To bring the Maréchale back to liberty, God used the voices of nature, of children and of friends.
She had always had a poet's sensitive ear for earth's thousand voices of praise, and, sitting in a garden on a spring morning, she wrote: "The past, whoever was right or wrong, shall be buried. Let the dead bury their dead. Leave it, and this beautiful spring-tide let us begin again. The crocuses and snowdrops in this lovely garden all say, 'New Resurrection life!'"
Her own children's voices called her back into the thick of the old spiritual battle. "Now for the children," she wrote; "they must all see some salvation work, and they will feel the glow of the heavenly fire. It will warm them, and say something far more than all the Bible lessons in the world." Her eldest daughters, at that time girls of sixteen and fifteen, but with a wisdom far beyond their years, literally pushed her into the war, and if ever she was unable to go they buckled on their armour and took her place. "Mother writes me," says Victoria in her journal, "that Evangeline held a beautiful meeting on Sunday because she herself was too ill to go. Poor mother, it is difficult for her to keep up her courage." This diarist of fifteen thus philosophises on the meaning of her mother's sorrow. "Everybody can understand why God lets people of the world, the infidels, the self-seekers, the indifferent, suffer. It is to bring them to Himself through disappointments in the world, in themselves, and in others. But why He allows His children that love Him, those whose greatest wish is to serve Him--why He allows them to suffer is a mystery. Perhaps it is to bring them into still closer communion with Himself, so that they may become one with Him--His, body, soul and spirit, without reserve."
The Maréchale's friends helped to bring her back to her predestined work of soul-winning.
During a time of awful silence, in which she never received a call and rarely a letter, she had not courage to visit any of her old comrades in Paris. Once, in her great sorrow, she wanted to get away to some sympathising friend and open her heart. At first she could think of no one, but suddenly she remembered a humble working woman, and, taking the train to Paris, she wearily climbed to the fifth story of a house in the Villette, sat down in this woman's little room, and burst into a flood of tears. Her friend tried to comfort her and, not quite understanding this passionate grief, made her lie down in her own bed while she prepared for her a delicious little French meal.