Paris
October, 1794
My dear Friend,
In your letter to me you emphasize the extraordinary courage with which the so-called "weaker sex" face death every day of these terrible times. And you are right.
With admiration you cite the poise of "noble" Madame Roland, "queenly" Marie Antoinette, "magnificent" Charlotte Corday, and "heroic" Mademoiselle de Sombreuil. (I am quoting your own adjectives.) You close with the "gripping" sacrifice of the sixteen Carmelite nuns of Compiègne, who mounted the scaffold of the guillotine singing the Veni Creator. And you do not forget the "soul-stirring" voice of young Blanche de la Force, who finished the hymn that the executioner's knife had silenced on the lips of her companions. Your eloquent letter concludes: "In all these martyrs of the Kingdom, the Gironde, and the persecuted Church, the natural dignity of man nobly triumphs over the waves of devastating chaos!"
Dear disciple of Rousseau! As always, I admire your cheerful and exalted faith in the indestructible nobility of natural man, even when mankind is tasting most desolate failure. But chaos is natural too, my friend, and so are the executioners of your heroines, and the brute in man--and even fear and terror.
As I have been much closer to the frightful happenings in Paris than you, who have emigrated, let me admit that I interpret the amazing resignation of those who die every day, not as a noble response of nature, so much as a last heroic affirmation of a Christian culture, now disintegrating. Yes, my friend, you deeply despise this culture, but I have learned again to esteem it as a necessary restraint upon terror--and in a few cases, as the inspiration of a nobility far beyond natural heroism.
Blanche de la Force was the last on your list of heroines. And yet she was not a heroine in your sense of the word. She was elected not to demonstrate the nobility of human nature but to prove the infinite frailty of all our vaunted powers. Sister Marie of the Incarnation, the only surviving Carmelite of Compiègne, has confirmed my opinion.
But perhaps you do not even know that Blanche de la Force was a former member of the Carmelite convent of Compiègne. She was a novice there for a time. Let me tell you a little of this short but extremely significant episode in her life, for I believe that the famous song at the scaffold begins here.
