Читать книгу The Maréchale (Catherine Booth-Clibborn) - Strahan James - Страница 3

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PREFACE

This book is the unexpected result of a brief visit which the Maréchale paid her daughter and the writer in the spring of this year. She was daily persuaded, not so much to talk of the past, as to live parts of her life over again, for in her case the telling of a story is the enacting of a drama. At a meal-time she rarely keeps her seat, though she is apparently unconscious of leaving it and surprised that she requires to return to it. She begins to describe an incident, to recall a conversation, to sketch a character, and straightway she is suiting the word to the action, the action to the word, holding the mirror up to nature, using her brilliant dramatic gift, which is as natural to her as singing is to birds, to call up faces, to bring back voices, to restore scenes, which are all, whether grave or gay, summoned out of a dead past that has suddenly, as by the wave of a magician's wand, become once more alive.

One day I said to her, "Have you never thought of giving all this to the world?" She answered, "I am often asked to do so, and some day I may." Soon after she surprised me by saying, "I have come to the conclusion that something ought to be written now, and you must write it."

A mass of materials in English, French and German—reports, letters, diaries, magazines, and other documents—has therefore been put at my disposal. I have not used a tithe of what I have received, and much of what is left is as good as what has been taken. More will ere long, I doubt not, see the light. One of my best sources of information has been the Maréchale's own phenomenal memory, which I have tested times without number, and found invariably accurate, except in dates. Events are apt to be associated in her mind not so much with years as with homes and children, which are much more interesting.

With regard to the subject of the fourteenth chapter, the Maréchale would have preferred not to break the silence which she has maintained for a number of years, but after reading her letters and diaries I have urged her to let a brief statement be published, first because I feel that she owes something to her old comrades in the fight, and second for the sake of her own and her family's future work. Members of the family who have been consulted, as well as other friends, desire this even more strongly than the writer does.

This book consists of a few sections from a life which, like Mrs. Browning's pomegranate, "shows within a heart blood-tinctured." To a heart of love add a spirit of fire, and you have the Maréchale. Blood and fire—that is what she was at the beginning, and that is what she will be to the end. One has often heard her say that she has never been more in her element than when, on entering some town, she has found herself confronted, in a theater or casino, by "all the devils of the place." She is happy whenever "Jesus is going to have a chance for a night." In the natural course of things her greatest battles are still before her. England has need of her, France perhaps still greater need. May it be long before the Maréchale reaches her last campaign! Meanwhile the old battle-cry, En Avant!

The subject of this sketch—written during a brief respite from other work—is at present far away, but I know that what she desires to give to the world is a sense of the Divine, the miracle-working power which rewards a child-like faith, and that she will be glad if every reader closes the book with a Gloire à Dieu!

J. S.