A WARRIOR-SAINT OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. IN THREE PARTS.-PART I. My Christian champion stout, . . . God's scourge upon the Moor. ΟΝ LOCKHART. Defiance, Emperor, while I have strength to hurl it ! N August 8, 1902, a French officer, Lieutenant-Colonel de Saint-Rémy, being ordered to send a squadron of his regiment of Chasseurs to assist in closing the nuns' school at Lanouen, in Morbihan, positively refused to obey. "I am a Christian," he is reported to have answered, "and will not share in an act which is contrary to my faith and to my religious sentiments." He was, as might be expected, "at once relieved from his command," and was ordered "to repair to Belle Isle to undergo fortress imprisonment." When, through the Times of August 12, this "very serious incident" became known in England, those who were familiar with recent French military biography were at once reminded of a nearly parallel case in 1880, during the almost similar anti-clerical agitation under the government of Paul Bert. Next day they learned that everybody in France had remembered it too, and that application had been made to the retired General de Gallifet, the surviving actor in the scene, for his account of the affair in 1880, when General de Sonis, commanding at Chateauroux, was in a like strait between his religious and his military duty. This M. de Gallifet has accordingly done in a letter to the Gaulois (reproduced in part in the Daily Telegraph of August 13): "On the eve of the day fixed for the execution of the decrees against the religious orders," writes M. de Gallifet, "General de Sonis saw me at Tours, and did not refuse his obedience, but gave me his resignation "an important military distinction. Who was General de Sonis, the clerical champion of 1880? The average Englishman may be excused for not knowing, since, setting aside a bare mention of his name in Cassell's "History of the Franco-German War," and a few like summaries, all the books which go into detail on his career are distinctly Roman Catholic. M. de Sonis had a reason, highly creditable to himself, for wishing to remain in obscurity during his lifetime, and on this very occasion of 1880 he wrote to two or three newspapers on his own side begging them not to put his name forward. Yet even in those days his work was manifest—a restored Church, a restored army; and since his death removed the seal of secrecy, he has become known for what he was the Havelock, the Hedley Vicars, the General Gordon of France. Legend has already begun to gather round a career in itself sufficiently striking and unconventional. It is told how, at his prayer, streams have broken forth in the desert, and devouring floods have been stayed. The Queen of Heaven has descended to comfort him. The Bishop, whose task it was to pronounce his funeral sermon, ventured to hint at a coming time when miracles should be wrought at his tomb, and the Church "should glorify with a brighter splendour" this striking example of Christian graces united with national valour. And meanwhile his life has been written at full length by an Archbishop, and abridged, adapted, illustrated, in infinite gilt prize-books and red-lined manuals with allegorical devices of sword and chaplet. He is depicted at the head of Catholic tracts, kneeling in full uniform, with hands and eyes uplifted, ministering beside plague-stricken pallets, leading his last charge. with the Dove descending in bodily shape upon him. The prayer with which he solaced his last years of suffering is sold as a leaflet at fivepence the hundred, while the devout watchword of his fighting days is emblazoned on filigree cards, amid conventional garlands of oak and bay. Anecdotes of his piety form the staple of those little "Almanachs de la France," or Almanachs du Bon Soldat," which are put forth annually to "check the flood of socialist and immoral literature." But, above all, the indecisive battle of Loigny, in the war of 1870-dismissed by military historians with a few words of contempt, "an action as décousue as possible "-has acquired glory and interest as the scene of his final charge under the banner of the Sacred Heart, and, moreover, of the apparition of "Our Lady of VOL. CCXCIII. NO. 2062. B B Lourdes "—an exact replica of that described by Bernadette-to comfort him as he lay wounded and abandoned. "In the name of the Holy Trinity, and under the protection of Mary, Queen and Mother of all Christians, of my patron St. Louis, of St. Joseph, and of my guardian angel "-so opens the fragment of autobiography which General de Sonis did not live to complete. He goes on to state that he was, in the correct sense, a Creole, being born (August 25, 1825, St. Louis's Day) at Pointe-à-Pitre, in the island of Guadeloupe, where his father, Lieutenant Charles Gaston de Sonis, was aide to the military governor. The lieutenant's family consisted of two daughters and two sons, beside a step-daughter, the child of his wife by a former marriage. Louis Gaston, the future warrior-saint, was his father's second child and elder son. His mother was Marie Elizabeth Sylphide de Bébian, widow of M. Chanais de Lestortière. Both parents came of noble families impoverished by the Revolution, and could boast of ancestors martyred by the guillotine and on the battlefields of the Vendée. Gaston remembered through life the maternal grandfather's house, looking over the blue sea studded with islets, the Place de la Victoire, whither he dragged his black nurse every morning that he might see the soldiers drilling, the volcano, and the sulphur springs, objects for adventurous and delightful excursions. One of these expeditions stood out especially in his memory, when he, then about six years old, lay wrapped in cloaks at the bottom of a boat, listening to the plash of the oars alone breaking the stillness, and gazing up to the starry heavens above, with thoughts of the majesty of Creation, such as of old inspired the Psalmist. "This was the first revelation of God to my soul. I can feel my father's arm adjusting the cloaks round me." In another fragment Gaston recalls: "My father used to take me up on his horse before him, to draw pictures for me, sing songs, tell stories. Whenever my father was at home, we were all of us climbing on his knee at once." M. de Sonis père returned to France in 1832, taking the children with him, but the mother was left behind at the bedside of her aged father. Little Gaston was sustained by the promise that Mama would soon come after them; but the grandfather lingered full three years, and when at last, in 1835, a date was fixed for her leaving him, she was suddenly struck down by malarial fever. "We were all overwhelmed by the blow," wrote the son who had been watching for her return. In this year Gaston was sent to the preparatory College of Stanislas, under the direction of the Marist Fathers. Severe strictures have recently been passed upon this establishment. Inadequate washing apparatus, pupils incited to anti-Republican demonstrations,' surveillance system carried to the extreme, with the result of manufacturing a typical "little prig, with his eyes turned down, and his toes turned out "all these things have been alleged against it. Perhaps little Gaston de Sonis did turn down his eyes and turn out his toes, but at any rate he preserved tender reminiscences of his days of pupilage. "The good Fathers encouraged my natural dispositions for piety, and I repaid them by my progress. Every night I knelt long in prayer by my bedside. When only ten, I was permitted to make my first Communion, and to this great act I brought all my baptismal innocence, together with a fervour beyond my years. . . . Delicious memories; balm for evil days! I could fill pages, but let it suffice to say that I regard my first Communion as the blessing of my life." ... Precocious piety, forced in a hot-house, some may say. Yet the hot-house plant lived to flourish in the free air. Forty-five years afterwards, in a letter of 1880, written on the occasion of his resignation of his command, the veteran Sonis reminds his correspondent of "our first Communion together, and our vow to die rather than yield." Gaston's next move was to the Oratorian College of Juilly,3 the training school of a line of warriors, beginning with Marshal Villars. He arrived a thin and pale little boy, and, like Marcellin Marbot before him, he had to undergo the ignominy of being nicknamed Mademoiselle; but he soon proved his manliness in the riding school, where his special adroitness presaged the future cavalry leader. Yet, somewhat oddly, his first fancy was for the sea service, and, at his own wish, he was transferred in 1842 to a naval college. This he found to be "a den of vice"-such is his scathing phrase; and, consequently, he was soon glad to fall in with his father's original plan for him, that he should complete his education at the Military College of Saint-Cyr. During his vacation in 1844 he took long rides with his father, and from him learned what he afterwards repeated to his son as the A B C of military discipline-" Never to ask to go to 1 Urbain Gohier, in the National Review, reprinted as a tract by the Ladies' League for the Preservation of the Reformed Faith of the Church of England. 2 Hannah Lynch, French Life in Town and Country, 1901. Founded as an Augustinian monastery in the twelfth century, and appropriated by Blanche of Castille for the education of the orphans of Crusaders. Created Académie Royale under Louis XIII. A description of it near the time of Sonis occurs in Canon Wordsworth's Diary of a Tour in France. the right rather than to the left, unless that should be the post of danger." In September 1844, the young people of the Sonis family were all at home with their father, then in garrison at Libourne, and as happy as the day was long. Gaston was in request at all the local gaieties, and his sisters profited by having so charming a brother. The father was called away for a day or two to take his youngest son Théobald to school. They set off cheerfully, and the sisters remembered rallying Papa upon his jaunty appearance in civilian dress. Early next morning an old friend of the family knocked up the porter, and demanded to be shown up at once into Gaston's chamber. Seating himself by the youth's bedside, and pressing his hands, he said, "My poor child, I have terrible news for you. Your father has been taken suddenly ill, and is now lying at the Hôtel du Midi at Bordeaux." And as the startled sleeper gazed bewildered, the friend went on to say that he had obtained a carriage, that the sisters must be called, and they must drive post haste, on the chance of being in time for a last farewell. So said, so done; and as evening fell the young people drove up to the door of the Hôtel du Midi, but when they arrived the father was speechless. They sat weeping round his bed, and shuddered as the Curé entered with the Viaticum, which seemed to them as the death-warrant. "My children," said the priest, "stay me not in a sacred duty." The sisters drew Gaston from the room. In a few minutes he was recalled; extreme unction had been administered. The father pressed their hands, gave his watch to Gaston, and shortly afterwards sank into a stupor, from which he never rallied. All night the orphans knelt hand in hand, feeling abandoned of earth and heaven, when in the early morning the door opened, and an ecclesiastic presented himself-not the assistant at the death-bed, but a sojourner in the hotel, who, hearing the sad tale, had come to offer comfort. And according to Sonis, the words he spoke "pierced the soul, revived the latent spark of piety in my heart, braced me for future duty. When he left us I was converted; my heart was given to Heaven." This priest was a Jesuit, and for his sake Sonis always protected that Order in its missionary enterprises abroad, and against the attacks of socialists and anti-clericals at home. The sisters were sent back to their mother's family in Guadeloupe, where they remained till one of them married, and the others entered Carmelite convents. Meanwhile Sonis made his début at Saint-Cyr, which in the days of Louis-Philippe was far from being |