Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 June 1879 — From Sin Into Society Through the Church London Truth, [ARTICLE]

From Sin Into Society Through the Church London Truth.

A fair sinner who has had the misfortune to be brought up in heresy can take a shorter cut into society. I once observed the course of a non-orthodox Magdalen in Paris, who got to the top of the ladder: She was an American, and the wife of a clerk at Washington from whom she separated without being divorced. Paris appeared to her a meet field for her energies and talents, and to Paris she came. She was small, sparkling, and an amusing chatterbox. Her manners were eccentric, and her transitions from mad gayety to tearful sentiment rapid and bewildering. She gave, in a maison meublee where she had rooms, card parties, at which she managed to win a great deal of money. A chamberlain of the empress attended them. This attractive niece of Uncle Sam, who was unique in her genre, fascinated the courtier, and she tormented him to obtain for her invitations to the Monday evening parties at the Tuilries and to Compiegne. Having ascertained that the police had been taking notes about her, he was embarrassed. But in revolving in his mind how to please her without getting into a scrape himself, he asked if she thought she could wear gracefully the mask of devotion. The clever little woman jumped at the idea, and it started a train of projects in her fertile brain, one more brilliant than the other. Ere the courtier had taken leave it was agreed that this charmer was to attend the Advent sermons of the Abbe Bauer, at that time the coqueluche of Bonapartist layhood, to affect contrition, to demand a private interview, and after she had expressed doubts as to the saving graces of Protestantism, to crave for admission into the Catholic church. The part traced out was admirably acted. Mere recantation did not suffice for the zeal of the fair catechumen. She insisted on being baptised, which enabled her to appear at the front of St. Thomas in a white christening robe, in which she looked really angelic, and with, for sponsors, a lady of the De Merode family, and a princess connected with the house of Savoy. Eventually this “smart" woman was

found out. She was for upward of six years a fountain through which official honors flowed. The curious thing was that she could hardly speak French, and that with her imperfect knowledge of this tongue she conducted to a successful issue divers political intrigues in which she was engaged by financia companies.