Volume 3 — Translated from the French. THREE WOMEN OF OUR TIME. EUGÉNIE DE GUÉRIN--CHARLOTTE BRONTË--RAHEL LEVIN. BY GABRIEL CERNY.

It is now quite a number of years since it became the fashion to study women, and writers of note have called to life more than one who would have preferred being left to oblivion under her cold tombstone. Is it not enough to have lived once even if we have lived wisely? "No one would accept an existence that was to last forever," said a philosopher who had suffered from the injustice of mankind.

It seems, for example, as if the heroines of the seventeenth century must smile in pity to see the pettiest actions of their lives as well as the deepest inspirations of their hearts given up for food to the indiscreet curiosity and vivid imagination of the eminent philosopher who had so lovingly resuscitated them. And the intellectual women who came after them, are not they not often wounded by the judgments passed upon them by the most inquisitive and fertile of critics?

In two works entirely devoted to woman, a fantaisiste who was once an historian, has tried to explain the best means to insure happiness to the fairer half of the human race, with a minuteness very tender in intention but often quite repugnant to our taste. He states in detail the hygienic care indispensable to creatures weak in body, feeble in mind, and so helpless when left to themselves that in truth there are but two conditions in the world suitable for them--to be courtesans if they are beautiful, and maid-servants if they are destitute of physical charms; nay, such is the arrogance of this literary Céladon that he would assign to the wife an inferior position and leave the husband to superintend not only business affairs but household matters. In short, when we read these books we seem to be attending a session of the Naturalization Society, teaching the public to rear and domesticate some valuable animal much to be distrusted.

Not even the toilettes of the eighteenth century have failed to arouse the interest of two authors of our day, who, displeased perhaps with the slight success of their book, have now abandoned the range of realities for the dreary delusions of a lawless realism. In a work as long as it is tiresome, they have described with feminine lucidity the various costumes of the ladies of the court of Louis XV., of the Revolution, and the Empire.

A book has now appeared which, according to its title, promises to show us the "Intellect of Women of our own Time," but in reality confines itself to giving three interesting biographies. The author was already known to the public through a romance which reveals true talent "Daniel Blady," the story of a musician, is written in the German style, and shows an elevation of sentiment, a straightforward honesty of principle, and above all a simplicity of devotion rarely to be met with in the world. M. Camille Selden admires modest women, incapable of personal ambition or vanity, who consecrate all the tender and enlivening faculties of soul and reason to the service of a husband, father, or brother, and such a woman he portrays in "Daniel Blady."

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In order to represent fairly the women of our day M. Selden has selected three different characters; three names worn modestly, usefully, and honorably; three contrasts of position, race, doctrine, and education: a French Catholic, an English Protestant, a German Jewess: Eugénie de Guérin, Charlotte Brontë, and Rachel Varnhagen von Ense. They were all affectionate, devoted, and self-forgetful; two of them married, and the French-woman alone had the happy privilege of restoring to God a heart and soul that had belonged to no one.

I.

Eugénie de Guérin du Cayla was born and bred en province, although of a truly noble family, of Venetian origin it is said. Her mode of life was that of a woman of the middle class (bourgeoise) enjoying that comparative ease which we see in the country; a large house scantily furnished, a garden less cultivated than the fields, and servants of little or no training, who seem to form a part of the family.

Mlle. de Guérin lost her mother early, and having two brothers and a sister younger than herself, became burthened with the care of a household and family. Her letters and journal show her to us as she was at twenty-seven or twenty-eight years of age, not one of those persons of morose and frigid virtue who are good for nothing but to mend linen and take care of birds, but a woman of intelligent and unembarrassed activity. She made fires, visited the poultry-yard, prepared breakfast for the reapers, and when her work was done, betook herself in all haste to a little retreat which she dignified with the name of study, where she ran through some book or wrote a few pages--always charming, always strong--of a sort of journal of the actions of her life. Eugénie's especial favorite was her brother Maurice, who was five years younger than herself, and it would be impossible to speak of her without recalling the passionate maternal tenderness with which from her earliest youth she regarded this brother whom she had loved to rock and nurse in infancy.

"I remember that you sometimes made me jealous," she wrote to him one day, "it was because I was a little older than you, and I did not know that tenderness and caresses, the hearts milk, are lavished on the little ones."

Devotion was the principle motive-power of Eugénie's actions; ardent prayer and charity profoundly moved her; wind, snow, rain-storms, nothing checked her when she knew that in some corner of the village there were miseries to be relieved, tears to be wiped away. She felt sympathy with all living creatures, even if they were inanimate like trees and flowers; she sighed when the wind bowed them down; "she pitied them, comparing them to unhappy human beings bending beneath misfortune," and imitating the example of the great saint, Francis of Assisi, she would gladly have conversed with lambs and turtle-doves.

Mlle. de Guérin pitied the educated peasants who knew how to read and yet could not pray. "Prayer to God," she said, "is the only fit manner to celebrate any thing in this world." And again, "Nothing is easier than to speak to the neglected ones of this world; they are not like us, full of tumultuous or perverse thoughts that prevent them from hearing."

She loved religion with its festivals and splendors; and breathed in God with the incense and flowers on the altar, nor could she ever have understood an invisible, abstract God, a God simply the guardian of morality as Protestants believe him to be.

Most women become useful only through some being whom they love and to whom they refer the actions of their lives; it is their noblest and most natural instinct to efface and lose themselves in another's glory. Having no husband or children, Mlle. de Guérin attached herself to her brother Maurice, a delicate nature, a sad {836} and suffering soul, destined to self-destruction, a lofty but unquiet spirit that was never to find on earth the satisfaction and realization of his hopes. "You are the one of all the family," he wrote to her, "whose disposition is most in sympathy with my own, so far as I can judge by the verses that you send me, in all of which there is a gentle reverie, a tinge of melancholy, in short, which forms, I believe, the basis of my character." Mlle. de Guérin's letters to her brother were not only tender and consoling, but strong and healthy in their tone. Indeed, he needed them, for terrible were his sufferings from the ill-will and indifference of others. He wrote and tried to establish himself as a critic; but some publishers rejected him and others evaded his proposals with vague promises, until with despair he saw every issue closed to him, and knew not what answer to make to his father, who grew impatient at the constant failure of his expectations.

Though ignorant of the world, Mlle, de Guérin did not the less suspect the dangers that Christian faith may encounter. One day, a voice that seemed to come from heaven told her that Maurice no longer prayed; and then we find her trembling and uneasy. "I have received your letter," she says, "and I see you in it, but I do not recognize you; for you only open your mind to me, and it is your heart, your soul, your inmost being that I long to see. Return to prayer, your soul is full of love and craves expansion; believe, hope, love, and all the rest shall be added. If I could only see you a Christian! Oh! I would give my life and everything else for that." . . . Like all persons who try to dispense with the divine restraints of the precepts of the gospel, poor Maurice struggled in a dreary world; his sensitive and poetic soul saw God everywhere except in his own heart; he longed sometimes to be a flower, or a bird, or verdure; his brain and imagination ran away with him, and his soul poured itself forth without restraint, and lost its way through wandering from the veritable Source of life.

This passion for nature led him to write a work which shows genuine power even if it be unproductive; a prose poem in which Christianity is forgotten for the sake of fable and antiquity. But thanks to his sister's prayers, Maurice was one of those who return to God. He passed away without agitation or suffering, smiling on all, and begging his sister Eugénie to read him some spiritual book. At the bottom of his heart he had never ceased to love God, and he returned to him as a little child returns to its mother.

Eugénie did not give herself up to vain despair after Maurice's death. Thinking perpetually of him whom she had loved so deeply, she busied herself with the writings which he had left behind him, and prayed for his soul, recommending him also to the prayers of her friends. She still addressed herself to him, and oppressed with sadness unto death, communed with his absent soul, imploring him to come to her. "Maurice, my friend, what is heaven, that home of friends? Will you never give me any sign of life? Shall I never hear you, as the dead are sometimes said to make themselves heard? Oh! if it be possible, if there exist any communication between this world and the other, return to me!"

But one day she grew weary of this unanswered correspondence, and a moral exhaustion took possession of her. "Let us cast our hearts into eternity," she cried. These were her last words, and she died, glad to see her life accomplished, confiding in the mercy of God, in his goodness who reunites the soul which he has severed here below, but never has forgotten in their bereavement.

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II.

Charlotte Brontë, (Currer Bell,) whom M. Camille Selden offers to us as a type of energy and virtue, was the daughter of a country clergyman. Sad was the childhood and sad the youth of the poor English girl. Her mother was an invalid, her father a man of gloomy and almost fierce disposition, their means were so limited as to border upon poverty, and as if to complete the dreary picture, the scenery about the parsonage was "austere and lugubrious to contemplate, like the sea beneath an impending tempest."

In England the clerical profession is totally unlike the holy mission of a Catholic clergyman. The ecclesiastical life there is a career, not a vocation. "Mr. Brontë never left home unarmed," a singular method of preaching peace to the world and reconciliation among brethren. He was a good father, no doubt--almost all Englishmen are so. But he kept his family at a distance, and spoke to them seldom, and then in a curt and supercilious manner. His morose spirit did not relish the society of children, and if he became the preceptor of his little family, it was rather in order to fulfil a duty and conform himself to custom, than from a feeling of tenderness or even solicitude for their future welfare. Thus the minister's children lived amid influences which were cold and serious, but upright, and in a certain sense strengthening. There are so many children in every English family that parents of the middle class are obliged to treat them less as subordinates than as auxiliaries. The children are less familiar with their parents but more respectful than among us; life is not so easy and gentle, education more masculine.

Independence is the goal toward which all young English people tend, and both girls and boys are early taught that labor alone can lead them to it. In France we long impatiently for the time to shut up our children in the high-walled barracks which we dignify with the name of boarding-schools; for it is extremely necessary, we say, to be rid of idle, noisy boys. Girls are generally educated at home, but either through weakness or indifference, they are treated with far too much indulgence. "Poor little things!" we say pathetically; "who can tell what fate awaits them in married life?" for in this country we so far forget Christian duty as to make marriage a necessity, an obligation, a matter of business, instead of seeking therein, as the English do, a basis of true happiness.

Children, educated as they are in England, early acquire habits of observation and reflection; sitting around the tea-table in the evening, they listen to the conversation of their grandparents, and are often questioned upon the most serious subjects. This is Protestantism, you say. Not at all: it is the remains of the Christian spirit anterior to the Reformation. This spirit is exhibited in habits as in laws. If family life among us were truly catholic, we should possess all this and in greater perfection.

There is another practice in England which is often beneficial, and which we do not dare to adopt openly in France. I mean the habit of writing out one's impressions. This seems to be as natural in England as thought; and mothers, young girls, and men consider it a duty to keep an account of the good ideas that occur to them or of the interesting facts they may observe.

In France, on the contrary, true literary culture is closed to women, and there is a general outcry whenever any woman takes the liberty of publishing a work under her own name. It is thought quite natural that a young girl, with a dress outrageously decolletée and her head covered with flowers, should appear upon a stage and sing a bravura; but let her venture to write, and the world accuses her of want of reserve.

A Frenchman has such a horror of anything methodical and serious that he prefers to educate his daughters without thought or reflection, at hap-hazard and with no provision for {838} the future. Frenchwomen understand everything without study, it is said; this may be true, and the merit is not so great as to make it worth while to deny the assertion. What a superficial method! what an incredible way to acquire knowledge and judgment!

Englishwomen on the contrary, devote themselves to a regular course of instruction; they read a great deal, making extracts and critical notes, and thus avoid idleness and ennui, those two terrible diseases that affect womankind. Unfortunately abuses glide into their reading, and novels or even newspapers hold a place there which they ought not to occupy. This is a fruit of Protestantism, of free inquiry, and if our faith were firm and practical, we should know how to avoid the abuse and accept the useful side of this custom.

But there is again a situation which Englishwomen meet with a better grace than Frenchwomen--we mean the misfortune of remaining unmarried at twenty-eight or thirty years of age--of becoming old maids. With us, as soon as a daughter comes into the world we begin to think of amassing her dower; for it is the value of this dower which is to secure a good or bad marriage for her. We persuade her that it is almost a disgrace to remain unmarried, but by a tacit agreement we conceal from her the fact that marriage, as the Church instituted it, is the union of two souls equal in the sight of God, and that in giving her hand to a man, she becomes half of himself and flesh of his flesh. No, it is not a question of heart or of duty; she marries a man whom she has known scarcely two months, and her family triumphantly congratulate themselves on being freed from the unpleasant possibility of harboring an old maid. To avoid this, some marriages are a mere sale, a present shame, a future misery, and a final sin.

As in England daughters have no dower, and sons are valued much more highly, young women are early prepared not to marry, and are neither sadder nor more unfortunate on that account. Care of the little ones in the family; that pleasant occupation belonging by right to maiden aunts, (tantes berceuses,) study, attentive observation of men and things, and the consciousness of intellectual worth, sustain the Englishwomen until the moment, often distant, and never to arrive for many a one, when a good, sincere, and intelligent man shall unite her lot to his; but as she has self-respect and does not consider loss of youth as loss of caste, she does not accept the suitor unless she knows him well and is certain that he does not wish to take her or buy her pour faire une fin.

Charlotte, like Eugénie and like Rahel, of whom we shall speak in her turn, was rather insignificant in appearance; her features were irregular, her forehead prominent, and her eyes small but deep and piercing in expression. She was educated with two of her sisters in a boarding-school, where the regimen was hard and unhealthy, the uniform coarse, and the food insufficient and ill cooked. Mr. Brontë turned a deaf ear to his eldest daughter's complaints for a long time, and did not decide to take his children home until one of them had already sunk under the injudicious treatment. Charlotte was then placed with Miss W----, with whom she lived eight years as pupil and second teacher. And here M. Camille Selden gives us some excellent remarks upon the difference existing between the French lay pension with its supplementary course, and the English boarding-school.

"In the former, as in a well-disciplined army, every movement, every manoeuvre must be executed in union, even the recess is subject to rules. In the midst of her battalion of teachers and sub-mistresses, the French directress, en grande tenue, resembles a brilliant colonel marching proudly at the head of his squadron in a review."

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"The object of education in England is at once simpler and gentler. It is thought there to be the duty of a woman, as of a man, to develop the judgment by study; that reflection and observation are equally necessary to teach both sexes how to live wisely and think justly. Therefore we never hear of courses of study where under the pretext of maternal education, gentlemen in black coats give out bribes for history, geography--nay, even philosophy, to little girls who come there apparently to study under maternal supervision, but in reality to learn to receive company and dress tastefully; in one word, to rehearse the worldly comedy which a little later they will be condemned to enact."

The author should have completed his picture by giving an exact account of our houses of religious education; but I think he knows little about them, and cares little to get information concerning them, which accounts for certain wants in his book.

Poor Charlotte Brontë was never young, partly because of her childish sufferings, but chiefly because of her serious and inquiring nature, which applied its powers to investigating and analyzing the sources of everything. She did not indulge in the childish ideas of a school girl, and being free from the dangerous enthusiasm that imagination engenders, she understood the full extent of human misery without exaggerating it, and if she was deprived of illusions at least she was spared disappointment. And yet she suffered; her vigorous soul, her fertile intellect imprisoned in this common-place situation, were stifled as in a cage; and to complete her misery came religious terrors, frightful visions of "failing grace and impossible salvation," until her awe-struck heart recoiled in affright.

Like all souls ardently loving goodness and thirsting from the true love, she sighed after the bliss of heaven: "I would be willing," she exclaimed, "I would be willing to exchange my eighteen years for gray hairs--or even to stand on the verge of the grave, if by that means I could be assured of the divine mercy;" but alas! in the practices of that dry and personal religion in which each one answers to himself for himself, and whence confidence is banished as a weakness, where should she look for help?

Meanwhile the circle of poverty was drawing closer and closer about Charlotte and her sisters, and a thousand thoughts sprang up in the brain of the courageous girl: "I wish to make money, no matter how--if only the means be honest! nothing would discourage me," said she; "but I should not care to be a cook--I should prefer being housemaid." In the evening, when every one else was in bed, she used to meet her sisters in the little parlor, and they would read to each other their literary efforts in a low voice. They decided with one accord that Charlotte must write to Southey and send him a book of her poems. The poet saw no great merit in these effusions and tried to discourage Charlotte, giving her at the same time excellent moral advice upon the nothingness of celebrity and the dangers of ambition.

She decided then to make a journey to Belgium in order to study French, but she was almost immediately recalled home. The old aunt who had kept house during her absence was dead, her father was becoming blind, and her brother was subject to attacks of delirium in which he threatened his father's life. It was amid these terrible calamities that Miss Brontë wrote "Jane Eyre," the most powerful of her novels.

The next plan was that she and her sisters should all write together and get a volume printed at their own expense under the names of Ellis, Acton, and Currer Bell. It may well be imagined that this unfortunate book, sent out like a foundling into the literary world, met with no success, for if the beginnings of any career are precarious, the obstacles presented by literature are insurmountable to any one {840} not possessed of immense energy. We know Charlotte well enough to feel sure that she was not a woman to waste away in the dejection of sterile discouragement; she began to write again, and composed "The Professor." Alas! the poor little book travelled about from publisher to publisher without finding rest anywhere; and such was the naïveté of its author, that in her eagerness to send her rejected book to each new bookseller, she forgot to remove the old postage stamps from the package--not an encouraging recommendation to any editor to accept the leavings of his confrères!

It was at Manchester, during six weeks that she passed there with her father, who was forced to undergo an operation for cataract, that Miss Brontë finished "Jane Eyre." Messrs. Smith and Elder of London accepted the manuscript without hesitation, and from that time the obscure young girl was a celebrity whom every one longed to know and to receive.

Charlotte's literary success brought a ray of joy into Mr. Brontë's melancholy household, but it was of short duration. Twice within two months the inhabitants of Haworth saw the window-blinds of the parsonage closed, and heard the bell toll a death-knell. Charlotte's brother, prostrated by excesses, and consumed internally, died in the course of fifteen minutes; but they were minutes of awful anguish; in the grasp of the death-agony the dying man started to his feet, crying out that he would die standing, and that his will should give way only with his breath. Her elder sister, Emily, left home for the last time when she followed his bier to the grave; and another sister, the youngest and Charlotte's well-beloved, Anna Brontë, sustained herself awhile by dint of care and tenderness, but her lungs were affected and she soon began to languish; she too declined and died.

Poor Charlotte now found herself alone with her father who had lost five of his six children. She devoted herself to writing, as much to distract her grief as to deceive the long hours of the day; and henceforth her personality presented two distinct faces. She was a conscientious Englishwoman, a clergyman's daughter attached to her duties, and an authoress, ardent and active in defence of her convictions, and not without a certain obstinacy. "Her success continued, and she was obliged to submit to the exhibition to which English enthusiasm and bad taste subject their favorites. Miss Brontë had to go to dinner-parties, and to reunions of unlooked-for luxury and splendor; but the distinction that flattered her most was being placed by Thackeray in the seat of honor to hear the first lecture of this celebrated author at Willis's Rooms."

But solitude which had been the foundation and habit of her life, rendered her unfit for the world. Miss Brontë had suffered too much to preserve that serenity of temper and freedom of spirit necessary to enable one to talk easily and agreeably, and often would she sit silent amid a cross-fire of conversation all around her "I was forced to explain," she said, "that I was silent because I could talk no more."

Charlotte Brontë had arrived at the age of thirty-eight years without having had her heart touched with any emotion stronger than dutiful affection for her family. But--and here prose intrudes itself a little--her father had a vicar, and what could an English vicar do but be married? He loved Charlotte, and moreover, she had become a good match; but on one hand the fear of a refusal, and on the other the dread of the embarrassment for a clergyman of sharing the existence of a literary woman, prevented him from declaring his affections. At last, however, he took courage, and I ask myself if this courage was not rendered more attainable by Charlotte herself. At all events she accepted his offer without hesitation; but her father, who was too selfish to allow his daughter to occupy herself with any one but himself, opposed the marriage, and the enamored vicar left Haworth.

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The privation that Mr. Brontë experienced after his vicar's departure--a privation that Miss Brontë's temperament must have made him feel more sensibly--was such that he recalled the suitor, and the marriage took place. It was a dreary ceremony: no relations, no friends, so that the bride positively had no one to lead her to the altar; for her father had refused to be present at the marriage for fear of feeling agitated, faithful to the end to the dry and egotistical line of conduct he had marked out for himself.

The wife devoted herself bravely to seconding her husband in the duties of his ministry. She visited the poor, had a Sunday-school, improvised prayers and knew the Bible by heart. She was happy--but her happiness was of short duration, for physical and moral sufferings had exhausted her, and she died just as life had become harmonized according to her wishes.

A celebrated author, a strong and courageous woman, aspiring after a Christian life, she gave all that a heart can give which is not possessed of the true light; and M. Selden is right in saying at the close: "Charlotte is better than her heroines." There are few authors of whom one could say as much.

III.

From England with its maintien compassé, and cold religious tenets, M. Camille Selden takes us to Germany, the land of sentiment and intellectual research, and introduces us to a Jewess in Berlin, that we may see what a German salon was at the end of the eighteenth century.

Rahel Levin was only twenty years old when she lost her father, a wealthy Israelite, gloomy and violent in his bearing at home, but amiable and attractive in society.

The young Rahel, endowed with great intelligence and unerring tact, united to a truly kind heart, was valued and sought by every one as soon as she appeared in society. She was exceedingly amiable, full of an obliging good temper that made her anticipate wishes, divine annoyances in order to relieve them, and forget herself in seeking to make others happy. Rare too was her loyalty; not only was her soul incapable of falsehood, but of any want of sincerity. Her husband who had the good taste not to be jealous of his wife's superiority and success, said of her "that she did not think to lose by showing herself as God had made her, or gain by hiding anything." "Natural candor, absolute purity of soul, and sincerity of heart are the only things worthy of respect--the rest is only external regularity and conventionality," she often said to those who lavished upon her expressions of respect and admiration.

Unhappily for Mlle. Levin, circumstances concurred in alienating her from her family. Her mother and brothers, notwithstanding their ample fortune, showed a rapacity worthy of their race, and most unlike Rahel's broad and generous ideas; and her position would have been pitiable, but for the illustrious friends who frequented her mother's house. Among them the young girl forgot the petty meanness of her home life; and inexhaustible in ideas, perceptive faculty, and wit, she handled the gravest subjects with delicate skill, and almost as if she were playing with them. Full of unfailing good temper, she could discuss the most varied, the most opposite subjects, without dogmatism or eccentricity.

But this want of union with her family, which had deprived her of the domestic happiness so indispensable to every affectionate woman had rendered her paradoxical and even a little sceptical. See, for example, what she wrote to her youngest sister, who had consulted her about a proposal of marriage: "The want of durability in everything, and the inevitable separation between an object and its {842} motive, afford, you see, the final explanation of all that is human. You do not wish to belong to humanity; very well, destroy yourself. I feel quite differently: only transitory things, only what is human can tranquillize and console me." How at variance is this bitterness with the ardent hopefulness of the spiritual Eugénie de Guérin! and how excellent a proof, if we needed any new one, that true happiness is unattainable without that deep religious feeling which raises us above all passing things! Charlotte Brontë had at least that Protestant severity which stifles all tender quailing of the heart and soul, like a miser trembling lest he should lose a farthing of the merits of his sacrifice; but poor Rahel possessed only the intellectual resources of the mind, and they can do little for us.

Goethe, whose countrywoman she was so proud of being; Goethe, little inclined to exaggerate the value of a woman's mind, took pleasure in calling her a generous girl. "She has powerful emotions and a careless way of expressing them," he said: "the better you know her, the more you feel yourself attracted and gently enthralled."

But it was a long time before she enthralled any one. At last one of her friends, Varnhagen von Ense, a young man twenty-six years old, offered her his hand. Let him describe to us the charm of his first interview with Rahel.

"From the first, I must say that she made me experience a very rare happiness, that of contemplating for the first time a complete being--complete in intelligence and heart, a perfect union of nature and cultivation. Everywhere I saw harmony, equilibrium, views as naïve as they were original, striking in their grandeur as in their novelty, and always in accordance with her slightest actions. And all was pervaded with a sentiment of the purest humanity, guided by an energetic sense of duty, and heightened by a noble self-forgetfulness in the presence, of the joys and griefs of others."

Rahel was then thirty-six years old, and this great disparity of age, added to her want of beauty and fortune, must have inspired her with doubts of the duration of a feeling, which perhaps her heart, accustomed to independence, did not at first reciprocate. But in Germany marriages are not made as they are in France; people do not marry without knowing each other, or with a precipitation which might lead one to suppose that on both sides there was something to conceal, or that the intention was to make a good bargain of duty. According to the fashion of their country the two friends were betrothed, and were then forced to separate.

"I am not afraid; I will wait for you; I know you will never forsake me," wrote the indulgent Rahel eight years later, when a Frenchwoman would have lost patience a thousand times over.

In France, where dower, beauty, name, or position, rank before affection, such a separation would certainly have proved fatal. Had he no cause to fear that some one else might supplant him with Rahel? Was she untroubled by dread of the cruel dangers that threaten and disturb the affections? Might not her heart, naturally sceptical, and shaken by contact with the world, distrust the effect of opinion upon so young a man? "But true love has nothing to fear from worldly talk or material considerations; a whiff of a passing breeze cannot destroy strongly rooted affections, whose living germ lies sheltered in the depths of the heart." Such love can wait, for it does not know how to change. Such love was Rahel's; was it Varnhagen's? We shall see.

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Rahel was not an author, and had no thought of publication; it was only after her death that her husband sought some slight consolation in publishing her letters. These letters which make three volumes, were written in the course of forty years, and therefore they reveal the different phases of development in the young girl, the independent woman, and the matron. Through the generous feelings which she expresses, with a soul sympathizing with all sorts of interests, there pierces a certain delicate irony which seems to find pleasure in following out to the end any singular or original idea: We feel painfully that this woman has lost much, suffered deeply. In the life of Rahel the Jewess, as in that of Charlotte the Protestant, we discern the absence of our Saviour's cross; we see nowhere the gentle vision of the Virgin Mother.

In one of her letters, Mlle. Levin describes the impression which a visit to a Catholic convent had made upon her mind. She had entered into the services in the chapel like an artist: "I would gladly go there again, if it were only to hear the music, and breathe in the odor of the incense," said she. But the mortifications of the religious seemed to her more eccentric than touching; she pitied them for having to fulfil the functions of gardener and cook, to prepare medicines and feel the pulse of their patients. "Without exception their hands looked coarse," she said, "and their masculine tread sounded like the tramp of a patrol." And yet later in life Rahel was to perform, voluntarily, the same work as these nuns, and moreover she had a true sentiment of piety, which sometimes rose to an expression of faith.

"In moments of suffering," she wrote, "how happy faith makes me feel! I love to rest upon it as on a downy pillow."

We read these words so full of simple piety, with a full heart, thinking sadly how little assistance this woman would have needed to become an ardent convert to the true religion. It is really surprising that she should not have sought out Christianity.

"Never try to suppress a generous impulse, or to crowd out a genuine feeling," she wrote to a friend: "despair or discouragement are the only fruits of dry reasoning; examine yourself carefully, and dread above all things the decisions of wisdom unenlightened by the heart."

Rahel and Varnhagen had agreed to meet again one day; but absence is often fatal to the strongest ties, and more than once this one was on the point of snapping.

"A woman who has passed thirty," says our author, "may well fear lest youth, proved by the parish register, should win the day against youth of mind and soul."

It would have been very hard to find a rival to a woman so gifted as Rahel; but the first moment of enthusiasm over, Varnhagen began to think that his betrothed had been very prompt in her acceptance of the promises by which he had bound himself when a young and inexperienced man; and perhaps his memory recalled certain confidences of ill-matched pairs, who had assured him that generosity is a snare.

"For nothing in the world, of course, would he have renounced this affection of which he was proud; but he thought that she would accept his fidelity without his name, and he presumed to offer his devotion in lieu of the projected union."

Rahel could not accept a compromise as humiliating to her heart as dangerous to her reputation. She refused it, but--and this was less dignified--she refused sadly and plainly to free Varnhagen from his engagement. This was what she wrote:

"Bitterness at least equals suffering, when you, the single, solitary soul who knows me thoroughly, would turn away from me, or what is the same thing, when you would be false to yourself, and forsake me: hard words, my friend, but none the less true. I must be severe to the only being who has given me a right to expect anything from him. In you alone had I hoped, and I think I should insult you in saying that I had ceased to hope."

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To this bitter trial was added another one, which was very severe, though merely connected with material matters, especially for a person who was no longer young. Half abandoned, and half exploitée by her family, Rahel had become poor. Valiant and strong, she had long succeeded in hiding from her friends the privations which she imposed upon herself, in order to maintain her household properly. She had just lost her mother, and one of her brothers, who died blessing her for her devotion, and these afflictions must be added to the money troubles, which increased every day. Alas! there was no consolation in this distress, for Rahel could not say like the august daughter of a great king, "I thank God for two things; first, for having made me a Christian, and next, for having made me unhappy."

Economy was not her chief virtue, and kindness, that luxury which she could not live without, led her to deprive herself of the necessaries of life, in order that her servants might want for nothing. "It is mere selfishness," she said, laughing; "I prefer spoiling them to spoiling myself."

The misfortunes of war completed the ruin of her purse and her health. She assisted her countrymen by collecting contributions, and when money failed, she paid with personal exertions, fulfilling the admirable precept, "When you have given everything, give yourself." The vehemence of her feelings exhausted her strength, and her frail health gave way beneath the excess of privation and fatigue. She fell ill, and was forced to keep her bed for three months.

Her resources were exhausted, and poverty approached with great strides. She decided to ask one of her brothers, who was rich, to send her a little money; but he not only refused, but took a cruel pleasure in taunting the poor girl, with what he called her crazy liberality.

For six months the war intercepted all communications, so that she could receive no tidings of him whom she still called her betrothed. But this anxiety was the last. On waking one morning Rahel saw a letter which had just been brought in, and by a sudden inspiration, worthy of one who had never despaired, she guessed what this note contained: "a living hope, which never dies out in valiant souls, cried out that at last she had grasped happiness;" and the hope proved true: ten days later she married August Varnhagen, who having recovered from his hesitation, fulfilled his vows with a good will.

"You will never repent marrying me," she wrote to him, with naïveté, a little while before her marriage; "Love me, or love me not, as God wills; whatever happens I shall be yours for ever, you can rely on me: I am constant, as you have been constant. Rahel shall never fail you."

Her husband was afterward made Prussian minister, and Rahel as ambassadress was once more surrounded as in the pleasantest days of her youth.

She was sixty-two years old when the disease attacked her of which she died. Varnhagen never left her, or ceased trying to make her forget her sufferings by reading the books to her which she loved best; and Heinrich Heine, learning that she was ordered to apply fresh rose-leaves to her inflamed eyes, sent her his first poems, lying at the bottom of a basket of exquisite roses.

Madame von Varnhagen had always loved the Bible, and, especially, Jewess though she was, the New Testament. She was never tired of listening to the history of the sufferings and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. One day finding herself more feeble, she said, taking her husband's hand and pressing it on her heart: "I feel better, my friend. I have been thinking a long time of Jesus, and it seems as if I had never felt as at this moment how truly He is my brother, and the brother of all men. It has comforted me." . . . These were her last words.

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Do these women explain the women of our times? It is at least disputable; but we must recognize in them three interesting characters. We will not try to compare them; the differences between them are self-evident; and certainly though Eugénie de Guérin, the Frenchwoman and the Catholic, played in a worldly sense the most obscure part, no person of elevated views can contest the fact that hers was the most beautiful life of the three.