"But are you not going farther?" he continued.
Seeing that she tried to avoid an explanation, he produced his aunt's letter, with the enclosed deed revoking his pension. She read the letter, every word of which must have been a torture, picturing as it did in glowing colours the isolation, the neglect, the actual destitution which awaited her boy, and raising her eyes to heaven, she exclaimed, "Oh! how many artifices Satan uses to oppose the designs of God!" Then, with the mingled tenderness of a mother and heroism of a saint, she asked, "My son, during the eight years which have elapsed since I left you to consecrate myself to God, have you wanted anything?"
"Well, then," she said, "the past ought to be to you a security for the future. Prove yourself the worthy child of God, the best of Fathers; keep His commandments, trust in His Providence, and you will find that He never disappoints those who fear Him. If I bid you adieu for the second time, it is again to obey His voice. If you really love me, you will rejoice that I have been chosen to labour for His honour among the infidels." She continued for some time thus to speak to him in the language of faith and love. As she raised his thoughts to heaven, his better feelings prevailed, and when she concluded, he knelt at her feet in tears and asked her blessing. He arose quite changed, burned the exciting letters, and, in the simplicity of his heart, offered to God the sacrifice of that holy mother whose loss he understood better now than at their first separation. That sacrifice was to him the source of immense graces and a fruitful seed of future sanctification.
Five days after leaving Tours, the missioners arrived in Paris, and were at first lodged near the house of the professed Jesuits, whence they afterwards removed to the Ursuline house of St. Jacques, where, as the Venerable Mother remarks, "they found themselves once more in their element." To their great joy, they succeeded in obtaining permission for one of the religious of this monastery to accompany them to Canada, but their satisfaction was of short duration, for the Archbishop soon recalled the permission, and could not be induced to renew it.
A still more severe disappointment awaited the Mother of the Incarnation before her departure. Her son, the object of so much solicitude, the cause of so much sorrow, had just gladdened her heart by most unexpectedly expressing a desire to become a Jesuit. To leave him in the novitiate of a religious house, cut off from the troubles and temptations of the world, and with nothing to divert him from the concerns of his salvation, would have been the very crown and climax of her happiness-- but the way of the cross was to be hers. The Father appointed to examine the young candidate thought him disqualified for religion; anxious, however, to soften the pain of an absolute refusal, he suggested that there might be a better chance at a future period, when the novitiate was less crowded. An ever-ruling Providence had destined the youth for another Order, and when God's time came, the disqualifications complained of had disappeared; the present trial was, however, none the less painful to his mother.