now she was standing by the last. Never was child guarded more
faithfully or sent more proudly on his path in life. One should read the
memoirs to understand, and pause frequently to consider: how she
promised her husband bravely in the beginning that she would answer for
their children, and how, in what she afterwards styled the hyperbole of
grief, she was called to fulfil to the letter, and was found faithful,
with an unexampled strength and devotion; how she saw two children
struck down by a fatal disease, and how she drew the surviving son back
to health by her watchful care to send him on his college and military
career with loving pride; how, when a Minister of France, irritated at
her putting by his patronage, roughly told her he could not "take the
Emperor by the collar to place Mr. Tone"--she went to the Emperor in
person, with dignity but without fear, and won his respect; how the
suggestion of the mean-minded that her demand was a pecuniary one, drew
from her the proud boast that in all her misfortunes she had never
learned to hold out her hand; how through all her misfortunes we watch
her with wonderful dignity, delicacy, courage, and devotion quick to
see what her trust demanded and never failing to answer the call, till
her task is done, and we see her on the morning when her son sets out on
the path she had prepared, the same quivering woman, who had sent her
husband with words of comfort to his duty, now, after all the years of
trial, sending her son as proudly on his path. It is their first
parting. Let her own words speak: "Hitherto I had not allowed myself
even to feel that my William was my own and my only child; I considered
only that Tone's son was confided to me; but in that moment Nature
resumed her rights. I sat in a field: the road was long and white before
me and no object on it but my child.... I could not think; but all I had
ever suffered seemed before and around me at that moment, and I wished
so intensely to close my eyes for ever, that I wondered it did not
happen. The transitions of the mind are very extraordinary. As I sat in