Rachel went to Egypt, as a forlorn hope, a few months before her death. She had sent directions for the sale of her furniture, and of the small hotel in which she had resided. The whole world crowded to see the wonderful house of which they had heard so much, and the following account, given by an Englishman, of the auction of her goods, contains an allusion to the rosary, and shows the strange mixture of inconsistency that reigned in her surroundings as in her opinions and convictions:—
Rather annoyed by the clamorous remarks and somewhat indecorous curiosity of my fellow sightseers, I let the string of visitors proceed up-stairs to the rooms upon the second floor, before I made my way into a little dark hole leading out of the drawing-room, which I had heard my noisy predecessors dignify by the high-sounding title of the "Boudoir Chinois." It was an absolute hole, and so pitch dark that I was for some minutes in it before my eyes were able to distinguish a Chinese paper, with birds and flowers upon it, and one or two little brackets supporting Chinese pots, which stood in the angles of the walls, and in virtue of which I suppose the room obtained its name. I was just preparing to go up-stairs, when a bust in white marble, which stood upon the chimney-piece, attracted my attention; the head was of a young and handsome man, with a shortish beard divided into two points, and round the neck there hung a rosary—forgotten, like so many other things, in the distress of that departure. I was greatly struck by this detail, and waited impatiently for the return of the concierge, whom I heard conveying the other party to the door. At last he came, and, anxious to ascertain on which of her adorers poor Rachel had left this singular necklace hanging, I immediately inquired, De qui est ce buste?"
"C'est de Canova," was the reply.
"Mais de qui est-ce le portrait?" I persisted, under the impression that the man did not know what he was speaking about.
"C'est le portrait du Christ."
I left the house bewildered with the confusion of ideas created by the curious assemblage of heterogeneous objects I had seen there, and strangely moved by the remembrance of that image of Our Blessed Lord in Rachel's Chinese boudoir with the poor dying Jewess's rosary hung about His neck.
Rachel herself, in a letter written on her return
