faith.  Do not object.  I am your father.  I can foresee all.  I know you will marry only according to the dictates of your heart.  Wait then until it has spoken, to settle the question....  If you love a Catholic, you will then have occasion to pay a compliment to your betrothed by adopting his faith, of which he will be very sensible....  From now until then, I shall not prevent you from following ceremonies which please you.  Those of the Roman liturgy are, assuredly, among the best; I myself attended Saint Peter’s at the time of the pontifical government....  The taste, the magnificence, the music, all moved me....  But to take a definite, irreparable step, I repeat, you must wait.  Your actual condition of a Protestant has the grand sentiment of being more neutral, less defined.”

What words to listen to by a heart already touched by the attraction of ’grace and by the nostalgia of eternal life!  But the heart was that of a young girl very pure and very tender.  To judge her father was to her impossible, and the Baron’s firmness had convinced her that she must obey his wishes and pray that he be enlightened.  She therefore waited, hoping, sustained and directed meanwhile by Cardinal Guerillot, who later on was to baptize her and to obtain for her the favor of approaching the holy table for the first time at the Pope’s mass.  That prelate, one of the noblest figures of which the French bishopric has had cause to be proud, since Monseigneur Pie, was one of those grand Christians for whom the hand of God is as visible in the direction of human beings as it is invisible to doubtful souls.  When Fanny, already devoted to her charities, confided in him the serious troubles of her mind and the discord which had arisen between her and her father on the so essential point of her baptism, the Cardinal replied: 

“Have faith in God.  He will give you a sign when your time has come.”  And he uttered those words with an accent whose conviction had filled the young girl with a certainty which had never left her.

In spite of his seventy years, and of the experiences of the confession, in spite of the disenchanting struggle with the freemasonry of his French diocese, which had caused his exile to Rome, the venerable man looked at Fanny’s marriage from a supernatural standpoint.  Many priests are thus capable of a naivete which, on careful analysis, is often in the right.  But at the moment the antithesis between the authentic reality and that which they believe, constitutes an irony almost absurd.  When he had baptized Fanny, the old Bishop of Clermont was possessed by a joy so deep that he said to her, to express to her the more delicately the tender respect of his friendship: 

“I can now say as did Saint Monica after the baptism of Saint Augustine:  ‘Cur hic sim, nescio; jam consumpta spe hujus saeculi’.  I do not know why I remain here below.  All my hope of the age is consummated.  And like her I can add—­the only thing which made me desire to remain awhile was to see you a Catholic before dying.  The traveller, who has tarried, has now nothing to do but to go.  He has gathered the last and the prettiest flower."....