e to the
deaf mute Parisse? In his funeral sermon on Madame Swetchine,
Lacordaire thus alludes to Parisse: "As we watched the sad setting of
that beauteous star, I saw her beloved mute following her with her
eyes from an adjoining chamber, the vigilant sentinel of a life which
had been so lavish of itself, and whose light went out with faithful
friendship on the one side, and grateful poverty on the other."

Madame Swetchine was endowed from birth with the material, the
physiological conditions, for a great and original character, force
competent to the finest and the grandest things, with an over-bias of
that force to the brain. For long periods, she was compelled to walk
in her chamber from seven to eight hours a day, to avoid intolerable
nervous pressures and pains. At sixty-six, she wrote to one of her
friends, "My interior life sterilizes itself by reason of
superabundance; the too great fullness causes an incessant
restlessness. I cannot give body to the multitude of confused ideas
which crowd each other, interweave, and suffocate me for want of
articulation." This profuse force, which continued throughout her
life, enabled her to achieve an amount of work, and acquire a wealth
of knowledge and wisdom, truly astonishing. Her youthful education,
with the many difficult accomplishments she mastered, was the first
resource for the occupation of her teeming energy. The second was the
discharge of her domestic and public duties, with as much discretion
and skill as if her sole ambition were to be a faultless housekeeper
and member of the social order. The third was friendship, to whose
genial duties of visiting and correspondence she devoted herself with
a fullness and an ardor as passionate as they were genuine. And yet
there remained a surplusage of unappropriated soul, whose vague and
constant action distressed her. She entered on an extensive study of
literature, history, psychology, and philosophy. Her biographer says,
that scarcely an important work on these subjects appeared in Europe
for fifty years with whose contents she did not familiarize herself,
pen in hand. She interspersed these arduous labors by a systematic
application to philanthropic works, personally visiting the sick and
the poor, and ministering to their wants. And still her force was
unexhausted she had more faculty and strength longing to be used, and
disturbing her with mysterious solicitations; a solitary activity,
without aliment; a wheel f