The strain on the Maréchale had been so great that when she arrived in England she was utterly prostrated. Two dear old cousins of her husband's, the Misses Susan and Esther Bell, in Eastbourne, nursed her back to life. Then came two dark, silent years in Brussels. The Maréchale looked for a friend and found none. All the world believed that she had "joined Zion." The French papers announced that she had burned (_brulé_) the principles for which she had once fought. Her daughter Victoria, who was with her in those years of lonely sorrow, writes: "Gradually her strength left her. She suffered dumbly, vainly hoping for some deliverance. Was this the Maréchale who had led her army to battle and faced the howling mob with a smile on her face? Her sorrow had crushed and sapped her courage which the storm of persecution only served to quicken."
Her children had starvation staring them in the face; another terrible illness, brought on by household care, laid her low; her spirit was exhausted by the torturing strain of years; and she could hold out no longer. In a "blind faith, without conviction," she was received into Zion Church. Broken on the wheel of life, stretched too long upon the rack of this tough world, she accepted--like Savonarola and Galileo, like Cranmer and Jeanne d'Arc--an alien creed, without her reason being convinced or her heart won.
But--again like those--not for long. Her deliverance came in a startling fashion. Soon after her removal with her family to Paris, her husband began to suffer from the effects of a neglected influenza which settled in his knee. True to his principles, he refused to see a doctor. When he was at the brink of death, the Maréchale brought in a physician in the guise of a friend. The sick man's case was at first pronounced to be hopeless, but three of the finest surgeons of Paris were hastily summoned, performed four operations, and saved his life, leaving him, however, crippled for the rest of his days.
The dismissal of Mr. Booth-Clibborn followed as a matter of course. He had violated the strictest laws of Zion by accepting the aid of surgery. Two of his own converts, now followers of Dr. Dowie, invaded the sick room, and handed him the fateful document. Some time afterward he wrote: "Dowie was a good man at one time. So was the devil. Dowie fell through the same sin--Pride." In addition to a statement which was published in four countries, he has recently borne the following conclusive testimony: "The Maréchale would never have had anything to do with Dr. Dowie but for me. When she came near him it was on every occasion unwillingly. She suffered unutterable anguish, pain and grief, from the fact that from the first all her instincts, as well as the consciousness of her true religious interest, were against Dr. Dowie's spiritual personality, his ways, his claims, his style of government. If, in a kind of despair, she went with me into it, though she was in it she was not of it. It was never sought, it was endured. The only comfort in the enduring was the possibility of doing a little good meanwhile to people in it, and of ultimately helping in the opening of my eyes."