M. de Lafayette tells us that the delirium began after she had received, as he expresses it, her sacraments. How much of loneliness of heart, in the midst of the most intense earthly affection, does the following passage reveal:

"Towards the close of her agony, and while she still retained the use of speech, my daughters feared that the habit of not occupying herself with objects of piety before me might be a restraint upon her saying or hearing prayers. A little crucifix was by her side, but, instead of taking it, she seized my hand, which she held between her own in the attitude of prayer. Probably she was praying for me. They asked me to leave her for a moment, in order that Madame de Montagu, who had always possessed her confidence on these subjects, might ask her if she had anything to say to her. My first impulse was to reject this request, tenderly and timidly as it was made. I feared that these last moments might be disturbed. I even acknowledge that my old conjugal affection for the first time experienced a feeling of jealousy. I felt a passionate desire to occupy her exclusively. I wanted all her looks, all her thoughts. But I overcame myself, wishing to leave her nothing to desire. I gave up my place to her sister, who repeated her question twice; but, though my wife loved her dearly and liked to have her near her, she twice answered 'No,' adding, 'Go to supper,' and seeming impatient that I should resume my place. As soon as I had done so, she once more put my hand between hers, saying, I am all yours.' These words-toute à vous—were the last which she uttered."

He passes on to a heartfelt and well-deserved eulogium upon the noble conduct of this "falcon-hearted dove," during the revolutionary troubles. "You know, as well as I do, all that she was, all that she did, during the Revolution." It was little that, in the words of Charles Fox, she had flown to Olmutz on the wings of love and duty, to share her husband's captivity. But he dwells specially upon her having remained in France, at her own exceeding personal risk, till she had satisfied all the claims of his creditors, and sent their son to America, to be brought up under the care of Washington; and on the "noble imprudence" which forbade her to conceal the name which had become so perilous to her. It appears that in those evil days many, even excellent and high-minded women, had brought themselves to pretend a fictitious divorce, in order to preserve the rights and property of their children; but every one of the energetic declarations and touching petitions which she addressed to the republican authorities began with these words, "Femme Lafayette."

We trust that the husband so deeply loved and so more than duly honoured fulfilled one of her last injunctions imploring him to read, for the love of her, "certain books which assuredly," he says, " I shall examine again with deep seriousness."

In this recommendation, he adds, "she called her religion, to make it more acceptable to me, 'the sovereign liberty,' as she often quoted to me these words of the Abbé Fauchet-' Jesus Christ, my ONLY Master.'"

The memoir of Madame de Montagu* is marked by literary merit, independent of the interest of its principal subject, of the various remarkable characters by whom she was surrounded, and of the touching and striking incidents of her life. It combines, with its fervent piety, the sparkling animation peculiar to French biography. The romantic, mournful, and withal, at times, ludicrous scenes which diversify the history of the emigration, and the strangely contrasted characters which community of misfortune then often threw together, are sketched with a masterly touch. Among the victims involved in one common calamity there were those who suffered with meek fortitude as confessors for their faith, no less than as loyal subjects of their king; others, who had been contemptuously cast on foreign strands by the tempest which their own reckless folly had contributed to raise, and who sought to alleviate the weariness of exile by a melancholy imitation of the life of brilliant trifling and frigid philosophism which had formed the staple of Parisian society for the last half-century. With a household of the former class Madame de Montagu formed a close intimacy during the short period of her stay in England. It was the family of M. le Rebours, formerly president of the Parliament of Paris--a household marked by close family union and fervent piety, mingled with somewhat of the austerity which in those days was often an attendant of piety in France, even among those who were free from the errors of Jansenism. The family consisted of Madame le Rebours, her father and mother, and her six children, two girls already grown up-industrious, fervent, and recollected, and four fine boys, as modest and almost as shy as their sisters. M. de Barville, the grandfather, a venerable grey-haired magistrate, educated the elder ones; Madame de Barville daily catechized the younger. She was a tall, thin, somewhat severe-looking person, with eyes still full of animation, speaking little, but always sensibly, piously, and to the purpose. An aged exiled priest, named Durand, who had become the pastor of this little flock, said Mass daily in a large room set apart for the purpose. The whole family attended; among the servants were three good old men, who had grown gray in the president's service; the day was regularly closed at nine o'clock by a pious lecture and prayers, .in which the king and his family were never forgotten. Madame

* The English translation just published is worthy of the original.

de Montagu never failed, if possible, to be present at these devotions. She was there on the day when the news of the king's murder reached Margate. The Abbé Durand, who was saying night prayers, stopped short at the place usually filled by the prayer for the king, and after a moment's silence he substituted for it a De profundis, begun in a broken voice and responded to by tears. But when the old priest would have passed on to the prayers which usually followed that which he had omitted, Madame de Barville, who was at the other end of the room, interrupted him by saying aloud: "We have not come to that yet, M. l'Abbé,—the prayer for the king." So well had those faithful hearts preserved in a foreign land the old French adage, -"Le roi est mort; vive le roi."

Madame de Montagu was no economist. In spite of her best endeavours, when she set to work to cut out garments, the woful waste of stuff showed her attempts at housewifery to be worse than useless. She laughed over her mishaps, but it was with tears in her eyes. England was too expensive a residence; and, after months of suffering and privation, she found shelter under the hospitable care of her aunt, the Countess de Tessé, one of the most remarkable women of her time.

Possessed of greater foresight than her brother, the Duke d'Ayen, Madame de Tessé had not left France "like a swallow carrying nothing with her but the plumage of her wings"; she had secured capital of some value, which she invested in land at Lowemberg, in the canton of Fribourg. It was a large farm, with plenty of pasturage for flocks. Here she and her husband (always subordinate to herself) lived at their ease, though without luxury, and were enabled to afford liberal hospitality to many of their friends and countrymen less well provided than themselves. Madame de Tessé was, alas! that most unlovely thing, an unbelieving woman; one of those intellectual ladies of the old régime who had been fascinated and led astray by the false philosophy of the age. She was a Liberal and a freethinker. In philosophy Voltaire, with whom she had been very intimate, was her master; in politics her nephew, M. de Lafayette, was her hero. Madame de Montagu had much to endure in her new home from the society into which she was thrown; but Madame de Tessé, notwithstanding her mental and spiritual aberrations, possessed a kindness and largeness of heart which endeared her to all her family. She was, moreover, happily extremely inconsistent in her speculative ideas. Professing and believing herself to be above all the prejudices of faith, she never failed to make a large sign of the cross behind her curtain whenever she took medicine. She loved not priests, but, by a happy inconsistency, she supported, on the produce of

her kitchen garden, three poor exiled priests who lived at Gormund; she would take Madame de Montagu to visit them, and, while she was deep in discussion with one, Madame de Montagu would quietly take another aside, and, kneeling down in a corner almost close to her aunt, who, notwithstanding her sharp eyes, saw nothing, she would make her confession at her ease.

Madame de Tessé had attracted to her solitude, in order to have some one to talk to after her own fashion, one of her old friends, the Marquis de Mun, formerly beau cavalier, and still beau causeur, beau joueur, full of wit, benevolence, and imperturbable sang-froid. His son, Adrian, an amiable and spirited young man, was of the party. We have already made acquaintance with him him in the "Récit d'une Sœur," as the bereaved and heart-broken father, to whom his son, another Adrian, brought a sunbeam to cheer his home, and to herald the light of faith in his heart in the person of Eugénie de la Ferronnays. As for M. le Comte de Tessé, grand d'Espagne de première classe, Chevalier des ordres, lieutenant-général des armées du Roi, premier écuyer de la feue Reine, et naguère député du Maine aux Etats généraux, he looked after the cultivation of the land, made various journeys when necessary, but figured little in the salon, and was, in fact, altogether eclipsed by his wife. The whole colony was afterwards removed from Switzerland to the shores of the Baltic. The same way of life was continued there; perpetual discussions, varied by the reading of romances. Madame de Montagu was doomed to listen in succession to the "Chevaliers du Cygne" of Madame de Genlis, then to "Clarissa Harlowe" for a whole mortal month; succeeded by "Tristram Shandy "; varied occasionally by a life from Plutarch, or an oraison funèbre from Bossuet. Bossuet aud Plutarch were well enough, and even the romances better than the discussions which followed them. In her change of abode, however, Madame de Tessé had provided herself with (what she accounted a somewhat unnecessary luxury) a chaplain, the post being occupied by an exiled priest, named the Abbé de Luchet. His office was next to a sinecure; but, as she said with a smile to M. de Mun, "there is my niece to employ him." The Abbé de Luchet was awkward and absent, and it was long before Madame de Montagu could open her heart to him. But she found him at last to be a most worthy priest; not, perhaps, very capable of disentangling a sophistry, but very good to direct a simple, upright soul in the right way. She assisted daily at the old man's Mass, which he said in his attic, M. de Mun's valet, who served his Mass, being the only other worshipper. On Sundays two respectable emi

grants of the neighbourhood increased the number of the congregation. But as Christmas drew near some of the country people, though living at a considerable distance, asked permission to come to the midnight Mass. At eleven o'clock, on a bitter cold Christmas-eve, the strangers knocked at the door. The attic was not yet prepared, and Madame de Montagu received them in the kitchen, where a great fire had been lighted. The party consisted of two or three families of peasants, very decently dressed. The women, like the men, wore thick leather gaiters, with the hair inside. The patriarch of the band, whose hair was white as snow, and his back bent with age, told Madame de Montagu that neither he nor his father or grandfather had ever had the happiness of hearing Mass at the hour of our Saviour's birth. He had come with his company many leagues across the marshes to adore the new-born Jesus in His crib, and to take part in a festival which had not perhaps been celebrated in that country since the Reformation. He belonged to the very scanty number of Catholic families which had never either apostatized or emigrated, and which, notwithstanding persecution and distance from all religious aid, had remained faithful to the religion of their fathers. While the old man told his tale, the women had gathered round the fire to dry their steaming garments, one of them reciting the rosary, while the others responded in a low voice. The men stood with their heads uncovered. The Abbé de Luchet's room would not hold all the congregation, so the door was left open, notwithstanding the cold, and some knelt on the steps of the staircase. Madame de Montagu often said that never had she heard a midnight mass sung at S. Roch, to the pealing organ and by the light of a thousand tapers, which touched her so deeply as this midnight celebration by a proscribed priest in an attic before that rustic audience. It seemed to carry her back to the midst of the shepherds in the stable of Bethlehem. Never, perhaps, had the Divine infant received homage more acceptable since S. Francis sang the Gospel at the midnight Mass in the cave at Grecio, when he instituted the touching devotion to the Crib which has since pervaded Christendom.

It was during her sojourn in Holstein that Madame de Montagu undertook her gigantic task, L'Œuvre des Emigrés. Devotion to the poor had ever formed one of the distinctive features of her lovely character. She shared it with all her sisters, but it seemed to be intensified in her, perhaps as a recompense for the acts of faith and humility by which, in the full tide of her greatness and prosperity, Madame d'Ayen had sought a pious beggar-woman to stand godmother for her little Pauline.