me in 1842. In a letter to a clerical friend,
written a few months later, the convert gives a palpitating account of
the circumstances.[121] The predisposing conditions appear to have been
slight. He had an elder brother who had been converted and was a
Catholic priest. He was himself irreligious, and nourished an
antipathy to the apostate brother and generally to his "cloth."
Finding himself at Rome in his twenty-ninth year, he fell in with a
French gentleman who tried to make a proselyte of him, but who
succeeded no farther after two or three conversations than to get him
to hang (half jocosely) a religious medal round his neck, and to accept
and read a copy of a short prayer to the Virgin. M. Ratisbonne
represents his own part in the conversations as having been of a light
and chaffing order; but he notes the fact that for some days he was
unable to banish the words of the prayer from his mind, and that the
night before the crisis he had a sort of nightmare, in the imagery of
which a black cross with no Christ upon it figured. Nevertheless,
until noon of the next day he was free in mind and spent the time in
trivial conversations. I now give his own words.

[121] My quotations are made from an Italian translation of this letter
in the Biografia del sig. M. A. Ratisbonne, Ferrara, 1843, which I have
to thank Monsignore D. O'Connell of Rome for bringing to my notice. I
abridge the original.

"If at this time any one had accosted me, saying: 'Alphonse, in a
quarter of an hour you shall be adoring Jesus Christ as your God and
Saviour; you shall lie prostrate with your face upon the ground in a
humble church; you shall be smiting your breast at the foot of a
priest; you shall pass the carnival in a college of Jesuits to prepare
yourself to receive baptism, ready to give your life for the Catholic
faith; you shall renounce the world and its pomps and pleasures;
renounce your fortune, your hopes, and if need be, your betrothed; the
affections of your family, the esteem of your friends, and your
attachment to the Jewish people; you shall have no other aspiration
than to follow Christ and bear his cross till death;'--if, I say, a
prophet had come to me with such a prediction, I should have judged
that only one person could be more mad than he--whosoever, namely,
might believe in the possibility of such senseless folly becoming true.

And yet that folly is at present my only wisdom, my sole happiness.

"Coming