For Remembrance (ed. Repplier, 1901)/Prologue to Madame Elizabeth of France. Glances Backward

Prologue to Madame Elizabeth of France.
Glances Backward.
Delivered by Miss Helen Maloney.

ADIES: While we offer you our most respectful welcome, we ask your kindest indulgence, and we are well assured that we do not ask in vain. Our mimic stage does not aspire to hold the mirror up to Nature, but only to offer you the reflection of your own memories, in pictures that make a picture. The colors shall be identical with those that glowed in your own Eden days, and the speech shall sound back to you, as a quaint echo from the past. Each simple device will bring a thought of those earliest dramas wherein you yourselves were the applauded actors, and gentle eyes, now closed forever, were the kindly witnesses. With a gracious smile over the same simple scenes and the same girlish recitations, you will blend, dear ladies, something like a sigh over the old, unforgotten faces, the unforgotten years and over the graver dramas that life has, since then, mounted upon a broader stage. If "one touch of Nature makes the whole world kin," these many touches from our common heritage, as daughters of Eden, must surely permit your happy hostesses to call themselves your younger sisters. In your genial presence we shall not fear our own mischances; for, surely, your smiling recollections cherish such accidents, from your own experiences, as among the gems of happy holidays. The forgotten word that roused the prompter; the obstinate curtain that refused to rise or decline to fall; the perfidious column that tottered away from the heroine's weight; the fragile throne which it would have been peril to ascend; the feudal prison of sternly frowning paper; do they not all come to you with something of the old charm that belongs to the "touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still?" Permit us, then, to place our trust in your goodness, as we venture to draw back the curtain of a hundred years and more; let us ask you to help us in reconstructing the scenes wherein Madame Elizabeth of France moved as an angel of mercy; for we cannot forget that she was an Apostle of the Sacred Heart, and that is was in the darkest hour of the Reign of Terror her pure hand wrote out, as the document itself proves, the most beautiful of the many consecrations to the Heart of Jesus. She proclaimed its Love as the true reconciling of lofty and lowly, the true bond of equality, the true regeneration of the nations, and the one great Centre of Charity.