation of her parents knew no bounds. They looked upon it as a most disgraceful infatuation. Peremptorily imposing silence upon her in relation to the subject, they determined to suppress it, if possible, until every means had been used to divert her mind from the fatal delusion.

All the wiles and artifices of the gayest and most fashionable circles in various American cities to which she was taken, were exhausted in vain to captivate her youthful fancy and deliver her soul from its mysterious thraldom. In vain the ardent addresses of devoted admirers—who were destined in the near future to be the brightest ornaments the bench and bar of their state could boast—were laid at her feet. In vain were all those worldly allurements, generally so irresistible to the young, spread before her. Her soul turned steadfastly away from each bewitching enticement, to solace itself with thoughts of the humble sanctuary in Montreal, where the weary bird had found a place in which she might build her nest, even within the tabernacle of thy house, O Lord of hosts!

In the autumn preceding the Christmas festival of which I write, the ramblers had returned from their fruitless wanderings. Fanny’s parents, discouraged and discomfited, resolved at this crisis to enlist the zeal of a few very intimate friends in their cause, by disclosing to them the great and unaccountable calamity which had befallen their child.

Among those whom they earnestly entreated to aid them in efforts to extricate her from the grasp of the great deceiver, was the lady with whom she was now passing the weeks of the early winter. A Connecticut Episcopalian of the High‐Church stamp, she occupied what they playfully called a “half‐way house,” at which they hoped she would be able to persuade Fanny to stop. She invited several gay young ladies to meet and enliven Fanny’s visit, but took the greatest pains to conceal from them the religious tendencies of her beautiful guest. She entered with great zeal upon every scheme for winter pastimes, in the hope of diverting the mind of her young friend from its absorbing theme. In their private conversations, she exhausted every argument to convince Fanny that the Episcopal Church offered all the consolations for which her soul was yearning. In vain, in vain! She who had been called to drink from the fountain‐head could not slake her thirst with draughts from scattered pools, which brought no refreshment to her fainting spirit. Vain also were the precautions used for concealment. Suspicions soon arose among her young companions that there was something wrong with Fanny. A rosary had been partially revealed as she drew her kerchief from her pocket. Worse still, a crucifix had been discovered under her pillow! Here were proofs of superstition indeed, of rank idolatry in unmistakable form, and no one knows to what unimaginable extent! Then it began to be whispered around the admiring and compassionate circle that she had not only taken the first step on the downward road, but was even now contemplating the still more fatal and final one of religious immolation!

It was their apprehension of this direful result which imparted a new and melancholy interest in their eyes to all her words and actions. Though she maintained a modest reserve upon the subjects dearest to her heart, they thought they could discover some mysterious connection with these in every expression she uttered.

On several occasions, the most adventurous of her companions endeavored to penetrate the silence that sealed her lips in regard to her religious convictions, by direct questions, and, when these failed, by ridicule of such “absurd superstitions”; but to no purpose. Her nearest approach to any satisfactory remark was in reply to one of these questions: “It is impossible to convey any clear idea to your mind, in its present state, concerning these matters. Your opinions are founded upon prejudice, and your prejudices are the result of your entire ignorance in relation to them. If you really desire to be better informed, you need, first of all, to pray with humility for light and guidance, and then seek for knowledge. If you do this with sincerity, you will surely be instructed, and ‘know of the doctrine’; but, if you refuse to take this first step, all the teaching in the world will be of no avail. ‘They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. If they believe not Moses and the prophets, neither would they believe though one should come to them from the dead.’ ”

She rebuked ridicule with such calm dignity that it was soon abandoned, one of her assailants, a very lively young lady, remarking one day: “It is astonishing to see how terribly in earnest Fanny is! She certainly believes in the Catholic religion with all her heart, though how a person with her extensive information and splendid talents can receive such absurdities is a puzzle to common sense!”

But her severe trials were in her home. Her parents were unutterably grieved when she persisted in accepting the Catholic faith. This further determination to forsake those who had so fondly loved and tenderly cherished her, and who were so justly proud of the use she had made of the opportunities for improvement which their solicitude had secured for her, was beyond all human endurance.

If she had been the victim of adversity or of disappointed hopes, there might have been some excuse; but that the idol of doting parents should abandon her elegant home to the desolation in which her departure would enshroud it, and turn from all the advantages that wealth, position, and the homage of society could offer—dashing to the ground on the very threshold of life the brilliant prospects which were opening before her—was worse than madness! They complained bitterly to her of her ingratitude and heartless disregard of their feelings and wishes; poured unmeasured and contemptuous reproaches upon her for stifling the modest womanly instincts of her refined and delicate nature, to strike out boldly upon a new road hitherto untrodden by any woman of New England. Remonstrances, pleading, reproaches, and contempt were alike unavailing. Listening only to the persuasions of that “invisible Lover” whose voice had called her to relinquish the seductive charms which surrounded her worldly course, she turned away from them steadfastly to follow him and carry his cross up the steep and thorny paths of penance and self‐ abnegation, offering herself entirely to him on the Calvary made glorious to her by his precious blood.

Not “immediately,” however, like those whom he called of old, did she “leave the ship and her father, to follow him.” Weary years of waiting and yearning, far from the tabernacles where her soul had chosen its home, did she accord in tender regard for the feelings of those, so truly and deeply beloved, who could not give her up, and who had no clue by which to trace the course her spirit was taking, or power even to conjecture the motives that actuated her.

When at length the time arrived to which they had consented to limit her stay with them, who shall describe the pangs that rent her heart in a parting so full of grief; in severing these nearest and dearest ties, and in witnessing the anguish which overwhelmed those around whom her tenderest earthly affections were entwined?

Alone, but full of peace, “leaning on the arm of her Beloved,” did she tread the painful path. Her parents could not accompany her to witness the sacrifice which prostrated their fondest hopes, nor could they ever bring themselves to visit her in the sanctuary she had chosen.

Her Sheldon friend did so repeatedly, and was amazed to find her radiant with a joy which her countenance had never before revealed—happy in the peaceful home that offered only poverty and an unceasing round of labors in the service of the sick and suffering, with a happiness which the splendors of her worldly one could never impart.

Multitudes of New England people visiting Montreal flocked to the convent, begging to see the lovely young nun of the Hôtel Dieu, who was the first daughter New England had given to the sacred enclosure, and whom they claimed as belonging especially to them through her connection with their favorite Revolutionary hero.

So continual were these interruptions that she was driven at length to obtain the permission of the mother‐superior absolutely to decline appearing in answer to such calls, except when they were made by the friends of former days, for whom she still preserved and cherished the liveliest affection.

By a singular coincidence—or rather, let us say, through tender memories of the gentle nun long since departed from the Hôtel Dieu, and the prevailing efficacy of her prayers—a large proportion of those who were present at the Christmas party at Sheldon, including the mistress of the feast and many of her family, were, from time to time as years flew by, received into the bosom of the Holy Catholic Church.

And so does our gracious and mighty Mother, “ever ancient, ever new,” win her triumphs, one by one, perpetually through all the ages—wins them often in the face, nay, even perforce, of circumstances apparently the most directly opposed to her influence; accomplishes them by means so weak and simple as would seem, according to all human reasoning, utterly inadequate. In countries far remote from her gentle influence, one is called—we hardly know how or why—in this place, another in that, as if the words of our divine Lord found their fulfilment even in this: “Two shall be in the field: one shall be taken, and one shall be left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill: one shall be taken, and one shall be left.”

And every soul thus called to launch its eternal interests upon the ocean of infinite truth must encounter much the same appalling trials, be haunted by the same startling doubts and dark forebodings. Over the sunken rocks of heresy and unbelief along this coast the billows break with a force that affrights the stoutest heart, and many a would‐be voyager shrinks back dismayed before their power; but once pluck up heart of grace to pass the foaming barrier, in the mid‐ocean all is “peace, and joy unspeakable, and full of glory.”

We cannot more fitly conclude this little sketch of a real event than by a quotation from Montalembert’s closing chapter on the “Anglo‐Saxon Nuns”:

“Is this a dream, the page of a romance? Is it only history—the history of a past for ever ended? No; once more it is what we behold and what happens amongst us every day.... Who, then, is this invisible Lover, dead upon a cross eighteen hundred years ago, who thus attracts to him youth, beauty, and love?—who appears to them clothed with a glory and a charm which they cannot withstand?—who seizes on the living flesh of our flesh, and drains the purest blood of our blood? Is it a man? No; it is God. There lies the secret, there the key of this sublime and sad mystery. God alone could win such victories and deserve such sacrifices. Jesus, whose godhead is amongst us daily insulted or denied, proves it daily, with a thousand other proofs, by those miracles of self‐denial and self‐devotion which are called vocations. Young and innocent hearts give themselves to him, to reward him for the gift he has given us of himself; and this sacrifice by which we are crucified is but the answer of human love to the love of that God who was crucified for us.”

The House That Jack Built.

By The Author Of “The House Of Yorke.”

In Two Parts.