She went to Paris, and _Valérie_ was published in December 1803. All Madame de Krüdener's guns were primed, ready to salute the book. Not one missed fire. All the bells of criticism tolled. Like a good general, she was on the field of battle herself. She drove incognito from one fashionable shop to another, asking for hats, or scarfs, or feathers, or wreaths, or ribbons _à la Valérie_. When this elegant and still beautiful lady drove up in her carriage and asked with such assurance for these articles of her own invention, the shopkeepers did their utmost to come to an understanding of what she wanted and to provide it. And when astonished shop-girls denied the existence of such wares, Madame de Krüdener smiled so kindly and pitied them so much because they did not know _Valérie_ that she quickly transformed them into eager canvassers of readers for her book. She drove on with her purchases to other shops, and in a few days had produced amongst the shopkeepers such a furious competition in articles _à la Valérie_ that her friends, when they went at her instigation to ask for these wares, became innocent accomplices in her stratagem, and were constrained to bear witness to her triumph.
Now Madame de Krüdener writes to her friend: "The success of _Valérie_ is complete and unprecedented. An acquaintance said to me the other day: 'There is something _supernatural_ about such success.' Yes, my friend, it is the will of Heaven that this purer morality should be diffused throughout France, where as yet it is not so well understood."
Hardly had this feverish craving for celebrity been satisfied, this refinement of hypocrisy been brought to perfection, when Madame de Krüdener's genuine conversion took place. It came about in this wise. Sitting at the window of her house in Riga one day in 1805, she was in the act of bowing to one of the most favoured of her numerous admirers when the unfortunate man was seized with a fit of apoplexy and fell down dead. This incident preyed on her mind. Her melancholy, however, did not render her independent of earthly requirements, and she sent one day for a shoemaker to measure her for a pair of shoes. The man came. At first she hardly noticed him, but while he was kneeling in front of her she was struck by his happy expression. "Are you happy?" she asked him. "I am the happiest man in the world," was the reply. This shoemaker was one of the "awakened," a member of the community of Moravian Brethren. He had an aversion to work, and lived at home with his mother, Frau Blau, one of the worst religious hypocrites in Riga, who gained her livelihood by imposing upon the rich members of her sect. The sight of the shoemaker's happiness made such an impression on Madame de Krüdener's susceptible soul that she again and again visited his mother and him. At their house she made acquaintance with many more of the Moravian Brethren, and was soon as enthusiastic a Christian believer as any one of them. A gradual, slow training in Christianity would not have been possible in her case, but the doctrine of sudden conversion and entire change of life was one well calculated to have a strong effect upon her, now that she was over forty.