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At the period when Mother Marie-des-Anges was authorized to reconstitute her community, Laurent Goussard, who had not made much by his purchase, went to see the good abbess, and proposed to her to buy back the former property of her convent.
To-day Mother Marie-des-Anges is high in court favor, and there is nothing she cannot obtain in the most august regions of power; but it is only just to add that she asks nothing, not even for her charities, for she provides the means to do them nobly by the wise manner in which she administers the property of her convent.
When she was just twenty-one, Marie-des-Anges fell in love, and her beautiful, dark, restless eyes for the first time became illuminated with a look of dreamy happiness.
The head of Mother Marie-des-Anges being indispensably necessary to the carrying out of this decree of the sovereign people, she kept it on her shoulders, and the headsman put aside his machine. Though the other decree, organising the Grand National Gynaecium, was lost sight of in the many other duties that devolved upon the Convention, the excellent nun carried it out after her fashion.
This had been a torture to the imaginative little girl, and Sister Marie-des-Anges, seeing it one day, ordered the older children to stop, and the game had been forbidden. This benevolent edict had given Mary a warm sense of being protected; but there was no one to protect her now.
From the description our friend gives of her, Mother Marie-des-Anges is a small woman, short and thick-set, whose face is prepossessing and agreeable beneath its wrinkles and the mask of saffron-tinted pallor which time and the austerities of a cloister have placed upon it.
She had not the courage to repel him and to speak to him seriously of the future, and could not understand why he had not yet asked her father for her hand and had not fulfilled his former promises, until, one Sunday, as she was coming from High Mass, walking on before her cousins, Marie-des-Anges heard the following words, from a group in which André was standing, and he was the speaker: "Oh! no," he said, "you are altogether mistaken; I should never do anything so foolish.... One does not marry a girl without a halfpenny; one takes her for one's mistress."
The same day he mounted the tribune, and after speaking in general terms of the "bloody boobies" who by their foolish fury compromised the future of the Revolution, he told who and what Mother Marie-des-Anges really was; he dwelt on her marvellous aptitude for the training of youth, and he presented a scheme in which she was placed at the head of a "grand national gynaecium," the organization of which was to be made the subject of another decree.
The dear man was not however making a bad bargain, for the difference in the value of assignats with which he had paid and the good sound money he would receive made a pretty profit. But Mother Marie-des-Anges, remembering that without his warning Danton could not have saved her, did better still for her first helper.
Under the Restoration, the celebration of this service became a sort of scandal; but Mother Marie-des-Anges would never hear of suppressing it, and the great veneration which has always surrounded her obliged these cavillers to hold their tongues. This courageous obstinacy had its reward, under the government of July.
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