All the Maréchale's hearers remember her penetrating gaze. No one ever encountered her eyes and saw them shift. Thousands have felt as if she were looking through all disguises into their very souls, and her tapering index finger has often made the bravest quail. "All through the night," wrote a convicted sinner, "I saw her finger pointing straight at me." And one feels certain that her look was never more direct, never more searching, than when it was turned inward. She has always had a passion for seeing things as they are, especially the things of the spirit.
We are not surprised, therefore, at her often repeated words: "This experience has taught me the folly of violating God-given instinct, and allowing the inner light of God's Holy Spirit to be darkened by man. When I compare myself with what I was in the past, in many respects it seems as if that person was dead!"
Drawn by the cords of love, held by ties too sacred to be broken, worn by years of poverty and sickness, and moving at last in a kind of trance, more dead than alive, one of God's truest and bravest servants blindly stumbled on till she found herself, for a time of agony, in a spiritual prison-house from which there seemed to be no escape.
Her greatest danger lay in a kind of fatalistic submission, which would have meant permanent disloyalty to her own ideals and convictions, as well as the abandonment of her vocation. She read the letters of Père Didon, whose heroic acceptance of his destiny influenced her in the direction of sinking her individuality. And one cannot understand the exquisite torture of her position unless one realises that her mind had often been made an arena of conflict between the apparently irreconcilable claims of the domestic and the apostolic life. And yet, Father Hyacinth once said to her in Paris, "You are the only woman I have ever met who has reconciled the vocation of a mother with that of an apostle." It may be appropriate to say here that the prayers of both father and mother have been answered in the conversion of their ten children, who have of their own free will consecrated themselves to the service of Christ. Four sons and three daughters are already engaged in active evangelistic work, and have been used of God for the conversion of many souls.