battlements of heaven.




THE LETTERS OF MARCELINE VALMORE


"Prends garde a moi, ma fille, et couvre moi bien!" Marceline Desbordes-
Valmore, writing from France to her daughter Ondine, who was delicate and
chilly in London in 1841, has the same solicitous, journeying fancy as
was expressed by two other women, both also Frenchwomen, and both
articulate in tenderness. Eugenie de Guerin, that queen of sisters, had
preceded her with her own complaint, "I have a pain in my brother's
side"; and in another age Mme. de Sevigne had suffered, in the course of
long posts and through infrequent letters--a protraction of conjectured
pain--within the frame of her absent daughter. She phrased her plight in
much the same words, confessing the uncancelled union with her child that
had effaced for her the boundaries of her personal life.

Is not what we call a life--the personal life--a separation from the
universal life, a seclusion, a division, a cleft, a wound? For these
women, such a severance was in part healed, made whole, closed up, and
cured. Life was restored between two at a time of human-kind. Did these
three women guess that their sufferings of sympathy with their children
were indeed the signs of a new and universal health--the prophecy of
human unity?

The sign might have been a more manifest and a happier prophecy had this
union of tenderness taken the gay occasion as often as the sad. Except