consolation in the example of a God who suffered and died for us.  Madame D——­ will be so kind, I am sure, as to read you a chapter of it every day, if you cannot read yourself.  Give her my kindest regards, and beg her to write and tell me how you are going on, and how she is herself.  If you will not think me troublesome I will write to you more frequently.  Good-bye, my dear friend.  May God pour upon you His grace and blessing.  Be patient and of good cheer.

“Your ever devoted friend,

“WIDOW....”

“In taking the Communion to-day my prayers were specially for you.  My daughter, Henriette, and Ernest, who has passed a much better night, beg to be remembered, as also does Clara.  We often talk of you.  Let me know how you are, I beg of you.  When you have read L’Ame sur le Calvaire you can send it back to me, and I will let you have L’Esprit Consolateur.”

The letter and the books were never sent, for my mother, who was to have forwarded them, learnt that Mademoiselle Guyon had died.  Some of the consolatory remarks which the letter contains may seem very trite, but are there any better ones to offer a person afflicted with cancer?  They are, at all events, as good as laudanum.  As a matter of fact the Revolution had left no impress upon the people among whom I lived.  The religious ideas of the people were not touched; the congregations came together again, and the nuns of the old orders, converted into schoolmistresses, imparted to women the same education as before.  Thus my sister’s first mistress was an old Ursuline nun, who was very fond of her, and who made her learn by heart the psalms which are chanted in church.  After a year or two the worthy old lady had reached the end of her tether, and was conscientious enough to come and tell my mother so.  She said, “I have nothing more to teach her; she knows all that I know better than I do myself.”  The Catholic faith revived in these remote districts, with all its respectable gravity and, fortunately for it, disencumbered of the worldly and temporal bonds which the ancient regime had forged for it.

This complexity of origin is, I believe, to a great extent the cause of my seeming inconsistency.  I am double, as it were, and one half of me laughs while the other weeps.  This is the explanation of my cheerfulness.  As I am two spirits in one body, one of them has always cause to be content.  While upon the one hand I was only anxious to be a village priest or tutor in a seminary.  I was all the time dreaming the strangest dreams.  During divine service I used to fall into long reveries; my eyes wandered to the ceiling of the chapel, upon which I read all sorts of strange things.  My thoughts wandered to the great men whom we read of in history.  I was playing one day, when six years old, with one of my cousins and other friends, and we amused ourselves by selecting our future professions.  “And what will you be?” my cousin asked