Lacordaire (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Lacordaire's Return To France ? Friend Ship WITH MADAME SWETCHINE - CON- FERENCES DE NOTRE DAME - LACORDAIRE RETURNS TO ROME. stormy part of his career having become 'a parcel and portion of the troubled past,' Lacordaire returned to Paris, took a small house in an out-of-the-way street in the Pays Latin, and for three years lived there a life of prayer, of work, of solitude, ? a life which Montalembert describes as being ' grave, simple, and obscure ; a life truly hid in God.' This was in 1832, a time when the cholera was raging in Paris, and Lacordaire passed whole days in the hospital in close attendance on the sick, dressed as a layman, the prejudices against the priesthood being even then asstrong as ever. ' Each day,' he writes, ' I contrive to gather in a little harvest for eternity. Sometimes I receive a confession. Many die silent and without seeming to listen, but I lay my hand upon their foreheads, and confiding myself to the Divine goodness, repeat the words of absolution. Yesterday, a soldier, standing by the bedside of his dying wife, and under the idea that I was a layman, asked me in a low voice where he could meet with a priest. I told him I was one; and I felt happy,' he adds, with a simplicity which certainly strikes a Protestant as being strangely nai've,' in being there just at the right moment to save a soul, and to oblige a fellow-creature.' His mother came to join him here, and during the remainder of her life, which only lasted a few years, enjoyed with him days to which his letters revert fondly as long days of ' peace and work and silence,'?a calm and fruitful season which suited well with the temper and habit of his soul, and which was probably needed to prepare him for his life-long apostolate. His mind seems to have belonged ...